Nintendo-Scene

Team Enigma, the makers of the universal Infectus modchip have released details on the upcoming Argon modchip for Wii as well as the newly announced Infectus2 universal modchip and the now titled “Wiiktus” firmware, a version of the Argon’s firmware that will run on Infectus1 and 2 chips to deliver D2C compatibility.

Pre-Orders are currently being offered exclusively through Hardstore.com with the Argon slated for a December 13th release at €39.90 ($58.38) and the Infectus2 slated for release December 20th at €44.90 ($65.70).

First production of Argon chips will be limited to around 4000 units due to the limited quantity of Acetel chips available. The second production run is slated for December 20th meaning that they will likely not be available until after the holidays. Pictures of final production version along with installation instructions and more details on compatibility will be available soon (likely December 5th).

Official Argon Specs are as follows:

1. Work on all D2C WII boards*
2. 13 wires connection
3. 100% UPDATABLE! Trought the on board JTAG connector*
4. ACTEL processor
5. Direct Boot from Wii games (extreme compatibility, more than Wiikey/D2Ckey)
6. Dirct boot for every GC game
7. Multiple disc support
8. Audio streaming for GC Games supported
9. Partial regional Patch (work on 80% of games)

*All ARGON arrive with a flat cable for external reprogramming with INFECTUS2 or a special and cheaper INFECTUS USB ACTEL programmer

The Infectus2 modchip will be completely replacing the original Infectus. The new version includes a daughter board attached to a ribbon cable to allow easier reprogramming in-situ. The daughter board offer a mini USB connector, two bank switches and three status LEDs.

If you are interested in playing with the Infectus programming software early a Beta version of the Infectus 3.6 Programmer for Wiiktus and other firmware has been released.

Download: Infectus Programmer 3.6 Beta

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Nintendo.co.jp has a new channel posted, called “Everybody’s Nintendo Channel.” There is DS connectivity for demos and videos, and even offers a way to make recommendations for your friends. Currently it is only available in Japan, but hopefully it will spread out worldwide soon enough.

Translation:

“Everybody’s NINTENDOCHANNERU” is the latest information about the game, we tell him to the channel. The latest video and software, Nintendo DS version of the experience you can enjoy. The game was played from our customers “all the recommendations” to see that their game was to look for help.

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Pagetable is reporting that The Legend of Zelda - Link‚Äôs Awakening DX for the GB/GBC (as well as other games) has source code included and unencrypted. Apparently, the games needed to be 2MB in size, and if they weren’t big enough, padding with files already on hand was easy enough to do. So, if the files included information included in the RAM at the time, you get a nice chunk of the source code.

Imagine you’re writing a Game Boy game, and the resulting ROM with all the code and data is just a little over one megabyte in size. No big deal, just pad the game to two megabytes, and use a 2 MB ROM in the cartridge. Just tell the linker to allocate 2 MB or RAM, put the actual data at the beginning, and then write a 2 MB “.gb” image to disk, which will then be sent to the ROM chip factory.

Now imagine you’re doing this in MS-DOS. Your linker, probably written in C, calls malloc() of the runtime library of the C compiler. You already know where this is going?

While modern operating systems will always clear all malloc()ed memory, so that you cannot get to other processes’ data, this was uncommon in the single-user MS-DOS days. If you allocate 2 MB of RAM (the linker must have used a DOS extender or XMS), you’d get memory with random data in it: leftovers from whatever was in this memory before. (seppel tells me that this can also be caused by seek()ing over EOF in MS-DOS, in which case the previous data on the hard disk will be in the image.)

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YAOSM (Yet Another Open Source Modchip) developer Bell has released a new version of the 1.9 firmware wich includes the Gamecube Audio Fix feature. The “Audio Fix” is a feature that fixes choppy audio playback on certain Gamecube backups. This release marks the first Open Source Wii Modchip firmware to include the feature; previously only available on some commercial Wii modchips.

This is only a beta release and binaries have only been made available for particular PIC models, so read the release notes and use at your own risk.

Download: YAOSM 1.9 +Audio Fix Beta

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The results are in, the @$#&! The Warranty Sweepstakes was a success and without further ado here are the winners:

thesorrowful1

lethal_b

breadslice

dipswitch

dead5times

The winners have all been contacted and their entries confirmed, they will all be receiving a PulseVU 2 from Sickmods.net. Hopefully we’ll see new great things from all of them once they get their hands on it!

Nintendo-Scene and Sickmods.net would like to give a big THANK YOU to all that participated, we had lots of great entries from all levels of modding experience. If you missed out on this contest or maybe you entered and didn’t win, fear not, we’ll have more contests and prices coming soon!

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A short while ago the Infectus team announced that they had developed a firmware for their chip that worked on D2C Wii consoles.  Not only was this great news but it required half as many solder points as the only other D2C compatible modchip the d2ckey.

The Infectus team has now release the first picuture of the installation.

 

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After much hard work YAOSM 1.9 Final has been released. Not much has changed since the rc2 beta release earlier this week with the exception of some added testing and tweaks including support for Action Replay (which has been blocked by the console since the 3.0 Dashboard update). Provisions for the Super Mario Galaxy Fix, like the rc2 beta, are included.

Download YAOSM 1.9 Final

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PSX-Scene, the official support forum for WiiFree, is reporting that the team will no longer support the WiiFree modchip firmware for Wii. The team will be moving on to other projects and encourage their users to migrate to the YAOSM firmware, as they view YAOSM as the spiritual successor to WiiFree.

From the report:

The developers have informed us that development on WiiFree has ceased. They feel that YAOSM is the spiritual successor to WiiFree and should be used instead. They commend Bell on his fantastic work with YAOSM and hope that everyone will support him and the YAOSM project.

Despite the fact that WiiFree development has ceased the code is open source, meaning any interested party could pickup development where the official team left off.

Nintendo-Scene would like to thank the team behind WiiFree for providing such a great contribution to the scene and wish them luck on their future endeavors.

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Another interesting YouTube find. while not Nintendo console related it is a hack and it involves Mario which makes it good enough for the NS news page. These 7ft tall Tesla coils create tonally accurate sparks at 110db. Controlled by a laptop via fiber optic connections they play back classic Mairo Midi tunes.

[source]

From the Video Notes:

Twin Solid State Musical Tesla coils playing Mario Bros theme song at the 2007 Lightning on the Lawn Teslathon sponsored by DC Cox (Resonance Research Corp) in Baraboo WI.
The music that you hear is coming from the sparks that these two identical high power solid state Tesla coils are generating. There are no speakers involved. The Tesla coils stand 7 feet tall and are each capable of putting out over 12 foot of spark. They are spaced about 18 feet apart. The coils are controlled over a fiber optic link by a single laptop computer. Each coil is assigned to a midi channel which it responds to by playing notes that are programed into the computer software. These coils were constructed by Steve Ward and Jeff Larson. Video was captured by Terry Blake. What is not obvious is how loud the coils are. They are well over 110dB If you look at another You Tube video [below] which is from a different angle, you can hear the echo off the building and get a better idea of how loud it is.

 

[source]

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The d2ckey team announced today a new product called the FlexPCB. Sold separately from the d2ckey chip this flexible ribbon based PCB fits over the drive chip in your Wii and allows for a much quicker and easier installation of the chip by removing the need to cut strip and line up numerous wires. It’s essentially a quick solder interface for the d2ckey.

 

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