Question Question about Wii's GameCube Ports

[Yanis]

Hi, I have a small question, say you have a wire or a cable or something like this in your hand, if you want to add a switch or a board or whatever you want you'd just cut that wire or cable or whatever in half and solder both sides the switch or board or the whatever you want, how that would translate to the Wii motherboard? (the model is RVL-CPU-01 btw)

For my first project I need to do something that, so add something between the gamecube data input and send the output of this something to the normal data circuit like nothing happened (it's a controller adapter that I'd like to make it built-in, it's a small thing so it should be ok for a first mod), I'm not entirely sure that's actually possible but since I'm bad with understanding boards I figured I'd ask here just in case it's a thing

Also feel free to ask for more details if what I'm asking isn't clear, I'm bad at explaining things (especially in english lol), but TLDR I want to add something between the gamecube input on the ports and whatever point of the motherboard the data goes

My main idea was desoldering the GC data pin of the port I want and solder back the output to the pad somehow, though it sounds like a bad idea lol, maybe there's something easier? (also feel free to yell at me if this is the wrong place to ask, I'm new to forums in general)

 

[Lemoncake]

That sounds pretty cool! Are you tying to do this on a trimmed Wii or an untrimmed one? If it’s untrimmed, I assume you could just sever all the traces to the controller ports and then wire all of its connections (voltage, data, etc.) back to the same locations you would in a trimmed Wii. If you then put a switch between any of those wires you could then turn its functionality on and off whenever you want. I’d check with a more experienced member before attempting this, but in case you want to give it a shot, here are the guides you’ll want to refer to for the soldering locations: Trimming Guide, 6 Layer Trimming Guide

 

[Yanis]

The Wii isn't trimmed (and it's not on my plans, yet™), sever traces seems a bit tough on the revision I have, I don't think I have enough space to guarantee this (also it's kinda scary), I think the easiest way would be removing the gamecube ports and add this in-between thing on the pins I want then solder the ports back to the motherboard

maybe I should buy some recent revisions to make this easier

 

[Lemoncake]

Gotcha. Maybe I didn’t understand your original post, but what exactly are you trying to do with the GameCube ports that would require them to be both attached to the Wii and also to something else? Depending on what it is, you might not even have to desolder the GameCube ports in the first place.

 

[Yanis]

here's a little drawing of what I want to achieve eventually, the main idea is turning an external adapter into an internal one but I want to keep the features and advantages of having an external thing, hence why I'd like to add a switch to toggle the internal adapter on and off (when it's off it would just act like an original board)

for now I'd like to do that on port 1 but I think the final version would do that for each ports (though I'm not sure yet if I want to create that final version yet)

small edit: note that this drawing is probably over-simplified for the purpose of the explanation, I have no idea how it actually looks like

 

[Lemoncake]

Okay, but what’s the purpose of an adapter for GameCube controllers if you already have GameCube controller ports on the Wii? Or are you trying to put GameCube functionality on a Wii that didn’t already have it?

 

[Yanis]

with some of the N64 Virtual Console titles (like Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask but I assume it's all of them) the internal N64 emulator is doing a bad conversion of the control stick inputs that makes things like aiming really hard compared to if you do it on a real N64 where it's "smoother", this adapter is a way to fix that issue by doing something I never remember but iirc it's just decreasing the deadzone and increasing the area from after the deadzone to when the games makes Link walk (in the case of OoT and MM at least, I'm not sure how to explain that part properly though)

also it provides a USB port to view controller inputs on the computer (usually adapters like this use an Arduino-like board), which is cool to have, so the main issue is how to interrupt the gamecube signal, make it go through this adapter and connect the output to the other side of the signal you interrupted (the drawing explains that part better than I can do with words)

usually people use a 3rd party adapter, in my case it's a little 3D-printed case with an Arduino inside, where you plug your GameCube controller and plug the GC output of the adapter to the Wii (so there's 3 inputs/outputs, 1 USB output for the serial data to view the inputs, 1 Gamecube output to plug into the Wii and 1 Gamecube input for your controller)