I’ve been keeping in touch with Jay at ConsoleChips where I pre-ordered at, and the new d2pro9 chip seems to be a better option all-round than the Wasabi chip. But! The d2pro9 can’t be firmware flashed via dvd-rom without some extra piece of kit that needs to be soldered onto the chip, and for a short time there was no wii-clip for it either.

So, I finally got fed up, and asked for options. My requirements were simple:

• I want to solder as little as possible onto the actual Wii’s board
• The chip must be D2C compatible
• The chip must be able to allow me to play NTSC games on a PAL console
• I want to be able to firmware upgrade the chip via DVD

The answer? There are no chips, currently, that can do all four. Most do only two or three of them. Even the Wasabi didn’t manage to do “No soldering” if I wanted region-free functionality (which was the point after all).

However! The d2ckey, the first chip to work on the D2C chipset drives, does the first three. In fact, it requires NO soldering AT ALL if used with a wii-clip. So its firmware can’t be update via DVD, or at all, but so far, it’s not had to, at all. So that’s what we agreed on. Jay immediately packaged up and despatched the D2CKey soldered onto its wii-clip, and refunded me the difference of cost.

I must say, Jay‘s been great, he kept in contact and offered alternatives when my request didn’t work out.