Nintendo continues their war against piracy, arrrrr. See that big hole in the Wii drive there? Yeah, that's where the old drive controller chip used to be. They've revised the design of the Wii drive to render all current modchips completely useless. Sucks for "backup"-ers who came late to the party then.

From what early reports indicate, this new Wii without a chip on its shoulder has not been widely distributed yet. This model was found in an Australian console. Here's what the folks at Modsupplier was able to learn from it:

What they have done is combine the old D1A and drive controller chip in to one which is now called the GC2-D3, as you can see from the photo there is a big blank space on the PCB where the controller chip used to be.

[...] It could possibly be a few months or longer before it could be figured out as it’s a totally new way of handling drive function, that's just our guess and maybe they will work it out faster. This is all speculation of course for now, but we can see the first generation of chips for these drives being a high wire count such as the D2CKey when they were first released.

The Wiikey team is currently trying to figure out how to work with this new drive. Seeing as how their measures against piracy didn't seem to work with Wiibrew, or even the new DSi, it probably won't take long before pirates figure out how to chip this unchippable drive.

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More Nintendo power targeted against piracy:

• Trouble for Wiibrew: Wii Menu 3.4 blocks Twilight Hack, deletes modified saves
• Twilight Hack v0.1-beta2: specially made for Wii firmware 3.4
• Nintendo confirms that DSi really is incompatible with R4
• Sorry, Nintendo: Acekard team releases first DSi compatible flashcart