Taking apart the Wii

A part of of being a game designer requires you to have a general idea of what platform you're working on and what its limitations and highlights are. If you're a programmer you need to know exactly what you're working with obviously but someone who is simply writing the script only needs to have a general idea of what's possible and what's not. Then again, for quite a few years anything has been possible by using your imagination. If you can't have a war with 10,000 soldiers, all modelled into 3D, on the Playstation One then you can fake it by having the bulk of the fighters as sprites in the background away from the main playing area. It's not like the script writer cares if the scene uses vector or per pixel lighting, all he cares about is the story and mood.

Anyway, my point is that it's good to know what you're working with (this time from a purely technical sense, but not concerning processing power) and such an opportunity presented itself to me and a friend when my Wii started making a strange buzzing sound every time a Wii game was inserted and spinning. I had this problem for around 6+ months already but never got around to doing anything about it and sort of learned to live with it (although that wasn't the case as the end of this post will prove). The sound was terrible and when playing late at night with low volume on the TV the buzzing sound would come out on top easily. My Wii guarantee had run out so I decided to open it up myself. A special tri-wing screwdriver was needed so I ordered one from a store here in Finland. It came in a few days in a small envelope into my mail box.

I realize a technical guide to breaking your console isn't exactly a topic to be covered in a game design blog, and my reason for doing so as stated above is stretching it, but I'm interested to find out how these things work in reality and maybe it's a fresh take on another type of topic for once.

A few notes when opening up some technical equipment:

- Unplug the device. Don't plug the device in before you assemble it again if you're not sure of what you're doing. Having said that though, you could probably take apart any console today, plug it in and turn it on to check how it works without getting electric shocks or anything but do keep in mind that parts need to move so be careful. And if someone goes and kills themselves because "Gabriel said it was OK" then you're an idiot. Don't do it.

- Get a digital camera and take pictures of different angles when it's still in one piece just in case you need to reference it later.

- Set the screws and pieces you get on white pieces of paper. If you open up one "layer" and find you need to open more screws under that one, put those screws on another piece of paper and mark it with a pencil so you know what goes where.

- Keep your eyes open and move slowly. What I mean is check that the piece you're going to take off doesn't affect other pieces, don't use force because you might break something rip a wire off its socket, and watch out for springs that might get loose.

- Don't touch any circuit boards after rubbing your socks on the wool carpet. Touch some separate piece of metal first.

So, what was making the noise in my Wii? I saw a few videos on the net about opening the console and read some horror stories about having to solder a piece of a tiny cog back in but luckily my problem wasn't nearly as severe.

On the Wii you start off by opening the sides. You remove screws from both sides of the console and then from under it. A few of the screws are hidden under white stickers and the soft "legs" used to hold the console a bit off the table when in the horizontal position. Remember to take the black faceplate off from the side where the Gamecube controllers and memory cards are inserted in order to get to the screws under it. Also, note that you need to take the small battery out of the console too thus resetting your system date and time among other small settings (don't worry about save games, they're written physically into memory and do not require any power to keep them there).



To take the front cover off, as shown above, you need to bend 2 pieces of plastic on the sides a bit inwards after removing all the screws from the sides and bottom. After that you will see a small wire that attaches to the led lights on the CD drive's entrance. You can carefully disconnect the wire because it fits right back in when you're done. You can still use the reset, eject and power buttons on the console itself but they're quite small so using a screwdriver or something similar can help.

After this you can open the top of the console and you'll see your CD drive which is held down by around 5-6 more screws.



In this picture we've put the power cord back in and turned the power on. We wanted to see where the sound came from or if it had actually disappeared. The sound was still there. The 2 screws I have marked in red were the problem, but we didn't know it yet at this point, so we continued to lift up the CD drive by opening some more screws and seeing what was under it.



When lifted up, this is what the CD drive's cover looks like. Once you lift it up the white parts in the picture are set free if there's a CD in the drive. They are held in place with springs and getting it back closed can be a difficult task but it's doable. Their task seems to be to adjust accordingly whether there is a Wii game disc, Gamecube game disc or no game disc inside. This possibly gives information to the console on what to expect because they seem too weak to actually guide the disc and the next phase proves that they're not needed to operate the disc.



The same 2 screws as shown in the second picture are marked in red here as well. We turned on the console and the sound was gone. After ejecting and re-entering the CD all seemed nice and quiet. We started thinking the white plastic pieces detecting the disc type were the culprits. We then put that part back after some fiddling around with the springs (there's a parallel cable inside that needs to be tucked inside a slot in the console to close the cover here so look out for that too).

The sound was back when we turned it on again and thus we started pressing the console from different parts seeing if that would silence it. None of the white parts did it, they actually made the sound even worse. Then I realized that the piece of metal holding the disc had plastic pieces that might have been scratching against the metal and all of a sudden the sound was gone when pressing down on it.

The weird thing is that the 2 screws shown on the images with the red arrows actually had to be loosened. That would mean they either had gotten tighter on their own (which isn't physically possible) or something else under the CD drive (or around it close to the metal piece) had loosened up a bit. I loosened the 2 screws and everything started working. The Wii was very quiet again just like it should be.

It turned out to be a very easy solution since those 2 screws aren't really a problem to find, although you do need the tri-wing screwdriver. If by loosening those 2 screws I caused something that'll end up in a big explosion a year from now then too bad, but right now it's been working perfectly for a month after the "operation" and Mario Galaxy seems a lot cooler. I've started playing games on the Wii that I just brushed through and didn't feel like playing a lot. Maybe the lesson here is that game designers need to take into account strange human behaviours and habits too. Even though a console flaw doesn't trace back to a game designer in any way, it's interesting to see that something you choose to ignore because of habit can stab you in the back by diminishing the enjoyment you might get from a game that is in no way related to the overshadowing problem.

You should've been able to swim in Assassin's Creed.