Hey guys. So I'm new to the forums. I'm hoping this post doesn't violate anything but we'll see after I hit submit. Anyway, I recently got my ARGON chip from modchipcentral.com. Very pleased with there speedy delivery and what not. I read up on the ARGON as much as I could and concluded that doing the solder to chip pins is too terrifying for me to pull off. It would end up looking like a 2 year old took a soldering crayola to the drive board. The next logical step was to go with a Wii-Clip. So I went ahead and ordered one but through fault of my own I ended up with 2 ARGON chips... one soldered to the clip and one still in the original packaging.
Before I start up my battery of questions I just wanted to state and ask some basic thing about Wii modding. I searched my Wii's serial number (LU5499xx...) and was told by the site that it was a D2C chip with a low chance of having cut pins. Upon opening up my Wii I did confirm that it was a D2C drive with no cut pins. A plus. Now, I got this Wii for my birthday in December of '07. So now my question to the community is, can this Wii be a possible D2C2? How can I begin to tell if it is a D2C2 board? From what I've read the chip is still labeled D2C but can be a D2C2 chip. Any truth to this?
So continuing onward to my chip install. I mounted the chip, pressed it down firmly, and wired everything back up. I kick up the console and it starts off nice. The chip is glowing blue as it should. However the drive isn't making a bit of noise. The drive motor wouldn't budge. Eventually the console dumps the Wii home screen and proceeds to tell me an internal error has occurred and that I should consult the manual. After reading up on the Wii-Clip I learned that the chip was possibly seated improperly. I tried reseating the chip and eventually got the drive motor to kick in. However once the drive motor had kicked in, the Wii would then not read any games I had backed up. As far as backing up my games went I had used TDK DVD-R disks. I know Verbatim work better but I didn't have any around for the test burn. So my second battery of questions deal with the ARGON chip. Am I doing something wrong? Should I be installing a certain type of firmware to the chip? Can the clip be bad? How do I tell if either are bad? On a final note the chip I'm using is an ARGON 1.8 with a SPI flash set up for D2C. The Wii-Clip does a 17 point solder to the clip so I'm guessing the chip is a 17 point solder. However I'm not 100% on that. Should I just dump the clip and opt for a solder job?
So my summary of questions:
1. How do I tell the difference between D2C and D2C2?
2. Why would my Wii-Clip be stopping the Wii Drive from working?
3. If my Wii-Clip is on and the chip is glowing blue why would my backed up games not be working? This is assuming my drive is now working and accepting disks.
4. Should I use a specific firmware for the ARGON chip? I've loaded it with the ARGON 250 Firmware.
5. Should I at all use the WASABUS 1.2 Firmware?
6. What am I doing wrong here? Was ARGON even a good choice of mod chips?
7. should I just opt for a solder job and all these problems will go away?
... Sorry for the wall of text but I'm just lost at this point. I've read many threads but nothing seems to answer my woes fully. I hope this thread helps and I apologize to all if I'm a pain.
Finally below are some images of my drive, chip and ARGON. Hope these can help.
1. Your Wii is not D2C2. 100% positive. You can tell by looking at the back of the drive. On the spindle if it's a D2C2 then there should be a triangular metal piece with the number 2 on it.
2. If the WiiClip is not seated perfectly then it can touch or be barely touching other IC legs which would cause problems.
3. Try different media. Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden 8X discs. Burn with ImgBurn at 4X speed.
4. Just use the latest firmware.
5. Same as #4.
6. Yes Argon is a good choice.
7. A solder job with wires is always the best way to go. If you want to go that way though find a professional to do the job.
You might want to lower the resolution of the pics as they are huge lol.
I have just done the EXACT same mod you have done over this past weekend.
The advice I have is make sure you put that sticker over the back of the chip (to prevent grounding of the contacts on the back of the board) and use the cardboard cover over the top of the chip.
You may also need an Injectus to update the firmware of the argon they are sold separately mine had 1.2 where as the new firmware is 1.8 you can download the software from the argon website. Mine is working fine after doing all those things.
I hope this helps been a long time lurker (3 years) first time poster.
Hi, i bought my wii premodified with Argon. I just want to ask if the ff:
1. Is it safe to connect it to the internet and access weather, news channel, wii shop etc?
2. Is safe to perform an official wii system update?
3. Is it capable of playing downloaded and burned wii iso games?
4. Can I still play original games?
