Well, my chip's been here for nearly a month, but I just now got around to installing it with all that's been going on. I have only one thing to say about the clip -- DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY!!! I put the thing on very carefully and it didn't work. I tried a couple more times. Then I got looking at the clip and the pins were bent. I straightened them out, put the clip back on, and almost got Mario Kart through the update, then it stalled, and I had to eject the disc. Got the red light the next time so I tried adjusting the chip again, nothing. Then I looked at the pins and they were bent yet again! This time when I tried to straighten them I snapped one of them off. So, now there's definitely no way the clip's going to work (oh well, at this point it didn't even want to stay on).
It's a good thing I have a cousin and at least two friends that are more than capable of soldering this chip in. I wasn't going to bother them and I thought this would be faster than having to take my Wii to one of them. However, it would have been less frustrating if I had just tried to solder the chip in myself than my repeated attempts to align the clip properly have been. It might have taken me hours to do what would take most people only a few minutes, but it would probably be working now. The Matrix for the Xbox worked because it actually made use of one of the system's screws to hold it down (though if you want it to stay on good, you replace the screw with a longer one). This thing relies on nothing more than pressure to keep it in place (obviously the vibration of the drive motor would eventually have knocked it loose even if it had worked initially). It may not take any skill to get this to work, but it certainly seems to require quite a bit of luck. If I had known that, I would not have bothered -- if my life is an RPG and Luck is an attribute, I rolled a 3 for the stat, didn't pick it as a prime attribute, and have been rolling natural 1's on every single check. I'll just have my cousin pull the chip off the clip and install it directly when he gets off work. This is the last "clip-on" solution I ever try. You have to ask yourself if you want something that works for now but is going to eventually fall off, or something that's most likely going to continue to work for as long as you own the system.
But on a positive note, injecting seems to work 100% for me now that I've switched from XP to 2003. Not sure what it was, but apparently it's not hardware-specific, I have injection working properly with Sonic 3 now and I'm using an Athlon XP 3200 for a CPU (yeah, I need to build a new PC, and as soon as an AMD emulates the R5000 at full speed in MAME, I will -- in other words, I'm waiting for something to run Gauntlet Legends at full speed).
UPDATE: Well, my cousin was too afraid he'd mess it up, so after watching a video on Youtube that made it look deceptively easy, I decided to just solder the mod chip myself. To make a long story short, it works. It's definitely not as neatly done as the one in the video, but the wires are on good and it's working properly.
Mario Kart still wouldn't load though after I got it soldered, but having watched the video, I knew the LEDs were lighting up the way they're supposed to. So, now I decided to check a GC backup (Soul Calibur II). That ran alright. So, apparently the problem is with the new Memorex discs (my GC backups are on older Memorex, before they changed to the pattern with all those square dots all over the place). Guess the pattern isn't all they changed, so I suggest avoiding Memorex (and to think I used to swear by them). I went and bought some Sony -Rs at K-mart and reburned the game. Works fine now. I went and grabbed the 1.6 update disc because it did stutter loading a disc once, it updated fine so that should no longer be an issue. So, the irony is, maybe the clip was working properly all along and if I had burned Mario Kart to a Sony to begin with, none of this would have been necessary. Consider the clip vindicated as it probably was working right in the first place. Oh well, at least I greatly increased my experience with soldering (and I can be certain the chip will NEVER fall off,
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@bathingapebape: You get the d2pro config disc at www.d2pro.com (the chip's official website). Just click on "Resources" and you should see it. It's a very small download, takes a little while to extract though because it's been padded to official GC iso size (it's going to look like a GC game when you put it in, though it resembles a C64 app once it loads). You operate the features with the reset button (which may seem awkward, but since the Wii doesn't come with a GC controller, that's the only way they could be sure it works for everyone).
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Minox:
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BigOnYa:
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cearp:
