Hacking DIOS-MIOS Lite proof of concept release!

[Deleted-185407]

The issue here is that DML is still work in progress and that you can't expect properly running games. Use 64KB cluster if possible. It will drastically improve the reading speed.

I'm aware it's not complete. More like I thought it was the audio streaming issue that's meant to be somewhat rectified in r168, as I'm getting the exact same symptom in both r167 and r168, hence thinking I might have done something wrong somewhere.

 

[obcd]

Are you using a high speed sd(hc) card that is formatted with a 64KB cluster size? Most no brand sd(hc) cards have a poor read write speed. Due to that, the system might not be able to read the audio stream fast enough, creating the poor sound performance. R168 has the audio enabled, which means that R167 would give you no audio at all for those games that need it enabled. All other existing methods to play gc backups seem to have problems with audio streaming as well. (As far as I am reading, I haven't tested it myself yet.) SD(HC) cards normally have a class mark on them. It's a number written in a C. The normal low speed cards are class2. They even sell class 10 cards. Problem is, the higher the class the more expensive the card. For normal purpose like an mp3 player or a digital camera, the speed isn't very important. It will take longer to transfer your music or your pictures, but who will know that it can be faster with a better card.

The devkitarm R24 was needed to compile the older versions of neek due to some behavour of the newer one that changed the way parameters are passed between functions. Crediar fixed the problem by casting some of these parameters (I believe that's what it's called) The newer compiler optimises code better than the older one, so in fact, you might even not be able anymore to compile everything with the old compiler.

Why do these things rely on SNEEK?

AND TINY SD CARDS!?!

sneek emulates the wii nand, and the di module redirects the requests that normally go to the dvd drive, and gets it's data from the usb drive or sd card. For some reason I don't have the details either, usb becomes unusable when the wii is switched into gc compatibility mode. Because of that, only SD remains. Sneek gets it's emulated nand from sd, and di was adapted to get the gc game code from sd as well.

As the situation is now, dml is no longer work in progress. Crediar has released what he has as a proof of concept, and has stated that he doesn't has time to work on it any further. Unless he is willing to share his sources, nobody else can work on it either.

 

[retKHAAAN]

lol...people wanted to load GC backups without needing to burn discs...and now they're upset over the way it is done. just can't satisfy everyone...

 

[obcd]

lol...people wanted to load GC backups without needing to burn discs...and now they're upset over the way it is done. just can't satisfy everyone...

Not completely true. People with newer wii's simply can't play burned backup discs anymore. So it's not like they still have a choice.

 

[Deleted-185407]

Are you using a high speed sd(hc) card that is formatted with a 64KB cluster size? Most no brand sd(hc) cards have a poor read write speed. Due to that, the system might not be able to read the audio stream fast enough, creating the poor sound performance. R168 has the audio enabled, which means that R167 would give you no audio at all for those games that need it enabled. All other existing methods to play gc backups seem to have problems with audio streaming as well. (As far as I am reading, I haven't tested it myself yet.) SD(HC) cards normally have a class mark on them. It's a number written in a C. The normal low speed cards are class2. They even sell class 10 cards. Problem is, the higher the class the more expensive the card. For normal purpose like an mp3 player or a digital camera, the speed isn't very important. It will take longer to transfer your music or your pictures, but who will know that it can be faster with a better card.

Basically when running the game (I don't have a Gamecube controller on me so I can't actually test gameplay), during the opening sequence, with distorted audio, every 2 seconds or so, freeze with a loud beep for a second. So I only assumed it was an audio streaming issue which it sounds like it might not be now.

Using a SanDisk 2GB MicroSD which I believe is class 2, so I assume that's the problem then! Will have to try and look into getting a proper SD card so.

 

[obcd]

You could start by trying the bigger 64KB cluster size, and see if it makes a difference.
All you need to do is reformatting the card with some additional parameters. Maybe you have tried that already?

 

[Deleted-185407]

You could start by trying the bigger 64KB cluster size, and see if it makes a difference.
All you need to do is reformatting the card with some additional parameters. Maybe you have tried that already?

It was FAT32 with 16KB cluster size as that was the maximum I could set it.

I changed it just there to FAT 64KB cluster size, and interestingly enough, while the audio is still highly distorted, the "freezes with beeps" are surprisingly much shorter in duration.

 

[WiiPower]

I'm surprised that the cluster size changes anything. Well, i also expect it to only load not fragmented games without any warning whatsoever about it. And if it loads fragmented games, you should be able to get the same or a better performance boost by defragging.

 

[hanibel]

I'm surprised that the cluster size changes anything.

Huh..really? Generally big files on filesystems with a big cluster size are being read faster than on filesystems with a small cluster size. If you have a flashcart, you can test this with Comic Book DS. Just put a lot of big *.cbds comics to your SD card and test the loading speed with different cluster sizes. The difference will be imense. That's why I'm using always the biggest cluster size possible for something like games, hacks, etc. It's really worth it.

 

[WiiPower]

I'm surprised that the cluster size changes anything.

Huh..really? Generally big files on filesystems with a big cluster size are being read faster than on filesystems with a small cluster size. If you have a flashcart, you can test this with Comic Book DS. Just put a lot of big *.cbds comics to your SD card and test the loading speed with different cluster sizes. The difference will be imense. That's why I'm using always the biggest cluster size possible for something like games, hacks, etc. It's really worth it.

This doesn't make any sense, if the files are not fragmented, there's no real difference between different cluster siszes as far as i know. But i'll keep this in mind and try it when i need more speed on anything.

