Remember how in my rarest LEGO Island video I made a kind of running joke out of how much other stuff I bought including three whole game consoles? Well, guess what... I missed one! While traversing through all those junk bins in the Japanese game stores, I ended up finding yet another thing that very much piqued my interest. It was a Nintendo Wii labelled "junk" that cost only 100 yen. How much is that? Well factoring in another 10 yen for tax, 110 yen is effectively 1 US dollar. Yeah, a whole Wii for $1. It's like a no-lose situation! Even if I can't get it to work, I could still sell it for parts for more than $1. Obviously I couldn't test it while I was travelling around. You know, I forgot to bring my TV with me. But now that I'm not travelling... let's see just how junk a junk Wii is. Interestingly, it was beautifully wrapped and packaged. Not so much now since I opened it before to look at it, but for something at the bottom of a junk bin it was just as carefully prepared as any of the displayed stock. Those Japanese sure are diligent. It's definitely used, there are some scuffs and scratches but nothing super major in my opinion. In fact I'd guess probably a good majority of Wiis look like this nowadays. But more importantly, does it work? For $1 it probably shouldn't... Plugging it all in, and... well, we're definitely getting power! Let's turn it on. H-holy [censored]! So it actually powers up! Right off that bat, that's a lot more than I expected. Alright, nice! It actually looks pretty good! Or better than I expected at least. The picture is a little soft and... maybe a little dark? But no more than I'd necessarily expect for a composite image, and certainly not enough to consider it "junk". I thought it'd be a good idea to test the optical drive. As the primary moving component, that's definitely at the greatest risk of failure, and without a softmod, a broken optical drive could indeed be a dealbreaker, explaining the low price. Unfortunately I quickly realized I couldn't really test that at the moment. One of the few things I didn't buy in Japan was any actual Japanese Wii games. All I have are PAL region games from Australia, and they obviously don't load due to region locking. I decided it was time to install a softmod. Theoretically, that should allow it to read discs of any region and if the drive turns out to be broken, will allow booting games from USB and SD card so it's not just a paperweight. Now as you can see this Wii has been used and I wanted a fresh start, so I reset it to factory defaults. But not before making a backup because you never know if there was something rare on there. Next I reset it and softmodded it with Letterbomb. I installed Priiloader and enabled the region free patch and tried to boot a PAL game. Unfortunately all of that didn't make any difference, the disc spun for a while but then refused to boot. As a matter of fact, none of my PAL discs worked, so assuming the region free patch is working, I guess the optical drive is dead... I experimented with a burned Japanese game, which was the best I was gonna get without paying for exorbitant shipping prices. Unfortunately that still has no guarantee of working, since Wiis at a certain point introduced a restricted DVD drive called the D3-2 which won't accept burned DVDs of any kind. And indeed, that disc didn't load either. I was really starting to lean towards the drive being broken. It just seemed most likely since the system was so cheap. Little did I know, I would soon get my answer. At this point in time, I was really into playing Mario Kart Wii on Wiimmfi, which is the community's resurrection of the Wii's long terminated online services. Back then I was playing on the Dolphin emulator just for the convenience of playing it on a PC. But I was also interested in popular mod of Mario Kart Wii called CTGP-R. CTGP-R specifically prevents you from playing on emulator primarily to deter cheating. So since I had this Wii set up, I thought, why not! Let's try it out on there. CTGP-R also requires a real Mario Kart disc to be in the drive, and since it seemed like the drive didn't work, I had a feeling this wouldn't either. But it turns out I was wrong. Much to my surprise, it started to read the disc, loaded the game, and soon I was playing some custom community maps. Wow, so... the drive does work! And the region free patch just... didn't? I mean it wasn't what I expected but... I'll take it. Well now I know there's nothing wrong with the drive, so I turned my attention to the only other issue I could see. The video was... a little dark. To be honest, at first glance, it was so subtle that I had to put a working Wii side-by-side just to be sure. Yeah it is definitely darker. But check it out on my trusty Trinitron. Yeah, that's dark... And you're probably thinking, come on, it wasn't that bad. And you're right. Sometimes it wasn't that bad, and sometimes it really was. I eventually realized if it had been powered off for a while it would be super dark when powered on but gradually brighten up the longer it was on. Check out this sped up recording. After ten minutes, it's definitely improved. And after a while, it even looks... dare I say it? "Fine"... But if I was a storeworker and I saw this when I powered it on... yeah I might call it junk and basically useless. In fact, it might have been even worse. I tried with some component cables just out of curiosity and got no picture at whatsoever. So this might have looked completely dead depending on what cables were used to test it. Well the good news is, I think it's fixable. In fact, I have a pretty good idea what might be wrong. Can we turn a junk Wii with a dodgy video output into a Wii that functions perfectly? Let's get to disassembling so we can take a look at the main board. So fun fact! This was the first time I'd ever disassembled a Wii, and it was actually a lot more complicated than I thought. Also looks like I accidentally left Mario Kart Wii in there. Ah well, it shouldn't be a big deal. With the help of an iFixit guide, I was soon down to the main board. Just gotta remove the heatsink and the Wi-Fi card and the board should just lift out. So here's what I think is wrong. I think the gradual brightening is the key to this mystery because immediately it sounds like a faulty capacitor since a capacitor's defining characteristic is charging up over time. You know, not THIS much time, but that would be why it's faulty. They're also absolutely notorious for failure, lest we forget the OG Xbox and its system destroying capacitor. At first glance, it all looked okay... But the Wii uses a lot of surface mount components so it's unlikely to be as obvious as some great hulking bulgy boy, you know? Luckily the Wii was an extremely popular system that's been extensively documented by the community and thanks to Shank's Wii Super Thread, I was soon able to determine this chip here on the underside, marked AVE-RVL, was the video encoder chip responsible for producing the AV output. The chip itself is proprietary but has nonetheless been pretty well documented. You can also buy replacements if somehow this chip was causing a problem. I don't think it is here, but knowing its purpose makes it a solid place to start looking for whatever is. The guide contains a pinout credited to "our lord Ashen himself" which is all I need for now. This pin here is responsible for the composite video output, so let's see what's coming directly out of it. So I wired up a new video plug. You can see I soldered to a nearby resistor connected to the chip leg rather than the chip leg itself... just because it was easier. And used one of the AV plug's structural points for the ground. This should give us a video feed effectively straight from the source, and you might be wondering how that differs from the AV plug proper. Well, between the chip and the plug, the signal actually goes through a noise filtering circuit made up primarily of capacitors. If the signal is clean straight out of the chip, that noise filtering circuit is our prime suspect. It was time to test. I screwed the heatsink in, plugged my composite hijack into the capture card, plugged in the power, and... Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I don't think I got anything wrong with my wiring. I tried the regular AV output again and still nothing. Cool, it's always... great... when something works less after you've tinkered with it. But no it turns out the Wii just needs the Wi-Fi card plugged in or it refuses to boot. I don't know if I would have guessed that myself but once again the Wii community has extensively documented this behavior too. It booted up. Already it looks better. Oof, look at that! That looks like a clean signal to me. Here's a comparison to what it was like before and yeah this is a significant difference. So that pretty much narrows it down to those noise filtering caps, which should make it easier to track down the culprit. Which one or ones specifically? Well, that will still need some probing to find out. The motherboard is also six layers making it a lot harder to follow traces with just your eyes, but anyway, with a multimeter and the chip pinout, I followed the signal past the aforementioned resistor which is just a 75 ohm to ground, common for analog video, and up to this capacitor on the other side. It's in series with the composite signal and the other side even appears to be continuous with the plug. So this is my next suspect. I reattached my video plug to the other side of this capacitor. Since we know the signal going into it is clean, if it gives us dim video, it's almost certainly our culprit. Let's see what we got. Hooh boy, back to the dodgy video. So I think that confirms this capacitor is it! Let's go ahead and get some replacements. I could only order them in packs of ten, so I decided why not, most of these caps are the same value so I'll just replace them all! About a week later, the capacitors arrived. I could only get them at a slightly higher voltage rating, which electrically should be fine, but does mean they're physically a little bigger than the ones I'm replacing. I wondered if that would be a problem reassembling it, but I noticed there's another capacitor nearby that seems to be about the same size, so it should be okay. Okay, so what you're about to see is me, to put it politely, [censored]-ing it up. I'm pretty new to surface mount components and only later learned these surface mount electrolytics are considered notoriously hard to remove. What I wanted to do was something like this. Cleanly desolder and lift it off the board. What I ended up doing was this. Yeah... that was the sound of the solder pads ripping right off the PCB. Uhhhh I won't lie... this is bad. It might be impossible to solder another capacitor onto there now. My only solace is... at least it was just a dollar. Not the worst thing to... make mistakes on. I decided to try again with a different approach on the next capacitor. As I mentioned, removing these is notoriously hard and there's actually a lot of debate about the best approach to do it. Desoldering is what I tried and obviously did not succeed at. But the other approach is just twisting them off. It sounds kinda crazy and is naturally a little controversial, but proponents aregue it actually puts less stress on the pads than desoldering since the forces go into snapping the capacitor's internals rather than upwards on the PCB pads. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I decided to try that, and... it worked! In fact, it worked on all three of the remaining capacitors. After some cleanup and removing the left over leg bits, those pads were perfectly reusable. I was able to replace those caps with no trouble at all. Now remember I'm pretty new to this, I need a little more practice and probably some better equipment if I'm going to keep working with surface mount stuff, so do your own research if you're going to do something like this. All I can say is for these caps on this board, twisting ended up causing no problems at all. As for that first one though, that is going to be tough. I mean the pads are pretty much all gone. But that's when I noticed something interesting. Something that might be very, very lucky. Check out the traces on the PCB. They're arranged in such a way that if the capacitor is mounted diagonally, it might just connect to the traces its supposed to. We might actually be able to make this work. I scraped off the solder mask on those traces so I could solder directly to them, and lining up the capacitor I think it actually might just work. I apologize for the bad camera angle, but I really did need to concentrate here. If I got either of the ends in the wrong place, that could have made a bad situation even worse. Luckily my hunch was right. The capacitor was indeed able to attach to those traces. If this works, this might be the best bodge I've ever done. It's time for the moment of truth. Let's see if this actually works! Holy [censored]. It actually works. And the video looks great. This is a junk Wii no more! It is now 100% functional. Here is one last comparison. What it looked like before and what it looks like now. The difference is literally night and day. It's kind of funny to think that it was a $1 Wii and if I could have bought the capacitors individually, it would have been a $1 fix as well. And despite some trouble with the repair, thanks to likely the greatest bodge of my life, it's all good and looks surprisingly decent. And yes, the component output is functional now too, which is great because that's probably what I'll actually be using. I think it's officially time to put this thing back together. Well, despite some... mistakes made during this repair, I'm super happy with how it worked out in the end. And it got me thinking. Knowing capacitors, I wonder if this will become a common issue for Wiis as they continue to age. At the time of this video, I could only find a handful of people mentioning an issue like this, so maybe it is just an unlucky unit. But in case someone does run into this issue on another Wii, my ultimate hope is that this video helps them fix it so that Wii can continue to function. I have a real soft spot for the Wii and like all electronics that bring us joy, I believe they deserve to be preserved and taken care of. Anyways, thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys.
Great video!
I really enjoyed this video.