IDEA: Piggybacking an IC chip to double Wii memory.

Is this possible? I know that there could certainly be hardware limiters to this which might prevent this from being plausible. I remember back in the dreamcast days when this hack could be performed and we managed to double the ram. The only real problem was that it wasn't officially supported, of course. This meant it was only really useful if you managed to run DC-Linux which could, in turn, support more ram.

I'm sure that this would be the same problem for the Wii since it was designed to run with 512mb and 512mb only. However, would we be able to access this via homebrew hacking? I remember seeing a video and forum thread that was about piggybacking an NAND and adding a toggle switch to swap between both NANDs. This didn't expand the memory but it allowed to choose between a Homebrew-Hacked and Official NAND. I thought this was really cool but I had nowhere near the tools to accomplish it myself. One Day...

I'm sure this wouldn't be beneficial to most, but for a pro who could desolder and solder in a slew of wiring which could be wired to a breadboard for testing purposes might accomplish a ram increase.

Either this or could we mirror the NAND and place it on a 1gb or higher NAND if these exist?

And lastly, how plausible would it be to overclock the wii's CPU? With the Dreamcast, I used a crystal which I bridged between the CPU chip and main board. I bypassed the clock pin with a 40mhz crystal running the console at 240mhz rather than base of 200mhz.

What are your ideas?

EDIT: I noticed this has already been mentioned once... http://forum.wiibrew.org/read.php?7,51873



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/28/2010 08:33PM by slyfox299.

I doubt it, even if you could you'd really need to be a skilled EE.

If you could replace the current RAM with an exact match pin for pin and the clock speed was the same the physical size is probably defined in the bootloader code, that would also need modifying. Not sure on the RAM package in the Wii but if it's something like BGA then you need special tools to remove and replace. You can't go soldering new IC's on the board without considering impedance.

Unlike RAM or NOR, NAND flash is a pain. All IO for NAND is done via a controller on an IC and programing is done at the block level. You can't just write to it like RAM or NOR a write will erase the block to 0xFF then nand your value with the address ... errors etc are handled in a part called the spare area. Not sure of the exact NAND used on the Wii but it sounds like it's probably a 8bit, 512k page with 16b spare.

Yes possibly a switch could be used to toggle the nand but again you'd need to be a skill EE and if it's a BGA then forget about soldering it yourself. You could have a mini board prototyped and have it soldered by a pick n place machine if you have a couple of grand spare.

I'm not sure why people want to upgrade their Wii... If you're into that kinda thing then use a computer that's what it's for :)