Well the WiiKey guys have done it yet again, we are proud to introduce you to the world first mod chip for the Wii D3 DVD drives the Wii DriveKey mod chip, this device will allow you to play your backups and games from other regions the same as you would with a chipped machine but uses no wires at all and is 100% solderless solution which is compatible with all Wii DVD drives including the latest D3 drive which so far there are no other solutions on the market. For those who don’t know yet the latest drive revision which was found in the AU market in Dec called the GC2-D3 also nick named d2nothing is a totally new design and they have removed the little controller chip found on all previous drives, this controller chip was how the old chips were able to work. So with no controller chip there is no way to use traditional chips such as the WiiKey with these D3 drives, this is where the DriveKey comes in and offers people with the D3 drive a valid option for them to be able to play their legitimate backups or games from other regions.

The DriveKey Wii modchip is not just for D3 owners either, if you have recently bought a Wii and have one of the epoxy D2E drives the Wii DriveKey is also a good solution for these drives, as they don’t require access to the controller chip and are installed running off the DVD drive ribbon cable, these will essentially be a solderless solution for the epoxy D2E drives as well. With that being said, a traditional chip such as the WiiKey 2 does have some advantages over the Drive Key, first being that the WiiKey 2 will support full drive speed, where the DriveKey only supports 2x read, this won’t be a huge problem and will just cause some of the games to load a fraction slower, there is possible concern about games such as call of duty that require fast read speeds to load the textures that the drive key might not be able to keep up, but so far we have not been able to test this out, so traditional chips will load games faster than the new method used by the DriveKey and won’t have the issue of not be able to load textures fast enough in some games, also the Wii DriveKey does not have the GameCube audio fix, so playing some of the older GC games might lead to some problems, so if you’re a fan of your older GameCube games you might want to look at another option as the DriveKey would not be the best solution if you really want to be able to play the old GC games, but we don’t think that will be many of you out there anyway.

The DriveKey has the ability to update the firmware on the chip via DVD, this means the team can release software updates for the chip in the future that could add handy new functions to the chip, but also means if there were any bugs in the firmware they could be fixed and the users could just simply update the chip and the bugs would be gone. When the Wii Drivekey was first announced they were not going to have it be updateable, but it looks like the team decided at the last minute that adding upgrade support for the chip would be a good idea and a failsafe for customers in the long term. The other failsafe the team have added to the Drive Key is a J-Tag connector, this can be used with an external programmer to physically program the chip from your PC, why this can be good to have a J-Tag is because if at any point a Wii system update comes out and blocks the chips function in anyway, for example blocks the ability to update the chip by DVD, you would be able to buy a J-Tag programmer and update the chip manually, this means that you can be confidant when buying the Wii DriveKey mod chip that they will always have the ability to update the firmware no matter what happens with the Wii or possible system updates that could affect the chips function. The second and possibly the most sort after feature in chips today is the Brick Blocker, the Drivekey modchip will also include a brick blocking function that will stop any games from outside your consoles region from making system updates, if you have a PAL euro console and you play a USA NTSC game that happens to require a firmware update to the console to be able to play, this NTSC game could update your PAL console with an NTSC firmware which can basically render the console useless, your original PAL games would not work anymore and the system is what’s called bricked, this is where the brick blocker comes in, the DriveKey can detect if you’re trying to play a game from outside your consoles region that wants to do a system update and will basically block the game fr