hmm - so I'm not really sure what Wii Backup Manager does. It shows an MD5 hash for every .wbfs game. It has the option to "verify" or "recalculate" these hashes. I'm not really sure what it is calculating or checking because the MD5 hash it shows is not the same if I use an external MD5 checksum program to calculate the wbfs file.
That aside, I did try the Dolphin integrity check, which provides no information other than to tell me it is good.
I also used "wit verify" (which apparently you need to use with the "-p" switch and point it directly at the .wbfs file?).
With verbosity on it tells me:
WBFSv1 #1/1 opened: w:\wbfs\Thomas & Friends - Hero of the Rails [ST4PNX]\ST4PNX.wbfs
>scan 1.0 DATA ST4PNX Thomas & Friends: Hero of the Rails
>info TICKET & TMD are well signed. Partition is encrypted and scrubbed.
+OK 1.0 DATA ST4PNX Thomas & Friends: Hero of the Rails
* WBFS #1: 1 disc verified.
I don't know much about how all these values are stored, but from reading the Wiims iso tools here:
http://wit.wiimm.de/wwt/cmd-verify.html#intro
It seems to indicate that indeed there are stored checksums (H4 for the whole partition) and that this verification method works well regardless of if the disk is scrubbed or not. So it would see like you can take it mostly as gospel if these return that the image is good (assuming someone didn't also somehow modify the stored values(?)).
So - it looks like my image is good.
Could it be due to my current global settings of forcing NTSC 480p and turning the video patching to "All" ?
I actually set these as my global settings in USBLGX because I needed those two things set for this particular game to play full screen without what appeared to be some type of haziness/interlacing. It didn't seem to negatively affect any other games I tried so I kept these settings globally.
Is having those set a bad idea?
Most of my searching about the error message I have found indicates that people seem to get it either:
1) If they are playing from a disc and have either a bad disk or laser.
2) If they are playing from a loader (HDD based) they get it upon loading a game.
I can't find any other posts that state this happens after x amount of time playing a game from the loader.
I had one other thought as one change I made to my console... I previously had a Wii disc (Wii Fit) inside the drive...it was just sitting there...probably because I forgot to eject it after backing it up. I recently decided to take it out because I figured I didn't need the disc/laser trying to read it everytime the Wii started. It can't be possible that a disc (any disc) is actually needed in the drive for certain games, can it? Like somehow the game does a disc access check at some random moment? I would think the cIOS redirects all of this, but just wanted to mention it.