Hacking neek2o with over 800 channels?

[HunterZ]

So I created an emunand on my Wii by dumping my real NAND. I then followed a tutorial by Cyan to use ModMii to get neek2o installed. USB Loader GX was able to boot neek2o and all was well.

I then proceeded to install 800+ channels, and now I need help:

USB Loader GX sees these channels fine in emunand mode (it just takes a while to load all the banners) and can run them fine. HOWEVER, booting neek2o does NOT work: it look a couple minutes for the safety warning to appear, and then I hit (A) and have been staring at a black screen for over 20 minutes.

Does neek2o have a channel limit? Do I just need to wait longer? Is there something else I need to do? Any workarounds?

Thanks!

 

[Cyan]

I don't remember if there's a limit on neek(2o).
You said you press A on the safety warning, so you are not auto-booting a game? you just launch neek and then choose the game from the System menu?

Maybe one of your installed channel is bad and the system menu is bricked (banner brick on neek) so system menu never displays anything.
You installed only official VC and wiiware, or also some injected channels and homebrew or forwarders etc?

The banner brick is caused by custom channel animation. USBGX can read them because there are better error detection and it's less strict with the used format (pictures, etc.), so it will be hard to find which one is at fault on all your 800 channels.

did you try auto-booting with neek2o? or you just want to boot into system menu for another reason than launching a game (editing a setting for example)?

 

[HunterZ]

Hey, it's the man himself! Thanks for taking the time to respond, thanks for USB Loader GX, and thanks for the neek2o guide(s).

I don't remember if there's a limit on neek(2o).
You said you press A on the safety warning, so you are not auto-booting a game? you just launch neek and then choose the game from the System menu?

My goal is probably to do things via USB Loader GX, but I'm taking baby steps.

My problem is that when booting neek2o via the USB Loader GX Features menu, the System Menu never appears after pressing (A) on the health warning screen. I'm just stuck on a black screen. I let it run for hours this morning just in case.

Maybe one of your installed channel is bad and the system menu is bricked (banner brick on neek) so system menu never displays anything.
You installed only official VC and wiiware, or also some injected channels and homebrew or forwarders etc?

So I started with a dump of my real NAND (created by USB Loader GX's dump full NAND feature), which had only official channels plus USB Loader GX forwarder, WiiFlow forwarder, and Homebrew Channel. This emunand booted fine via neek2o.

I then made the following modifications via ShowMiiWads:

• Deleted most of the forwarder channels and a couple of the official channels that came from my NAND dump (Netflix, Photo channel, etc.) because I don't need them in an emunand
• Installed neek2o channel.
  
• Installed a lot of VC/WiiWare titles via ShowMiiWads.

The banner brick is caused by custom channel animation. USBGX can read them because there are better error detection and it's less strict with the used format (pictures, etc.), so it will be hard to find which one is at fault on all your 800 channels.

Does/can USB Loader GX log ones that it thinks might be problematic?

did you try auto-booting with neek2o? or you just want to boot into system menu for another reason than launching a game (editing a setting for example)?

I'm taking baby steps. Once I get things working I want to experiment with neek-booting individual titles via USB Loader GX.

Other questions:

1. Is there a way to speed up the switch to emunand channel view in USB Loader GX? It seems to take a couple minutes.
2. Will installing Snort48+ help my neek2o woes? I'm probably going to try that next.

Thanks!

 

[Cyan]

I don't know if USBLoaderGX logs bad animated banners (I didn't develop that feature, and I don't have a bad banner to try).

snort48 is a channel installed on neek system menu (that you need to install usually at the beginning, before adding more than 48 games or you'll never see it) which let you "sort" and choose which games should be part of the 48 visible slots.
I guess It could fix banner brick, as the system menu will not try to load that bad animated banner. (unless it checks banners even for non displayed channels, because it's maybe parsing all found files).

If you can get snort, you will still have the problem of launching it to sort the channels you want to display, but you can do it from USBLoaderGX auto-booting into neek2o's Snort48 channel. this way, you can move around the channel order and see if it fix your issue.


The speed issue seems related to reading the game's title from gametdb.xml
You can try to disable the gametdb feature but you'll end up with bad names and wrong alphabetical order for your game list.
What you can do is not use the "animated banner layout", you can choose List layout instead, it should load faster.

There's no other way to speed it right now, but I'll see if I can add a "game cache" feature. Instead of rescanning all the drive for games at every boot/menu refresh, it will use a file with the game list. you'll have to force a game list refresh manually after adding/deleting a game.
it's on my future todo list, I don't know when I'll do it. for the moment, it's slow with too many games, sorry.

