News-27.02.2007

From Chiip-Wiki

27.02.2007
An important message To the people who plan on running their ATmega8-16 on the 5V supply: Please remember that

• you have to take a different series resistor for the LED because of the higher voltage! 130 ohm are a safe value for 3.3V - for 5V 270 ohm should be safe.
• the clock and output lines will output 5V levels too, 1.6V more than the DVD controller expects. I don't know if that's a problem - I did that by accident some weeks ago and it worked, but it could just as well brick your Wii! If you want to go safe you should use diodes on both the clock(C) and the output(O) line to reduce the voltage. Thanks to all the people who pointed out this possible danger!

I'm still not sure if switching to 5V supply will actually really solve any problems. It really seems that most ATmega8-16 work fine even at 3.3V. If someone experienced that switching to 5V helped in any way, please let me know.

Today I got two mails from people who said their Chiip runs backups fine, but the Wii won't run original discs anymore. I tested what they said, and... Well, it's embarrassing but it seems true. I was so busy with getting backups to work that I forgot about testing original discs...

Of course that bug will be fixed in a few days, but for the moment you'll have to live with that problem (or add a switch that temporarily disables Chiip, like two people have done). It doesn't seem to be with all original discs though, one said his Zelda works but Wii Sports for instance doesn't. Oh, I just see I received a mail from someone who has another temporary workaround for this problem: By setting the low fuse byte to 0xE1 Chiip will take about 30 seconds until it has finished patching. If you insert an original disc within that time it will run he says.

And there are two game backups that usually won't work with the current version of Chiip: Call Of Duty 3 and Rayman Raving Rabbids. This is because the current version of Chiip is based on Cyclowiz v1, which has exactly the same problems with these two games.

I got some more feedback today from people who have already built the Chiip. I'm glad to report that most people say it works. One person said that switching to beta2 solved problems, so you may want to test that version if your Chiip doesn't work and you've only tried beta1 yet.

By the way, writing eMails now works fine and fast again. I could even reduce the number of yet unanswered mails, but there are still a lot I haven't answered.

I asked for a free and good C compiler for PICs yesterday; in the meanwhile I got three recommendations, and all three guys recommended PICC-Lite from HI-TECH[1]. I suppose that means that this is the most popular C compiler for PICs around, but the problem is that this lite version only supports about a dozen different PICs. Maybe someone who knows the PICs can tell me if at least the most common PICs are supported by PICC-Lite or not?