Hacking RawkSD

[themanuel]

Yes, that was my experience. We would only have freezes when the mike was in use.

I had only just read your note about deleting the save file to fixi the freezes -- I guess I won't try that after all.

Unfortunately, my wife only likes to sing. Whenever we'd play together, we'd end up with a hang every few songs. That killed off her enjoyment of the game. Restarting the game via HBC just annoyed her more (too many selections).

And every time I forgot to set the date back to the current time after playing would cause problems with games the kids used. In particular, Wii Fit would erase their progress if it was ever started with the clock in the past. They eventually refused to ever play with RawkSD -- they'd much rather just play vanilla RB2.

I feel your pain, brother.
I've tried to get this to work better, but all I keep running into is cynical mocking from one of the devs.
I am just about ready to move on, like everyone else, I guess (in terms of getting a new build).
By the way, about the freezes, you could try switching the mic to the other USB port and see what happens.
I've not tried myself, but who knows.

 

[themanuel]

Yes, that was my experience. We would only have freezes when the mike was in use.

I had only just read your note about deleting the save file to fixi the freezes -- I guess I won't try that after all.

Unfortunately, my wife only likes to sing. Whenever we'd play together, we'd end up with a hang every few songs. That killed off her enjoyment of the game. Restarting the game via HBC just annoyed her more (too many selections).

And every time I forgot to set the date back to the current time after playing would cause problems with games the kids used. In particular, Wii Fit would erase their progress if it was ever started with the clock in the past. They eventually refused to ever play with RawkSD -- they'd much rather just play vanilla RB2.

Well, I started playing RB2 with the kids last Friday through RawkSD and ran into constant crashes so I decided to look into it a bit more.

I spent a lot of time following false leads, trying to re-rip songs, etc. I keep my songs in a hard drive so I installed a few to SD card to see if the medium made a difference with the crashes. It turns out that it worked flawlessly so I thought it was the HD causing the problem. I went on to transfer all the converted songs from GH and other RB games (900 songs total), but when it was all in the card the crashes were back.

I was really bummed but decided to try one more thing. I deleted about half of the songs and gave it a try and realized that the crashes were gone once again. It appears there is a practical limit to the number of songs you can have in your list before running into this crashes. I'm guessing this is perhaps a memory issue where the developers did not anticipate people having so many songs.

If anyone who's reading this has the crash issues with RawkSD (or just RB2, for that matter), please tell me how many songs you have in your list, to try an figure out where this limit may lie. I'll try to also figure it out by adding groups of songs to the card until the crashes return but it will take me a few days because the installation process is so slow.

Regards.

 

[themanuel]

I am zeroing in on 700 songs (besides the ones already in the RB2 disc) as the magic maximum number you can import before the crashes start to become too frequent. Keeping to this number does not mean you will never have crashes, I still had a few while "stress testing" but I think this will make your RawkSD workable to the point where you might have the occasional unfortunate crash but not enough to make the experience frustrating. I am still testing this limit by playing normally and will report back if I keep adjusting the maximum number.

The way I set up the songs was importing all the supported games and deleting any duplicate songs (some 100), keeping the Rock Band versions of the duplicates, since they play better than GH ones. I've noticed that on GH songs (at least some), if you don't hold each guitar note until the very last possible moment before the next note must be played, the sound of the note you are holding cuts off abruptly and makes the transition from note to note rather disjointed. This doesn't happen with the RB songs, nor with the GH ones when played on their original games, and some songs suffer from this more than others. Overall, it's better to play GH songs on their original games because of this and the fact that you get the extra drum element, but it's just nice to have them available through a RawkSD setup o access them all from one common interface.

Anyway, after deleting duplicates I eliminated all songs from band-centric games (Green Day RB and GH Aerosmith, Metallica and Van Halen), except for songs in those games that are not from the title band. This way, I know exactly what songs are missing from the list and I can go to those specific games and play them (plus I don't like the Aerosmith and Van Halen games that much, anyway). This takes the list down to approximately 700 songs, which I'm in the process of testing for robustness to crashes.

I'll keep posting updates here, in case anyone is still watching...

 

[jlv2]

I am zeroing in on 700 songs (besides the ones already in the RB2 disc) as the magic maximum number you can import before the crashes start to become too frequent...

I'll keep posting updates here, in case anyone is still watching...

I'm glad that you did. For some reason I thought about the Rawk3 debacle today, and decided to check the thread to see if anything had happened. Your notes above made that worthwhile.

I also have a large number of customs imported into Rawks3 - 711 in "rawk/rb2/customs". I've got almost another 50 DLCs I bought. It about fills a 16G SD. Given what you found above, I'll go through and prune a bunch of songs to get the total count under 700, and then see if the lockups stop happening so often.

If I don't have to restart the game, then launching via HBC won't be so painful.

(sadly, this still leaves the whole "set the clock back" lossage unresolved)

 

[themanuel]

I'm glad that you did. For some reason I thought about the Rawk3 debacle today, and decided to check the thread to see if anything had happened. Your notes above made that worthwhile.

I also have a large number of customs imported into Rawks3 - 711 in "rawk/rb2/customs". I've got almost another 50 DLCs I bought. It about fills a 16G SD. Given what you found above, I'll go through and prune a bunch of songs to get the total count under 700, and then see if the lockups stop happening so often.

If I don't have to restart the game, then launching via HBC won't be so painful.

(sadly, this still leaves the whole "set the clock back" lossage unresolved)

Hey, I'm glad you checked on this. This thread is so lonely.