 

[HunterZ]

Update: Having Snort48+ v1.1 problems: https://gbatemp.net/threads/snort48.281609/page-4#post-6882066

Currently trying to rebuild my NAND from scratch to get Snort48+ installed earlier. I made a new NAND dump using USB Loader GX, then used ShowMiiWads to install neek2o and Snort48+ WADs. After successfully booting into the USB NAND via neek2o via USB Loader GX, I used the Wii System Menu to delete some channels and it popped up a "The system files are corrupted." screen. Gah!

Maybe my overall problem is that neek2o is not handling deletion of channels from a USB NAND very well? I'll try just leaving those channels in the USB NAND but taking them off the System MEnu with Snort48+ and seeing how that goes.

Edit: Snort48+ *seems* to be able to save changes just fine if I don't delete anything from the USB NAND. Re-loading my 800 WADs now to see if that works too.

 

[HunterZ]

Well, I give up on trying to have a bootable neek2o System Menu. If I try to manually place more than a few channels at a time in Snort48+, I get the iplsave.bin crash.

I was able to neek-boot games from USB Loader GX without a problem, and thanks to Cyan's tutorials the Wii automatically reboots back to real NAND mode when exiting the games too. This seems to be an ideal solution.

 

[portugeek]

Installing Snort48+ on your EmuNAND should help solve any crashing issues caused by having more than 48 channels installed. In your case, you installed 800 channels before installing Snort48+. This causes issues because the first time you try to boot into your EmuNAND it'll attempt to populate your empty channel slots with any of the 800 channels that you currently have installed. And if, upon initial boot, you don't have Snort48+ installed on your EmuNAND, you won't be able to boot into you're EmuNAND environment. Installing Snort48+ after the fact, WILL now allow you to boot into your EmuNAND environment, but you won't be able to see or access the Snort48+ channel, which effectively makes any kind of channel organization impossible.

There IS a workaround though...

After installing Snort48+ on your EmuNAND, go to USBLoader GX. Go to "Global Settings">"Custom Paths".. scroll down and point "Nand Emu Path" & "Nand Emu Channel Path" to your EmuNAND folder. Then go to "Global Settings">"Loader Settings" and set your "Nand Chan. Emulation" to Neek. Then, as a precaution, go to "Global Settings">"Features" and select "Export SYSCONF to EmuNAND."

Now exit out of settings and go back to USBLoader GX's main menu. Make sure you're now viewing your EmuNAND channels. If you're not seeing them, select the 4th icon on the top bar, called "Loader Mode", and make sure "EmuNand Channels" is selected. Scroll through your list until you see "Snort48+". Loading it from here should load directly into Snort48+ within your EmuNAND. You'll then be able to organize the placement of your EmuNAND's channels, and more importantly, you'll be able to add Snort48+, and any other important channels, to the front page of your EmuNAND's System Menu.

If after ALL this, you still can't load into your EmuNAND, I suggest deleting some specific files/folders from your USB drive.
-Delete the "sneekcache" folder located inside usb:/nands/[YOUR-NANDS-NAME]/
-Then delete the "diconfig.bin" & "nandcfg.bin" files (If you have them).. located inside usb:/sneek/

You may not need to delete the last two files, but there's no harm in doing so. It always makes me feel better to do it. They're just config files that will auto-generate if you don't already have them.

 

[GreyWolf]

If you want a bunch of channels on NEEK and you also want to use it as a system menu I'd recommend using two dumps, one for actual NEEK system menu mode and one for redirected channels. You should never have to boot to the menu in the latter if you use USB Loader GX. You can install WADs from the settings and delete them in the main interface.

 

[game_rat]

I highly recommend that you look into using Postloader as a System Menu replacement on your UNEEK nand. There is a file called "neek2obooter.app" that you can add to the nand that will allow you to instantly access the Postloader interface instead of the System Menu. The interface isn't as pretty (no animation) but it works great.

 

[HunterZ]

@portugeek thanks for the detailed suggestions. I actually did try rebuilding an emunand with Snort48+ installed and booted first, and then installing the other channels. It still wouldn't boot. I booted Snort48+ directly by configuring USB Loader GX to boot it in Neek mode; the result was that Snort48+ showed a random assortment of channels and blank spots, and moving too many around at a time cause iplsave.bin errors. In any case, I could never get it too boot to the system menu, so I gave up on Snort48+ and just use USB Loader GX to boot games in Neek mode when needed.

@GreyWolf I don't quite follow what you're saying. Do you mean that I would boot dump1 in Neek mode and then run USB Loader GX inside of it with dump2 configured to be the emunand? Or something else?

