Wii Family Edition

The Wii Family Edition (model RVL-101) is a 2011 revision of the Wii. Unlike the original Wii, it is designed to sit flat and comes in an additional color (blue). Homebrew is generally not affected by this model, but there are some key differences compared to the original RVL-001 Wii.

Changes from the original model

Missing GameCube compatibility

• The disc drives used in this model are not able to read GameCube discs at all.
• The ports for GameCube controllers and Memory Cards are also missing. With some soldering work, they can be added back.
• BC and MIOS still exist. So does the Memory Card menu under Save Data Management. The animation for the disc channel was also unchanged, so it oddly still shows the rotating GameCube disc, alongside the Wii one.

Changes carried over from previous revisions

• The boards used are 4-layer
• The disc drives are unable to read standard DVDs and burned game discs.
• boot1 has the signing bug patched and boot2 is at least at version 4.

Different boot2 and IOS versions

• Newer RVL-101 units appear to have version 5 of boot2 installed, which is not available on NUS and can only be found on certain late Wii models.
• The ones that have boot2v5 also appear to have newer IOSes (while they are the same numbers as the vWii, they are different binaries), with updated main contents
  • IOS28 also has a network-related module updated.