Hacking Devolution - Public Release

[lovecf4444]

I am not reporting a bug , but have anyone had the luck to run Wave Race Bue Strom jpn version ? I have had got a black screen after inserting the retail disc and had no response after that. I tried Enternal Darkness and Star fox adventure as well ,both games were jpn version and worked fine with audio streaming.Devolution is a great app ,I have to say, as it has solved the auido streaming problem which was once only can be fixed by modchip method.

 

[turbotronic]

Yea seen that, so here we go, wiiflow r581:
http://www.mediafire...va962tci3cqc11u
In this rev you can select per game if you want to use its memory card emulator or not

Related: japanese games require a memory card that is formatted as SJIS (aka fancy characters) so you might want to add some code to use a different memcard file for specific games.
(It's great that I can be lazy and just palm this work off onto someone else - I didn't even have to bother supporting long filenames in my FAT code.)

Something I'm considering for the future is the ability to pass the .iso, memcard and .dvv file via their starting sector index instead of their starting cluster index. This would allow the engine to work with any filesystem as long as the files are not fragmented. Does this sound like a good idea or is it too difficult for the loaders to get that information?

it would be great if every game could get its own memory card (like in wiisx etc). it could be be placed in the game directory along with the image file. so we never have to care about free space.

 

[SifJar]

so wait... what purpose exactly does this serve?
playing a game that needs to be in the disk drive anyway, and only on gc-compatible wiis, why not just play from the disk?

Disc only needs to be inserted ONCE, the first time to verify you actually own it. After that, it is loaded from SD or USB without needing any disc in the drive at all. (It shocks me somewhat how many times this has been said in this thread, when it is quite clearly explained in the first post).

Any plans to add triforce emulation?

And how would one verify those games? AFAIK, there is no legal way to own those games, and I don't think anyone (or certainly very many people) will have a proper (i.e. non burnt) disc for verification purposes.

 

[FIX94]

Related: japanese games require a memory card that is formatted as SJIS (aka fancy characters) so you might want to add some code to use a different memcard file for specific games.
(It's great that I can be lazy and just palm this work off onto someone else - I didn't even have to bother supporting long filenames in my FAT code.)

Hehe, sure thats some easy thing to do.

Something I'm considering for the future is the ability to pass the .iso, memcard and .dvv file via their starting sector index instead of their starting cluster index. This would allow the engine to work with any filesystem as long as the files are not fragmented. Does this sound like a good idea or is it too difficult for the loaders to get that information?

Why cant we just give its filename with path btw? Or would that makes things even more complicated? Well and about this "not fragmented", I'm not quite sure about the fact to defragment drives in a loader if needed.

 

[PsyBlade]

Something I'm considering for the future is the ability to pass the .iso, memcard and .dvv file via their starting sector index instead of their starting cluster index. This would allow the engine to work with any filesystem as long as the files are not fragmented. Does this sound like a good idea or is it too difficult for the loaders to get that information?

think the general idea is great
but while your exact proposal goes into the right direction its not far enough

requireing defragmented files is inconvinient in the best case
and afaik will not work with eg ext234 (tiny bits of fixed position meatadata spread over the drive iirc)

it would be much better to pass a list of fragments (tuples of either offset in the file and on disk position or fragment size and position)
afaik thats the way the wii games loaders support non-WBFS FS
so I doubt the code needs much modification if you use the same format

maybe contact one of the respective developes directly
or take a look at one of the open source ones

 

[PsyBlade]

Why cant we just give its filename with path btw? Or would that makes things even more complicated?

That would need support for the filesystem the file is on in Devolution.
Which is exactly what he tried to avoid.

 

[FIX94]

Why cant we just give its filename with path btw? Or would that makes things even more complicated?

That would need support for the filesystem the file is on in Devolution.
Which is exactly what he tried to avoid.

Yea I got it, just was thinking about it with overjoy and we have some easy idea how to get the sector which should run fine. But, we also need some kinda frag list support if we really wanna do it that way, otherwise things will get quite complicated, PsyBlade is right.

 

[tueidj]

I wouldn't expect the loaders to do the defragmenting, but they could show an error if the file was fragmented so the user could fix it with a pc.
Passing the filepath + filename is inferior. It takes up more room for the pathname itself (only the first 256 bytes of low memory are usable) and adds a lot of complexity to the FAT code to handle long filenames and drill down through each directory to find it. With a cluster number you know exactly where to look in the partition, with a sector number and contiguous file you don't even need to know what the partition looks like.
Passing a fragment list in memory isn't an option (the engine is position independent code and moves itself around during startup, possibly overwriting anything except the lowmem area) and storing the list in a file would defeat the purpose.

