Hacking Usb Loader GX Slow to show games

[Cecilmax]

Hello,

I installed Usb Loader GX to work with hdd 2TB Fat32 32k cluster.

It work just fine to load any games, Wiiware, GC and Wii games. But when I switch view (wii, gamecube, emuNand, ..) it take maybe 30 seconds for the games to show ..

Any idea what can cause this lag ? do I have too much games ? lol

For wiiware games I have couple that only show the name by its gameID instead of games name. Any idea how to fix that ?

Thank you very much for your help.

 

[almmiron]

If you have many games, it will be slow. The first time you load usbGX is even slower, cause it will generate some configs. The things I do is try to maintain usb defragmented; configure the games to show in list (not banners, specially the custom ones[ngc]), then it can be a little faster. Wiiflow and cfg are faster, but I like the usbloaderGX gui, but you could use them as well. This is my experience.

 

[Cecilmax]

Thank you for your help, very appreciated. I had wiiflow before, I switch to usb loader because I don't know why but Wiiflow stopped working for somes reasons. I try everything, setup my 2TB in two partitions, one fat32 the other one wbfs, one partition, etc. at first book it seem to work, I see all the games, but once I download the covers, after 50% it begin to have trouble download covers and when I get back to main screen I see duplicated titles of games with duplicates covers ..

and when I try to launch a game, it show the progress bar and freeze on black screen..

I will give a try to cfg

 

[Cyan]

are there any game type which are slower than the other?
My guess is games on emuNAND might be slower to load than Wii or gamecube games, right?

if you have a lot of game it will become slower.
To fasten the loading time, be sure that your Wii and gamecube games contains the GameID inside the folder's name.
for example
games/Zelda windwaker [GZLP01]/game.iso
wbfs/new super mario wii [SMNP01]/SMNP01.wbfs
if the loader finds the GameID in the path, it will not have to open every ISO one by one to look inside to get it.

If you display banner layout, enable banner caching (in the settings>banner menu) to extract all the banners from the ISO instead of opening the ISO one by one again.

Maybe try to defragment.


Sorry that the loader is slow.
I will try to make a TitleCache option like Wiiflow. That's why Wiiflow loads faster, it doesn't rescan the drive after every boot, only if requested.
(sorry, I'm slow coding, I don't know when this option will be available)

 

[Cecilmax]

I will try that

Thank you very much for you work. Very appreciated.

It could be nice if we can also have a shortkey on the wiimote to switch between displaying wii games, gc games and nand emu games

 

[Cecilmax]

Just to be more specific, it is not slow only during boot but every time I switch viewing wiiware games to wii games or to gc games. It is like it have to reload all the covers and game list

 

[tswntk]

I don't really like the idea of TitleCache, cause you will than run into cache problems like corrupting, not refreshing etc.. IIRC Wiiflow has to create a manual refresh cache option to work around that.
I have more than 150 games and a 3-row screen takes less than 3 sec to refresh. I haven't really timed but I think even if you have 600 games, it should take less than 10 sec.

Something else must be wrong if it took more than 30 seconds to refresh, like wrong folders name structure, fragmentation as suggested
I am still on r1226 (it aint break) but I don't think that matters for this problem.

Edit: I have another HDD with 500 games and it still takes less than 5 sec to refresh.
Note: I don't run wiiware/vc games. May be you put them in Emunand and the time is to exit in and out of Emunabd mode?

 

[Cecilmax]

I think its because the covers images is on hdd instead of sd card, I will make somes tests and let you know if its faster

 

[Cyan]

I have 80 wii games, some Gamecube and some Wiiware, it's not slow either.
If I add the titcleCache, it will be an option only (not forced by default), and it will require a manual refresh button.
I didn't think of all the issues it could create yet, I'm not at this point. it's only a future possible feature.

I have all the ressources on SD card !
so, it could be why.
I prefer having all on SD, for multiple reason :
- all my homebrew are on SD. I can remove the drive (which has not only wii games) and still access homebrew if I power the Wii.
- All the settings/ressources should be "always" accessible. If you use Dual port option, then you will corrupt your drives and file system if you store them on a drive. switching ports is hard reseting and shutting down the drive without saving all current opened files.
Having all on SD prevent file system corruption.


I can't make a shortcut to switch Wii/GC/WiiWare, some users don't want to display ONLY one console at a time.
I display Wii+GC at the same time, there would need a switch for every combination?
if you want a quick switch, There is a "tabulation mod" of the loader. you can find it in the main thread of USBLoaderGX. search the pages backward, you will find it. (or use the search engine, look for "tab mod")

 

[Cecilmax]

After many tests, the problem was my drive or its usb loader that doesnt support well 2TB FAT32 32k cluster. I had also trouble to launch somes games, sometimes I got black screen after launch games or freeze within the game. After putting theses games on my other hdd 500gig fat32 32kb cluster, eveything work just fine..

Does usbloader gx have trouble with very large hdd like 2TB ?

 

[Cecilmax]

I think its maybe because its self powered, I will try with a larger hdd that have power supply

 

[Cyan]

it's possible that the speed issue is due to a wrong FAT32 file table information. (TOC, table of content)
there's an option to resynch the content of the drive and the TOC in the loader : Settings > HDD menu > Synch FAT32.

It's needed to resynch if you used old homebrew, which used old libFAT library. the library didn't properly update the TOC, making the drive slow to determine the remaning free space. maybe it could also affect loading time, I don't know.

I doubt it's a power issue.
If it was a power issue, I suppose the drive would shutdown or reset continuously. it would make a restart noise very often, and the loader would have issue reading and writing files to it as the device ID is not properly disconnected/reconnected from the console.
It's worth a try. Let me know if using Y-cable is faster.

It could be fragmentation too.

 

[Cecilmax]

I can confirm it work a lot better with a powered 2TB fat32, I still have to test it with gc games to see if it is still flawless.

I notice something, on games like super mario bros, the wiimote WII-U seem to not respond once we are in the game, the wiimote for WII only working fine. Any idea about this ?

 

[Cecilmax]

I can confirm, everything is flawless with usbloader gx with a 2TB powered FAT32 32kb cluster

I also had a problem with wiiflow with the self powered hdd and now its working just fine too.

 

[Cyan]

thank you for testing and reporting
that's good to know it was a power issue. I never had thought.

I guess it would interest @sonictopfan because he suffers from a very slow loading time too.
Be sure to use properly powered HDD

about the wiimote, I guess some games are using old IOS or devkits and are not compatible with wiimote+ ?

 

[Cecilmax]

My pleasure, for the wiimote problem I found a workaround, just popun the wiimote setup sync and reconnect the wiimote and it will be good.

 

[SuperNintendant]

I had this problem on my nephew's Wii. Tried fiddling with different settings on USB Loader GX and renaming folders but that didn't help. Took 23 seconds to load some of the GC games like Wind Waker from my SD card while my USB ports were empty. I stuck a USB stick in the back and that loading time from the SD card went down from 23 seconds to 14 seconds. It must check the USB first and wait for a few seconds before moving on to the SD card if nothing is there. It was the same improvement whether I stuck an exFAT-formatted 128GB USB drive full of pictures or an empty FAT32 8GB stick in there so I left the second one in because I didn't need it and now my nephew doesn't complain about the games taking forever.