@game_rat I wanted to get the system menu working as a "check all the boxes" type of thing. USB Loader GX is the overall best solution for me (even better than Postloader) because of the channel animation view that looks like the system menu. It also lets me selectively use Neek only for titles that don't work with regular emunand.

 

[mallocup77]

I have the same problem for ages, and can't find a solution so far as well. I've tried everything, even portugeek's workaround (that I didn't think of), nothing works. I think emuNAND just can't handle hundreds of channels, even if you're using Snort48+. I tried building an emunand with only a few channels (which works), then with about 60 channels using Snort (which works), but when adding hundreds of titles it won't work no matter what. I gave up too. Actually it is not so important booting up an emuNAND for me, using USB Loader GX is awesome and looks so cool. Would be good having the possibility though, especially to change system settings if you want, but oh well. I already set everything up when my emunand only had a few titles so I think I'm ok...

 

[GreyWolf]

It's the system menu that stinks at enumerating titles. If you bypass that by using a loader NEEK and EmuNAND shouldn't really care how many are installed.

EmuNAND is a cIOS feature and doesn't use the system menu at all. NEEK is a shim that redirects all NAND access calls to HDD or SD so it's very slow compared to real NAND. Using a loader with neek2o allows you to launch straight to a title without loading the system menu, thus bypassing the sluggish title scan.

 

[shadoom]

USB Loader GX is awesome and looks so cool.

^This
I had a lot of issues with too many titles as well but usb loader GX handles almost everything pretty well with its emunand implementation.
The only thing that is annoying that it resets the WiiU completely after exiting a WiiWare/VC game

 

[mallocup77]

^This
I had a lot of issues with too many titles as well but usb loader GX handles almost everything pretty well with its emunand implementation.
The only thing that is annoying that it resets the WiiU completely after exiting a WiiWare/VC game

Yeap... would be cool if when exiting it could return to USB Loader GX, but I don't even know if it's possible.

 

[HunterZ]

I'm on an original Wii, and it does fully reboot after exiting a game that USB Loader GX has booted in Neek mode. However, between nswitch and priiloader it always goes back to USB Loader GX automatically.

 

[GreyWolf]

You just need the neek2o channel installed in your nand folder. There's an option in USB Loader GX to enable ReturnTo for NEEK titles.

 

[shadoom]

You just need the neek2o channel installed in your nand folder. There's an option in USB Loader GX to enable ReturnTo for NEEK titles.

but that only works on a real wii, right?

 

[Cyan]

would be cool if when exiting it could return to USB Loader GX, but I don't even know if it's possible.

when exiting Neek2o, the only way to return to real NAND is by rebooting the console. (or maybe loading the kernel again without any neek patches, but nobody tried that).
So, if you want to boot USBGX after a reboot, you'll have to use priiloader -> autoboot menu -> USBGX forwarder dol -> boot USBGX on SD.


alternatively, you are not forced to reset the console when you exit a game, you can just "return to neek's system menu" to launch another channel from here.
if the channel is not part if the displayed banner slots, you can use the neek hidden menu to select and boot a channel.

 

[GreyWolf]

but that only works on a real wii, right?

No, on vWii you can set it to return to the system menu without the neek2o channel. Apparently the vWii has a title ID for the system menu that can be booted.

 

[Cyan]

it doesn't really exit to system menu.
the only way to exit Neek system menu on vWii is to reboot the console (like on Wii), which is the same as "returning to Wii U mode". So you don't need to install a "NK2O" channel which is used to reboot the console, as the vWii already has an official channel to reboot the console called "return to WiiU". You only need to enable "return to" option and that channel will be used on vWii.
You can't return to vWii system menu when exiting vWii neek.

Booting neek is done by loading a patched kernel, which contains NAND redirection, patches, etc.
I'm wondering if we could load a clean kernel from neek to return to Wii/vWii system menu without rebooting.

Kernel.bin is the 000000e.app ? I never really compared the generated kernel.bin with the original IOS's app file.



One thing I never tested is booting USBLoaderGX inside Neek, and list the neek channel as "real NAND" ones. The console consider them installed on real NAND, as it doesn't know there is a NAND redirection.
Though, it could conflict. USB or SD will be "locked" as real NAND, so you can't use that same device for the homebrew resources.
if SD is locked, trying to access SD could be an issue inside USBGX.
You could try to use USB for neek, and use the SD for homebrew. there's a special Neek version on Wii with SD enabled. I think neek2o has it enabled by default, but I never tested it.