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'Chip it and you brick it' warn Nintendo following Wii bust

by Steven Williamson on 14 April 2008, 08:55

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No Mario Kart multiplayer for you

Following a raid in Leicestershire,in which ELSPA investigators uncovered 2000 counterfeit chips, Nintendo has issued a warning to members of the public who may be thinking about picking up a dodgy Wii console.

The short supply of Wii over the Christmas period has apparently led to a boom in the sale of chipped consoles and ELSPA and the trading standard department has stepped up their search for illegal activities.

Last week a Wii chipping factory has been tracked down to fraudsters in Leicestershire, where ELSPA claim its uncovered a counterfeit plot potentially worth £millions.

The report states:

As a result of enquiries made by TSD officers and investigators from ELSPA, the trade body for the country’s major games publishers, a home was raided in the Coalville area of Leicestershire this week. The raid, which was undertaken by Leicestershire TSD and police, turned up vital evidence suggesting the non-descript home actually housed sophisticated counterfeiting apparatus – including an industrial unit to churn out rogue console chips. At least two people have so far been arrested for their part in the ‘fraud factory’. More than 2,000 counterfeit chips, were recovered from the raid. These consisted mostly of Wii console chips although some were for Xbox 360 and PlayStation2 consoles. A number of consoles were also seized. After the planned trial, all the rogue chips will be destroyed – if only to avoid disappointment amongst the nation’s competitive children and parents.

Following the arrests Nintendo issued a warning to anyone thinking of chipping their Wii. A Nintendo insider said: “A chipped Wii might sound cool but it is useless. The latest Wii extravaganza, seeing Mario back in a racer at the front of the pack, Mario Kart Wii, would be useless on a chipped Wii. You’ll never get the interaction or support when it all unravels. You’d have to be pretty stupid to think online gaming won’t be easily log-able in such digital days! Chip it and you brick it, as we say around the office. There is only one real Wii experience – and it doesn’t come chipped!”

No Mario Kart multiplayer!?! That's enough to put us off.


HEXUS Forums :: 15 Comments

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Posted by finlay666 - Mon 14 Apr 2008 11:45
How naive of nintendo

Buy chipped console, buy proper game for online…. should still work as some of the chips you can turn off too
Posted by Jay - Mon 14 Apr 2008 12:11
The problem is that I know loads of people who have a Wii but none of the play online.
Posted by Steven W - Mon 14 Apr 2008 12:45
It's a big thing for me, especially with MArio Kart. I want to play it online, it's the only reason I bought it. I wouldn't want to have a console where I couldn't use the online capability.
Posted by SmileyUK - Mon 14 Apr 2008 13:00
sounds like scare tactics to me though.

although im guessing we will find out soon enough :)
Posted by Spud1 - Mon 14 Apr 2008 23:51
It is scare tactics.

I havn't chipped my wii or used anything “dodgy”on it, and every game on my wii I have bought (including the awesome mario kart). I've not chipped a console since the PSX, and even then that was only so I could play the NTSC games I brought back from holiday (&#163;5 chip < Freeloader).

I'm still interested in knowing whats going on in the homebrew/hacking scene for it though, as well i'm still a geek and being able to write my own software for the wii that actually uses the wii hardware (as opposed to just the GCN chip) intrieges me.

Many wii chips exist and the most popular ones are all updateable by methods as simple as putting in a CDr and running an update executeable. All of the popular chips allow you to run MKWii and play online or offline without troubles - as long as you update the firmware on the chip first. Of course you can easily brick your wii, but as I understand it this really only happens when idiots try to use (for example) a PAL wii update on an NTSC wii, or vice-versa..that can brick you wii. However even that is only temporary, as there are apparently ways to unbrick your wii pretty easily (although you might have to wait a week or so).

Nintendo could of course start banning wiis that they detect as using a drivechip, however i've not heard of this happening to anyone in the world as yet. In any case it will be irrelavent soon as things like the “twilight hack” have opened up the wii hardware without having to use a drivechip…still in very early days at the moment but a wii version of PSOLoad is in development (allowing for things like a wii version of gcos to be developed), and i'm pretty sure its only going to be a few months before someone finally finds a method of direct booting dvdr's without a chip.

Possibilities for piracy aside (which, contry to popular belief is NOT the main purpose of these hacks and drivechips), it does look like we'll have homebrew with access to wii hardware soon :) I'm looking forward to a proper wii video player myself, possibly with streaming capability so my wii could act as a media center (for things other than iplayer =) )


edit: re-read the quotes from the article - they don't make any sense, and seem to say that a chipped console won't work online or will cause you endless problems…clearly whoever released those statements has never bothered to do even the tiniest bit of research…

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