 

[FIX94]

Well if you would do that way I would suggest to stay with FAT, thats easy to use and not complicated. Also most people dont have a problem with using some FAT partition (I have my HDD split in 3 parts for that and everythings fine).

 

[PsyBlade]

storing the list in a file would defeat the purpose.

not if this file is defragmented and you pass the sector number

it would be much shorter and thus not as prone to fragmentation (it would probably not even exeed one sector let alone one cluster)
simply deleting and recreating in case of fragmentation would be fast too if it's actually needed
and it could be read by the loader before writing to avoid unneccessary writes (good for flash)

or it would not even need to be an actual file in the filesystem
simply using some free sectors would be enough

edit: accordind to a quick calculation you could store at least 56 fragments per 512B sector
(damn mistyped numbers into calc & suck at math)
per fragment: 24 bit GCoffset + 48 bit LBA sector = 72 bit = 9 byte
makes 56 fragments with some bytes left for metadata like list lengh

 

[g4jek8j54]

I just wanted to say thanks to tueidj for this program! I finally got around to trying it on one game (NCAA Basketball 2K3, which is a rare GameCube game), and it seems to load it without any problems (DIOS-MIOS wouldn't load it correctly). I am just curious about some things...

1. Would it be possible to allow support for extracted games, like DIOS-MIOS has? This would probably help save some space on USB drives.

2. Would it be possible to add support for a USB controller in the empty USB port in future releases? I was thinking that this could be a nice solution for people who have Wiis that don't support GameCube games, since there are some GameCube to USB adapters out there.

However, again, great job, and thanks for sharing it with everyone!

 

[SifJar]

I just wanted to say thanks to tueidj for this program! I finally got around to trying it on one game (NCAA Basketball 2K3, which is a rare GameCube game), and it seems to load it without any problems (DIOS-MIOS wouldn't load it correctly). I am just curious about some things...

1. Would it be possible to allow support for extracted games, like DIOS-MIOS has? This would probably help save some space on USB drives.

2. Would it be possible to add support for a USB controller in the empty USB port in future releases? I was thinking that this could be a nice solution for people who have Wiis that don't support GameCube games, since there are some GameCube to USB adapters out there.

However, again, great job, and thanks for sharing it with everyone!

For 2., tueidj plans to add support for Wii remotes and classic controllers, which will allow people with the newer, non-GC supporting Wiis to play GC games. USB controller support would be extra work. That's not to say he won't add it (at one point, he mentioned support for xbox 360 controllers over USB, although that may have been partly a joke; although he did say he had most of the code written for some other purpose IIRC), but I'd say the classic controller and wii remote support should be enough for a lot of people.

No idea about 1, I don't imagine he will bother to add support for other formats of games though.

 

[PatrickD85]

@tueidj I know you haven't asked for it in any way but you have made my wii (and gamecube) experience quite a bit nicer with the release of devolution and unlike all the bitching which is going on about the AP... I first of offcourse want to thank you, but besides that I would also like to donate to show my appreciation. (I also donated tp a bunch of other projects (wii64 to name one) for their great work). If you want this offcourse is up to you ... but feel free to let me know if you have for instance a paypal account I can make a donation to.

 

[OriginalHamster]

^Yeah, all this bitching about AP measures is getting boring, people should be thankful for having this great app.

 

[Wiisel]

awesome stuff tueidj, its looking like I can finally get this big pink box off my wii

 

[Ace Overclocked]

Wrong thread sorry

 

[chop]

[Post no longer required, reply to deleted post]

 

[Anon10W1z]

Happens to me too...try using chkdsk /f Drveletter:

That didn't work for me when my SD card got corrupted, though.

okay, hope this cannot happen to someone's hdd....

hope all you want. It happened to me, and aparently to Anon

ok, thanks for the heads up.
Removing devolution, as this is unacceptable.

Wow I'm impressed @[member='tueidj']! Even though this is two months late, it's still impressive.

Sorry, I can't test it because I have no GC games.

*facepalm* I meant that it happened to my SD card because of a DIFFERENT APP, not Devo.

 

[the_randomizer]

So, Devolution DOESN'T adversely affect hard drives?

 

[FireGrey]

This is some great work tueidj
Just too bad that I don't have any GC games to try out.
I won't go any further than that cause of all the people bitching about the AP.
It's your work so you can do what you like with it.