So I've played a fair amount with about 720 songs including some DLC, and haven't encountered the crashes again but if I stress test it, switching back and forth repeatedly from the song selection menu using the B button, I can make it happen. However, I think it's now stable under normal playing circumstances. My wife and kids went batty too, whenever the thing froze. If you can keep it under 700, I think you'll be in good shape.

Also, do you normally start in the System Menu?
If so, you can install a channel with the RawkSD3b4 dol injected into it, so that you can launch straight from the SM without going to the HBC first.
Let me know if you are interested and I'll PM you a link to it.

 

[iancer]

GGGRRRRRRAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HOW DO I FIX THE "object refference" ERROR!?!?!??!
WWWWAAAHHHHH SOOO ANNOYING!
WHY CANT I HAVE CUSTOMS!?! WHY!? PLEASE HELP!
thank you for everything!

 

[themanuel]

Well, I stopped caring about RawkSD again but if I can help you, I will.
Where do you get this error?

 

[Tomazed]

I had a question If I may, I've recently come back to RawkSD and my memory is lacking some information. I lost the USB Key I was using back in 2010 when rawksd 3 beta was opened to everyone so I had to make a new one. I've installed some DLC I extracted from my RB 1 game and Guitar Hero 3 (all legit disc) through RawkSD PC app. Since they did not show ingame, I found an old utility called dlctools which aim to rewrite the bin file with my WII key. It kinda work since the dlc showed up at music selection menu but the game crash whenever I select a dlc song (no preview playing, just the freeze and High pitch noise...)

Do you have any idea what I've been doing wrong?

 

[fubka]

For those lurkers and RB3 holdouts, there is some progress, although it is by using rawksd indirectly.

http://rockband.scorehero.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36077&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

 

[TeleTubby666]

Has anyone tried to use RawkSD on WiiU yet?

 

[theli]

Has anyone tried to use RawkSD on WiiU yet?

Indeed, had annyone?

 

[b17bomber]

So I just dusted this off and started using it on my wii. It keeps freezing everytime I load a song.

 

[James Wheeler]

I have a 4.3U wii, a physical copy of rock band 2, and homebrew with rawksd. I used to pc app rocksd3 to install imported songs from rock band, gh world tour, gh5, and gh6. However everytime I load it up as I'm scrolling through the song list in solo quick play it freezes/crashes with a high pitched noise. Am I doing something wrong?

 

[Nixphoe]

Hello I was curious if anyone could help. So I was ripping LRB and the ACDC trackpack from the discs to a SD card. It was working fine until I got to RB1, then it started putting every release year as 2009 and not including album names. I didn't think to much of it because it because it still had the band and song names right. It wasn't untill I played the, song did I realize it had about a 4-6 second delay on the RB1 songs. So is this something that someone could help me with?

 

[BloodyBreak]

Does Anybody Still play this?

 

[iamthecheese]

Hi,

I recently tried using RawkSD, and for now all I'm trying to do is play RB1 songs. I can import them just fine, the audio and everything works, the only thing is the audio is way ahead behind the video. Like 4 or 5 seconds.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[HarveyHouston]

This is bumping a really old thread, but...

RawkSD is severely deprecated. Is it possible to bring this software up to date somehow? I'm attempting to use this in vWii, with no success. I've got version 2.02 which I assume is the latest stable version, but the patcher fails, and attempting to manually patch IOS 37 myself makes the installer hang. If RawkSD 3.0 exists (and not as a beta, since that says that the "trial period has expired"), where can I find it?

 

[maharito]

RawkSD is old alright, but what could be more convenient for GH2RB? Only thing is you have to go on WaybackMachine to get the usage guide. I'm messing with it right now--but you'd be the one to know about differences in compatibility between Wii and vWii for customs.

 

[Ashleyallen]

So I have to be honest i have been reading this thread to get this working on my WII and I don't think the devs of this program at all thought it through it is now 2020 and getting a copy of rock band 2 for the wii is very hard. you can buy it on amazon but its now 50 bucks and i'm not paying that kind of money.

Honestly not happy right now because I can't used the ISO patcher cause I do have a CIOS installed and I'm not willing to repatch my damn wii just for this one program.

So I have no idea how to get this working. because i can't patch my IOS 37 even though it's installed and works and i don't want to risk breaking it.

if they devs ever read this. get off your damn high horses please( Your program only works on ILLEGALLY hacked WII systems. any changes we make to it is technically not allowed. so hipocracy thy name is you.), you are not catering to pirates by making your program work with back up launchers, you are making older games able to be played 9 freaking years later.

 

[HarveyHouston]

Honestly not happy right now because I can't used the ISO patcher cause I do have a CIOS installed and I'm not willing to repatch my damn wii just for this one program.

So I have no idea how to get this working. because i can't patch my IOS 37 even though it's installed and works and i don't want to risk breaking it.

if they devs ever read this. get off your damn high horses please( Your program only works on ILLEGALLY hacked WII systems. any changes we make to it is technically not allowed. so hipocracy thy name is you.), you are not catering to pirates by making your program work with back up launchers, you are making older games able to be played 9 freaking years later.

Show me a LEGALLY hacked Wii, and I'd think you were cracking up.

The RawkSD program can be used for reasonably legitimate means, mainly custom songs and DLC that you own, but it is rather old, and the developers have since moved on to other projects. You may be interested to know that @Larsenv and @DarkMatterCore are trying to tackle the problem of adding customs and DLC back to RB2, and I have been doing some tests of my own to try to overcome the limitations in vWii (since RawkSD never really supported vWii, anyway). We're using alternate methods to atempt this, so please stay posted to my Rock Band Customs thread for updates on the matter.