Wii No Video Out, Hold Power Button To Turn Off, Everything Else Seems To Work?

Older Consoles Others
1

Hey everyone, been a viewer for a while now, and have my first question that i havent been able to find the answer to…

I just bought another wii with the intentions to build it into a wii portable. The problem is i went to power it on, and it wont output a signal. I read that it could be the wifi module, so i swapped in a good working one, and even tested this one’s module in a working wii. I swapped in another dvd drive, and another wiimote module. I tried resetting the power adapter, I tried everything you can google, and have not been able to get it to work.

It powers on fine, it wont display anything though. If you pop in a disk, it will take it in, spin it up, then stop it and do nothing. the only ways to power the system down are to unplug it or hold the power button.

With a disk in, if you power it up, it spins the disk up, ramps it up faster, moves the laser head, keeps the disk spinning, but does nothing. No output, nothing.

I can turn it on with the wiimote that came with it, but i cannot pair new ones to it, and as soon as the console is booted up, the wiimote disconnects and cannot reconnect.

Holding the reset button does nothing, gc controller does nothing. Ive tried different cables (composite as well as component out) different sensor bars, different power bricks, nothing has worked. Im not sure where to begin looking to repair this, so if anyone has any advice on where to start, that would be much appreciated.

2

I think perhaps the no video output is a red herring. You can think of the disc drive as operating independently from the rest of the console in this case, which makes me think it’s more likely this is a no boot issue rather than just a no video output issue… This unfortunately could be due to a variety of reasons. You can further verify this by hooking up just the audio (red/white) from a composite cable, if you don’t hear anything then it confirms the console is indeed not actually booting behind the scenes.

Apologies but it’s been a very long time since I’ve worked on a wii so I’m struggling a bit where to point you, but my first thought is, there was a serious design flaw with the original revision wii consoles (which for some reason nobody talks about) in which they mounted the heatsink with (I’m not making this up) about a 5mm gap between it and the SoC, meaning the SoC on these revisions effectively have no form of real cooling aside from the fan… this ultimately leads to what looks like static noise on the video out, which then progresses to full blown graphical artifacts which then leads to death of the SoC and symptoms like what your describing. So that would be my best guess as to what’s wrong with your unit and if that’s the case it’s unfortunately not going to be fixable :frowning:

If you want to delve a little deeper, then you can mesure resistance to ground on all your primary rails (using your working wii as a reference) to further confirm deny my suspicions above :slight_smile:

3

Thank you for such a fast reply! thats awesome :slight_smile:
I did forget to write down that i tried getting audio from it to no avail as well. its like its initializing the startup, but doesnt actually start up. thats why the wiimote can turn the console on, but as soon as it starts to run through its checklist for booting, it gets hung up on something and cant progress.

that is very curious about the SoC. both chips under the heatsink have squished thermal pads on them, so maybe this one didnt have this issue? ill check again, as its all ripped apart still anyways. this new wii i picked up is a revision 20. my first wii and backup are both 01. both are kinda terrible for wii portable, but i cannot seem to find a revision 40 wii to do this to haha!

im going to keep this wii around for parts, ive already harvested the good gamecube port flaps off it for my backup wii. im kinda thinking about tearing my main wii down again to check for the heatsink gap and address it if it exists before it becomes a problem. on the plus side, i have spare sensor bar, power supply, disc drive, as well as 2 more original wiimotes :slight_smile: just need 2 more nunchucks haha

i might probe around a bit just to confirm its toast. i hate thinking that it could be something simple ive overlooked before throwing in the towel. ive been collecting all the consoles that i used to have as a kid. the only reason im using a wii instead of a gamecube is literally because of the av cable. i built my own upscaler that compares to the OSSC and have it hooked up to my pc via capture card. the gamecube RGB cable was well over 100$, and my most expensive wii was 60$. the cable for it was like 25$. plus the wii is more powerful than the gamecube anyways, so its just all around better

Thank you again for all your help! i really appreciate it! take care

4

If I remember right (long time ago now) this was their quick fix, using the thermal pads (still not ideal) and then later I think they truly fixed the issue and significantly reduced/removed the gap as you would actually expect on the later revisions.

Good call, I think what I did back in the day was I just bought some copper plate and shimmed it up until the gap was no longer there together with thermal paste.

I think the general consensus is, despite the WII being more powerful and using real GC hardware internally is that the picture quality on the Wii is inferior to that of the Gamecube, I’ve heard people saying that even a GC with RGB scart looks better than a GC games on Wii even with component cables and forced “HD” … no idea why, maybe the analog lines aren’t as well filtered on wii vs GC :thinking: This kindof makes sense as I recall using a cheap third party (real crap quality) power supply for the Wii and the video output was very susceptable to outside interference while using this PSU to the point where I may as well have been using a composite cable in terms of overall video quality.

5

i was giving it some thought, and if i was to pull the spacers out from the heatsink, and rest it directly on the heatspreaders, the shrouds and stuff would be at different heights, but i cant see this thing creating enough heat to make that a big deal for airflow through the fins. even with it being a 95w model, i doubt it. ill probably end up doing that. i have some really high quality thermal paste for my computer builds, so that should take care of that issue.

i didnt know that haha! i guess i missed that in all my research on the different consoles… i have a snes, sega, gamecube, 2 wii’s and a xbox 360. everything i plumb through the upscaler i built looks super amazing. im actually blown away with how crisp the picture looks. i couldnt test it out with my gamecube though, as i only have the analog av cable, and it only supports composite. i was looking for a pal gamecube to regionbreak, but couldnt find one cheaper than i could buy a wii or two for haha!

i dont seem to have any interference issues with my wii. its in a console tower i made, all the power and av cables are cablemanaged together, and everything looks great. i might have lucked out with my digital av cable being somewhat decent quality haha!

anyways, thanks for all your help man, i really appreciate it!

6

:+1:

I suppose one alternative you could look into is one of those HMDI mods for the Wii, IE: picking up the digital signals before they go to the DAC and then going by way of a transmitter to HDMI output, that way you would in theory have none of the noise issues in theory… though I’ve gotta be honest, I’ve just checked the comparisons of the supposedly superior GC video output compared to Wii and WiiU, and while they GC shots do look a touch sharper the difference in my eyes is negligible… so might not be worth the effort.

Reconsider doing this if your looking for the best quality output from your consoles, running them all with eachother your effectively creating a fantastic antenna for noise pickup between all cables/consoles. If your after the best image quality then try routing them cables with a minimum of 10cm gap between all cables, better yet whack a few ferrite beads at the input and output side of each cable. That being said, if you don’t notice a difference or hasn’t bugged you so far then don’t worry about it :smiley:

There is no such thing as a digital AV cable :stuck_out_tongue: digital signal maybe, analog cable absolutely :slight_smile: