WiiFlow 3.1 (Mod) Installation and Setup

WiiFlow 3.1 (Mod) Installation and Setup

** This guide and more can also be found on WiiFloWiki 4**

This guide is an attempt to explain how to install WiiFlow 3.1 (mod) on your Wii. It will not go into detail about using the Homebrew channel, wad managers, and partitioning your USB HDD. Here's some links that might help you with them.

HBC - https://sites.google...omebrew-channel
Wad Manager - https://sites.google...use/wad-manager

Just to clarify - this is only for the WiiFlow currently coded by Fix94, Overjoy, and team which I'm a part of.

WiiFlow Basic Installation and Setup:

 

Maxternal

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Hi guys. I'm asking here because I searched a lot without success.

It is possible to create a forwarder dol what will call Wiiflow with specific parameters? What I want is to create forwarder channel that will launch wiiflow-mod on a specific screen. I want to make a channel that opens willflow directly on snes channel. Then I want another channel that will open wiiflow on genesis files only, etc.

Is this possible? Anyone can point me how can I achieve this?

Thanks you so much!
That might be a nice parameter option to add but it's presently not possible, no.
What you could do is extract the DOL from the hidden channel WAD in the plugins pack and use that in a forwarder. At least when coming from that it always shows the LAST set of plugin games you were looking at but you can't specifically select which ones.

If you REALLY feel like doing some programming, you could make write a little app that would change some setting in one of the INI files so that it thinks the last set of emulators you were looking at was the one you wanted but I think that's more work than you're looking to do.
 

mmoreira

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That might be a nice parameter option to add but it's presently not possible, no.

Thanks for the info! Let's hope this can be added in the future! I would love to make custom channels so my daughter can play these old classics as easily and nice as she can play WII games :)


If you REALLY feel like doing some programming, you could make write a little app that would change some setting in one of the INI files so that it thinks the last set of emulators you were looking at was the one you wanted but I think that's more work than you're looking to do.

Well, I can program in C#, but I never learned C++, so, I don't know how to change the code. Maybe someday I finally try to learn C++ but the truth is that I'm felling I'm getting too old to learn that beast. :/

Again, thank you for the attention!
 

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Thanks for the info! Let's hope this can be added in the future! I would love to make custom channels so my daughter can play these old classics as easily and nice as she can play WII games :)
Other options (although not quite as nice) you can set up the source menu to show up automatically right when you enter WiiFlow. It would still be three clicks instead of two but it would still be WiiFlow.
- Click #1: enter WiiFlow
- Click #2: choose between Wii, GameCube, SNES, NES, GameBoy, Genesis, NAND Channels, etc.
- Click #3: choose which game to play
You could also use a forwarder channel that would go straight to the emulator itself. At least for SNES, NES, and GameBoy there's versions of the emulators that show the covers (not floating 3D covers like WiiFlow but it's still better than a list of titles) You can get them here. http://gbatemp.net/t...s9xgx-cover-co/

EDIT : That source menu on startup option I think is in the wiiflow.ini file (in the /apps/wiiflow/ folder) under the [GENERAL] section
 

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Awesome Guide Fledge!! very thorough and easy to follow. Would you have any objections to me porting this over to DU? Helping members get this setup via PM can be frustrating as I am sure mastershoes is also aware of lol. (I bugged him for days getting plugins setup properly)

Full credit will be given of course as well as a link to the source. I always ask before posting someone's work. Thank you in advance either way, and thank you to both yourself and mastershoes for taking the time to work this up, as well as all you guys have done on the entire project.
 

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Are there plugins for Hugo and Atari 2600 emus? Been looking through the forums and see nothing
There are no plugins yet. I think there are just normal emulators. There's a lot of emu's that someone just needs to break down and convert them into plugins but the only one I know of that the original emu devs have done that for is for SegaSaturn. [member='mastershoes'] made covers for a lot of consoles in anticipation of there eventually being a plugin for that but SO FAR there hasn't been one.
 

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Awesome Guide Fledge!! very thorough and easy to follow. Would you have any objections to me porting this over to DU? Helping members get this setup via PM can be frustrating as I am sure mastershoes is also aware of lol. (I bugged him for days getting plugins setup properly)

Full credit will be given of course as well as a link to the source. I always ask before posting someone's work. Thank you in advance either way, and thank you to both yourself and mastershoes for taking the time to work this up, as well as all you guys have done on the entire project.
Thanks and yes you can port it over. I've heard of dark umbra but don't know much about it. I recognize some of it's donators on the homepage so maybe i will check it out.
 
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mmoreira

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Other options (although not quite as nice) you can set up the source menu to show up automatically right when you enter WiiFlow. It would still be three clicks instead of two but it would still be WiiFlow.
- Click #1: enter WiiFlow
- Click #2: choose between Wii, GameCube, SNES, NES, GameBoy, Genesis, NAND Channels, etc.
- Click #3: choose which game to play
You could also use a forwarder channel that would go straight to the emulator itself. At least for SNES, NES, and GameBoy there's versions of the emulators that show the covers (not floating 3D covers like WiiFlow but it's still better than a list of titles) You can get them here. http://gbatemp.net/t...s9xgx-cover-co/

EDIT : That source menu on startup option I think is in the wiiflow.ini file (in the /apps/wiiflow/ folder) under the [GENERAL] section

Hi, thanks for the tips!

I had another idea that almost did what I want. What I did was create separate folders, each one contained a copy of wiiflow and your own configuration file. On each file I only enable one plug-in and disabled the homebrew and nand sections. Then I created a customized forward .dol using CustomizeMii to point to these specific wiiflow folders and injected this dols on channels for each emulator.

There is only one thing left now, that is: Is there anyway to disable the game section too or at least configure wiiflow to always start on plugins section? If this can be done then I finally will have my custom channels that starts wiiflow directly on a specific emulator and will be very easy for my daughter to play with it. :)

Thanks again for all the help and tips.
 

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Awesome Guide Fledge!! very thorough and easy to follow. Would you have any objections to me porting this over to DU? Helping members get this setup via PM can be frustrating as I am sure mastershoes is also aware of lol. (I bugged him for days getting plugins setup properly)

Full credit will be given of course as well as a link to the source. I always ask before posting someone's work. Thank you in advance either way, and thank you to both yourself and mastershoes for taking the time to work this up, as well as all you guys have done on the entire project.
Thanks and yes you can port it over. I've heard of dark umbra but don't know much about it. I recognize some of it's donators on the homepage so maybe i will check it out.
Thanks again. Come check us out anytime. I'm sure you'll enjoy the community and recognize quite a few members :)
 

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Hi, thanks for the tips!

I had another idea that almost did what I want. What I did was create separate folders, each one contained a copy of wiiflow and your own configuration file. On each file I only enable one plug-in and disabled the homebrew and nand sections. Then I created a customized forward .dol using CustomizeMii to point to these specific wiiflow folders and injected this dols on channels for each emulator.

There is only one thing left now, that is: Is there anyway to disable the game section too or at least configure wiiflow to always start on plugins section? If this can be done then I finally will have my custom channels that starts wiiflow directly on a specific emulator and will be very easy for my daughter to play with it. :)

Thanks again for all the help and tips.
I don't have much experience with creating forwarders or with CustomizeMii but when you return to WiiFlow from the hidden channel
(which you can get as part of the plugin pack here http://code.google.com/p/open-wiiflow-mod/downloads/detail?name=WiiFlow_Plugins_Pack_v4_Update.7z&can=2&q=)
it always shows the plugins first. Maybe if you extract the DOL from that and use it in your forwarders (assuming you could still change the target folder name) you could get it to work.
 
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fledge68

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Hi, thanks for the tips!

I had another idea that almost did what I want. What I did was create separate folders, each one contained a copy of wiiflow and your own configuration file. On each file I only enable one plug-in and disabled the homebrew and nand sections. Then I created a customized forward .dol using CustomizeMii to point to these specific wiiflow folders and injected this dols on channels for each emulator.

There is only one thing left now, that is: Is there anyway to disable the game section too or at least configure wiiflow to always start on plugins section? If this can be done then I finally will have my custom channels that starts wiiflow directly on a specific emulator and will be very easy for my daughter to play with it. :)

Thanks again for all the help and tips.
I don't have much experience with creating forwarders or with CustomizeMii but when you return to WiiFlow from the hidden channel
(which you can get as part of the plugin pack here http://code.google.c...ate.7z&can=2&q=)
it always shows the plugins first. Maybe if you extract the DOL from that and use it in your forwarders (assuming you could still change the target folder name) you could get it to work.
Good answer .... yes the hidden wiiflow channel starts wiiflow in plugin mode.

off topic .... I gotta know where you get all your crazy animated gifs for you profile pics.
 

Maxternal

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off topic .... I gotta know where you get all your crazy animated gifs for you profile pics.
http://forum.romulation.net/index.php?topic=2804.0
I think there's some similar threads here on this forum but I haven't nearly read through to the end of any of them.
http://gbatemp.net/topic/104156-post-here-funny-pictures/
http://gbatemp.net/topic/332721-respond-with-gifs/
If I find one I like and it's too big to fit I google it to see if there's a smaller version of it and I save it for when I feel like a change (which I'm sure you've noticed happens a lot.)
 

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I don't have much experience with creating forwarders or with CustomizeMii but when you return to WiiFlow from the hidden channel
(which you can get as part of the plugin pack here http://code.google.c...ate.7z&can=2&q=)
it always shows the plugins first. Maybe if you extract the DOL from that and use it in your forwarders (assuming you could still change the target folder name) you could get it to work.

Hi Maxternal! Thanks for the tips. I managed to get what I want done. =)

What I did was:

1) I looked into hidden channel source code and realized that it calls the wiiflow executable with a EMULATOR_MAGIC argument, that causes the wiiflow to starts in the plugins window.

2) I looked into the wiiflow source itself and found a function to copy files, it is in the fileOps.c.

3) I downloaded the the Configurable USB Loader Forwarder source code, from this thread.

4) I modified the forwarder_no_splash_v12_no_args to copy a special ini file to wiiflow.ini in the same folder the boot.dol is and then it executes wiiflow passing the EMULATOR_MAGIC argument.

5) I inserted these DOLs into channels and it's done. Now my daughter can use the WII the way I wanted she use. :) She now has one channel that starts wiiflow only with genesis games, other only with cartoons that will play on mplayerce, etc.

I think this solution was nice because when you exit the game or movie the hidden channel still works as expected and restarts wiiflow on the last item. But there is one problem: You cannot make changes to the wiiflow from the interface because these changes are saved to the wiiflow.ini and this file is overwritten every time you launch the forwarder channel. Well, to me this is not a real problem, if I made some change into the wiiflow.ini, I just rename it to the default.ini and the next time I launch a channel the changes will be there.

I was reading all I wrote above and I think my explanation it's a bit confusing (sorry, my English is very limited). So, I will try to explain how it works.

1) I created several custom forwarders. Each one copys a template ini file to a wiiflow.ini file and then it calls the wiiflow executable passing the EMULATOR_MAGIC argument. I created several custom forwarders:
A snesgx forwarder will copy a file named snesgx.ini to wiiflow.ini, then launches wiiflow.
A mplaycer forwarder will copy a file named mplaycer.ini to wiiflow.ini, then launches wiiflow.
The wiiflow forwarder will copy a file named default.ini to wiiflow.ini, then launches wiiflow.
...and so on. This is nice because I can have one configuration for each forwarder, changing the themes, nand configuration, etc. But again, when I change the settings using wiiflow I need to remember to copy this altered wiiflow.ini to this template file, using sdexplorer.

2) I created a channel for each of these forwarders. In fact, I modified the oficial wiiflow channel and some channels by mastershoes to use IOS249 (It was necessary to use a IOS with file write support, and I installed d2x v8 base 57 on this slot) and my DOLs.


And that's it!


PS: If anyone is interested on this DOLs, source code or even the forwarder channels, let me know and I will find a way to put it for public download. Just don't pay to much attention to the source code, because my knowledge of C++ is near to nothing and all I did was 98% copy and paste from existing wiiflow code, so I my solution may not be the best one, but it worked for me.
 
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Hey guys, I'm having a reoccurring problem with the VBAGX plugin. If I select the GBA icon under the source menu, I don't see any of my games, but if I select the VBAGX plugin through the settings menu, I can see and play my games. Despite this, all of the other plugins work as the should. Here is what my VBAGX .ini file looks like.

Code:
[PLUGIN]
magic=56424158
coverColor=fcff00
coverFolder=vbagx
fileTypes=.agb|.gba|.bin|.elf|.mb|.dmg|.gb|.gbc|.cgb|.sgb|.zip|.7z
romDir=vbagx/roms
dolFile=vbagx-mod12.dol
bannerSound=gba.ogg
displayname=VbaGX
ReturnLoader=yes
consoleCoverID=nintendo

I do have the roms in the correct folder, the file types are included, and the roms do play through the modded version of the emulator, so is there anything here that I may need to adjust?
 

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Hey guys, I'm having a reoccurring problem with the VBAGX plugin. If I select the GBA icon under the source menu, I don't see any of my games, but if I select the VBAGX plugin through the settings menu, I can see and play my games. Despite this, all of the other plugins work as the should. Here is what my VBAGX .ini file looks like.

Code:
[PLUGIN]
magic=56424158
coverColor=fcff00
coverFolder=vbagx
fileTypes=.agb|.gba|.bin|.elf|.mb|.dmg|.gb|.gbc|.cgb|.sgb|.zip|.7z
romDir=vbagx/roms
dolFile=vbagx-mod12.dol
bannerSound=gba.ogg
displayname=VbaGX
ReturnLoader=yes
consoleCoverID=nintendo
I do have the roms in the correct folder, the file types are included, and the roms do play through the modded version of the emulator, so is there anything here that I may need to adjust?
I'm guessing the problem is most likely to do with your source_menu.ini file (in the /wiiflow/source_menu folder) since the plugin settings DO work. I'd make sure the magic numbers are the same but you can feel free to post it, too, so we can have a look at it if that doesn't fix things.
 

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I have SNES9X GX, FCEUltra GX and VBA GX emulators on my SD card and am trying to run them on Wiiflow. The problem is that the whole Emuflow thing (being able to run the above emulators from Wiiflow) is kind of too overwhelming to me.




I've been following this guide and it says I should download the latest svn plugin pack for Wiiflow, but I don't see anything on the download page that can be considered as such (there are no .ini files to be altered, as the guide tells me to do). What is the specific name of the Wiiflow mod file?




Also, how exactly do I install that Wiiflow mod? Can I directly install the mod to allow emuflow or should I first install the "clean" version of Wiiflow and then add the plugins?




Sorry for the noobness level...
 

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I have SNES9X GX, FCEUltra GX and VBA GX emulators on my SD card and am trying to run them on Wiiflow. The problem is that the whole Emuflow thing (being able to run the above emulators from Wiiflow) is kind of too overwhelming to me.

I've been following this guide and it says I should download the latest svn plugin pack for Wiiflow, but I don't see anything on the download page that can be considered as such (there are no .ini files to be altered, as the guide tells me to do). What is the specific name of the Wiiflow mod file?

Also, how exactly do I install that Wiiflow mod? Can I directly install the mod to allow emuflow or should I first install the "clean" version of Wiiflow and then add the plugins?
Actually, the Wiiflow-mod branch is now just used as place to work no beta work in progress stuff for the main WiiFlow branch. New downloads can now be found on the download page for the main SVN here :
http://code.google.com/p/wiiflow/downloads/list
WiiFlow will pick up on the plugins as soon as they're there so you can do it either way. You can put the plugins in while your working on your clean install or you can put them there after you've already been using it, either way.
 
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I just followed the guide, but I still have some problems. Just to be clear, I am running Wiiflow Mod 3.1 -r348, IOS249 base 56 v8.

Basically, what I did was download the Plugin pack and extract it to SD:\wiiflow\plugins. Then I installed the WiiFlow loader hidden channel wad using Wad Manager 1.7 (not sure what it does, but did it anyway). After that, I downloaded the advanced source menu pack and extracted it to SD:\wiiflow.

The problems are:

1) I can't get the source menu to come up. In order to see the emulator games, I have to click on the system menu icon; them I'm taken to the system menu "coverflow"; the same icon I clicked previously now shows an NES controller. When I click it I'm finally taken to the emulator games. Isn't there an easier way to display the ROMs?

2) Even when I get to see the ROMs, they are all displayed together rather than sorted by console;

3) The game covers are not displayed. What is the correct file path to put the cover files?

I am guessing that being able to successfully run the source menu will solve all of these problems.

Also, do I have to edit any of the .ini files? I know next to nothing about codes and programming, so I was hoping I wouldn't have to mess with the "magic numbers" and whatnot.
 

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1) I can't get the source menu to come up. In order to see the emulator games, I have to click on the system menu icon; them I'm taken to the system menu "coverflow"; the same icon I clicked previously now shows an NES controller. When I click it I'm finally taken to the emulator games. Isn't there an easier way to display the ROMs?
I would recommend updating to the version 4.0.2 on the main WiiFlow page
http://code.google.com/p/wiiflow/downloads/list
which is the same as WiiFlow-mod r735 IIRC so it's a whole lot newer than what you're using.
The way to get to the source menu in that older version was a little more complicated (not really hard but easier in the newer versions). In the newer versions you just press the button and it'll take you right to it.
2) Even when I get to see the ROMs, they are all displayed together rather than sorted by console;
When you press a button in the source menu it should filter out just the ROMs for that plugin.
From that point on, until you press another button in the source menu, every time you go to the NES controller icon it will only show the ROMs from the last time you set one.
OR
when you're in the plugins coverflow you can go to the settings and there's a plugins settings part. In there you can select which plugins to show and which ones not to show.
3) The game covers are not displayed. What is the correct file path to put the cover files?
There are two main points here :
1 Where
In the INI file for the plugin there will be a line that says
coverFolder=blahblah
so in your case, having stuff on the SD card, the full covers (front and back) are in a folder called
SD:/wiiflow/boxcovers/blahblah
and the front covers go in a folder called
SD:/wiiflow/covers/blahblah
so the "blahblah" is what changes from plugin to plugin
2 Names
The names of the cover file have to have the same name as the ROM file and this is INCLUDING the extension so
if the ROM file is named
mario.nes
then the PNG file for the cover should be named
mario.nes.png
Also, do I have to edit any of the .ini files? I know next to nothing about codes and programming, so I was hoping I wouldn't have to mess with the "magic numbers" and whatnot.
When you finally get to see the source menu you can see if the buttons actually work (check ALL of them because the people who make up the source menu packs sometimes add extra buttons)
If any buttons don't work that you DO have a plugin for, you will need to open up SD:/wiiflow/source_menu/source_menu.ini and under each [section] for each button that's for a certain plugin it will have it's magic number. the ones that don't work is probably because it's wrong so you need to change the one in source_menu.ini for that button to be the same as the one in the INI for the specific plugin.

There's plenty of little tweaks you can do in the INI's but that's the basics just in case you need it.
 
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