 

[obcd]

Maybe it's the seek time of the electronics in the sd card that makes the difference?

Seriously now. It could be related to the way things are handeled. The system get's configured to transfer some data, after which this data usualy is tranferred using a dma method that generates an interrupt when the transfer is finished. Transferring smaller blocks means that more transfers need to be configured, and this might make transfers slower. When I started experimenting with my uneek_fs, I also noticed that the speed became better when I transferred bigger blocks at once. Those blocks only were like 4 K in size. Increasing more didn't help to obtain faster speeds. Maybe there is a bottleneck elsewhere that limits the transferspeed when smaller blocks are used. A logical explanation would be that the system somewhere waits a fixed time, no matter what the size of a transferred block is. I also remember that the fat filing system caches some data in memory. Maybe it's defined as a number of clusters so that the bigger the cluster size, the more data is cached. It's all theory, but it shows that the cluster size could make a difference as people are seeing.

 

[brausm08]

to those who have this working: two questions....

1.) running through the building of the DML....i saw in earlier posts the size of the patched 00000008 file is ~200kb (but those posts were all reporting problems)...mine is only 55.4kb (the replaced/unpatched 00000008 file size is 20kb, the original 0000000c (from NUSD) file size is 177kb)...does this sound right, or should it be the ~200kb?

2.) discex on NGC games: starting with .iso in the discex0.8 folder: drag/drop iso to the exe...it does it's thing. what i'm left with: a folder containing 'game.iso' file and a 'sys' folder containing 'apploader.img', 'bi2.bin', and 'boot.bin' ....this doesn't at all look like the output of an extracted Wii game. is this the expected output? for wii games i had done previously, i used DiscEX 0.6; this is my first use of DiscEX 0.8.

i got SNEEK DI booting fine...with Mario Sunshine (original) in the drive, i can 'remove' it from disc channel and switch to any SD/DI title....but i only get a perpetual black screen on loading (i have three titles i'm testing with in SD:\games, all confirmed to run fine via swiss in the .iso format).

if you recognize where i may be going wrong, a redirection and a kick in the ass would be appreciated. thank you!

EDIT: if it matters, i'm using a Sandisk Extreme III 8GB SDHC card formatted FAT32-64kb

EDIT: got it working. proper size for DML is ~210kb. the extracted titles as described above work....

 

[vinzanity]

Got DML working with this set-up:
1 2GB SD card
1 Original Wii Disc (Wii Sports /Wii Play)
1 Discex'd game iso on the games folder of the root of the SD card
1 Sneek 157 or 168 with compiled DML "210 KB"

I have 2 2GB SD Cards (one Kingston and one generic el cheapo) and I was only able to get a game running on the Kingston SD card. The games I tried were Megaman X Collection and WWE Day of Reckoning 2. Megaman X Collection ran well (I only tried up to the Megaman X5 intro, the one with remixed rock Megaman 2 music) while WWE Day of Reckoning 2 had stuttering issues during the Wrestler intros and surprisingly when a wrestler uses a finisher (Press A+B when a Special Meter is full). Other than that it was playing great. One thing I have noticed though is that the file system of your SD card and quality means alot if you want to use DML. I first used FAT32 formatted Kingston SD card and the the game (WWEDOR2) stuttered as hell, a.k.a "unplayable". After i used the Panasonic SD card formatter which formatted it to FAT, the games were surprisingly playable (except during the intro movies and when i was about to do a finisher as mentioned previously). Also, it is hard to know if a specific SD card will work on a Wii Model (1 have 2 Wiis, both USA Models, both Boot2-capable, both set-up with same CIOS/MIOS but the Kingston card only works on 1 model) unless you try it yourself. Maybe SANDisk or better quality cards will provide better compatibility or performance but still, this is a great accomplishment. It was nice testing this one out, but I'm off to play WWE Dor2 on my WODE now.

 

[jonthedit]

Gahr I got SNEEK to run fine (using ModMii to download the files (Using 3 [first time user] Placed the files and it worked fine. But then I noticed you needed SNEEK+DI so I tried copying the files from ModMii like I did earlier. Now I get a black screen. Any Ideas?

-On 4.3U (real)

Choose 4.2U (SNEEK+DI)
-Green Theme
Yes to the recommended Priiloader/CIOS

Edit : I got it to run the SETUP fine. But after the "Wii Setup" was done I got a black screen with the plane SNEEK.
So anyway, I looked at the FAQ for the DI. Where do you get the patcher .exe crediar mentioned?

 

[Levente]

Gahr I got SNEEK to run fine (using ModMii to download the files (Using 3 [first time user] Placed the files and it worked fine. But then I noticed you needed SNEEK+DI so I tried copying the files from ModMii like I did earlier. Now I get a black screen. Any Ideas?

-On 4.3U (real)

Choose 4.2U (SNEEK+DI)
-Green Theme
Yes to the recommended Priiloader/CIOS

http://code.google.com/p/sneek/wiki/FAQDI

 

[justjack]

I was getting a black screen with sneek+di until I put a Wii game on usb.

 

[SanGor]

reading the FAQs of SNEEK/DI is very important!

 

[jonthedit]

Wait a minute... So you use a USB and a SD with this? >.>

 

[shortz1994]

Wait a minute... So you use a USB and a SD with this? >.>

yes you have to have a wii game in disc ex format. to get sneek di to boot. as sangor said read the FAQ, on how to get sneek running, it helps.

 

[king666]

Friends me you could spend your compilation of DML which weighs 210 Kb please you would be grateful if i hope your answer.

Greetings.