Hacking Configurable USB Loader

[DaFees]

Hmm, I like the potential that NAND emulation for this loader brings about. I normally boot into my neek2o setup and run WiiWare/n64 VC that way but if I could some how do it through CFG that'd be great.

I have an unrelated question though and this may not even be the right place to ask, BUT how do I have two different copies of the same game that are each bootable on their own but both use the same save file. For example, the game Fortune Street. Somebody made a custom board editor for that game and for me I use Wiiscrubber to inject custom boards into the original iso file (replacing already existing boards) for use. So what I want to have is the original game unaltered that I can play and then an altered version with custom boards I can play, both sharing the same save file. Is there some way I can do this?

 

[R2-D2199]

mod r46b4
==========
-fixed nand emu for d2x cIOS

http://www.mediafire.com/?1aybntu2soadzz2

 

[R2-D2199]

mod r46b5
==========
-added dump savegame function (in game settings)

http://www.mediafire.com/?b03dc6txhc3vbdn

 

[nakata6790]

Very nice, nand savegames!

I have a couple of questions:
- some games are hidden by cfg, it shows 7 less games (Wii and GC) than i have installed, i manually edited the .cfg file to hidden games=0 and by the configurator, yet they still don't show up in cfg (but they do in gx). Any suggestions?
- Does the recent development means that emunand channels will be loadable through cfg?

Thanks

 

[R2-D2199]

mod r46b6
==========
-improved and fixed savegame dumping

http://www.mediafire.com/?y3w83fi8y8gwhu4

- some games are hidden by cfg, it shows 7 less games (Wii and GC) than i have installed, i manually edited the .cfg file to hidden games=0 and by the configurator, yet they still don't show up in cfg (but they do in gx). Any suggestions?
- Does the recent development means that emunand channels will be loadable through cfg?

Which games exactly are hidden?
Can you post the debug.log file? (system->debug->save log)
Yes, I'm working on emunand channel support.

 

[nakata6790]

Which games exactly are hidden?
Can you post the debug.log file? (system->debug->save log)
Yes, I'm working on .

I have 7+1 missing total (246 instead of 254), i only remember the first and second Prince of Persia for Gamecube (codes GPTP41 & G2OE41). The only game hidden by me is Smuggler's Run cause it doesn't work on DM (code GSRE7S), i dont know why the other 7 don't show up

Of course:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/1xyj59

Great news about emunand channel support

 

[matofesi]

I've tested the new r46b6 with nand emu - it seems to work most of the times, but I found one annoyance which might be because of my setup, but... Most games I tested works fine, but sometimes the save to emulated nand takes really long time - in Zelda Twilight Princess about one out of four saves takes well over 30 seconds - disk activity led goes on and stays on, bgm plays in a loop and after some time it finishes the save and the game continues.

In Rayman Origins the problem looks different - if I start it without nand emu it loads fine but with emu on it loads the game screen turns black, HDD activity led goes on and the wii drive light blinks about once a second for about a minute and then the game starts fine and works without further slowdowns.

The disk I use is USB 2.0 750 GB drive in Toshiba enclosure formated to FAT and it works fine without nand emu.

Any suggestions?

PS. What is the difference between full and partial nand emu?

 

[Maxternal]

I've tested the new r46b6 with nand emu - it seems to work most of the times, but I found one annoyance which might be because of my setup, but... Most games I tested works fine, but sometimes the save to emulated nand takes really long time - in Zelda Twilight Princess about one out of four saves takes well over 30 seconds - disk activity led goes on and stays on, bgm plays in a loop and after some time it finishes the save and the game continues.

In Rayman Origins the problem looks different - if I start it without nand emu it loads fine but with emu on it loads the game screen turns black, HDD activity led goes on and the wii drive light blinks about once a second for about a minute and then the game starts fine and works without further slowdowns.

The disk I use is USB 2.0 750 GB drive in Toshiba enclosure formated to FAT and it works fine without nand emu.

Any suggestions?

PS. What is the difference between full and partial nand emu

- The main point of NAND emulation is to save space but it's definitely slower than your real NAND. It would also depend on the size of the save file and how complicated that game's organization of information is, disk fragmentation, etc.
- unfortunately, cIOS NAND emulation isn't perfect. There are some games/VC/WiiWare it just does not work for so you'll still have to use your internal real NAND for some things.
- PARTIAL just emulates the game save for that game and uses real NAND for everything else. FULL emulation uses it for everything (the game's channel, save, system settings, wifi, wiimote sync, etc.) It's sometimes more compatible but you do have to have a full NAND in place where some people just have some game saves and the rest of it's missing.

 

[matofesi]

Any suggestions?

PS. What is the difference between full and partial nand emu

- The main point of NAND emulation is to save space but it's definitely slower than your real NAND. It would also depend on the size of the save file and how complicated that game's organization of information is, disk fragmentation, etc.

Yes. I do understand that saving to emulated nand would be somehow slower. My problem is it's inconsistent and sometimes it seems to be doing something excessive - I don't think Rayman Origins reads or writes something really large from nand even before displaying a wiimote warning screen.

- unfortunately, cIOS NAND emulation isn't perfect. There are some games/VC/WiiWare it just does not work for so you'll still have to use your internal real NAND for some things.

Yes. I know this too - I do use Mighty Channels from time to time and I did used Sneek for a moment so I'm not a total noob

- PARTIAL just emulates the game save for that game and uses real NAND for everything else. FULL emulation uses it for everything (the game's channel, save, system settings, wifi, wiimote sync, etc.) It's sometimes more compatible but you do have to have a full NAND in place where some people just have some game saves and the rest of it's missing.

Ok. So this answer one of my questions and it's as I suspected Thanks.

Still I would like to hear some other suggestions regarding the slowdowns.

 

[Maxternal]

Still I would like to hear some other suggestions regarding the slowdowns.

I'm no expert so the only real suggestion on this that I have would be to defrag the hard drive ... or use real NAND for that one ... sorry for not being much help there, maybe someone else could pitch in here.

 

[matofesi]

Still I would like to hear some other suggestions regarding the slowdowns.

I'm no expert so the only real suggestion on this that I have would be to defrag the hard drive ... or use real NAND for that one ... sorry for not being much help there, maybe someone else could pitch in here.

The disk is new - I just transferred all games from the old one so it's not really fragmented. And it's not just one game - it's just the most annoying in Rayman as it always stops there but in other games it stops when saving too so it might be something with my disk or maybe it's some strange problem with the cIOS/loader/whatever. I wolud just like to hear some definitive answer like "it's like that and you have to live with it" or "no - it's most probably your disk" or even better "do this and that and send this info so we could diagnose the problem"

 

[R2-D2199]

v70r46
=========
-added savegame emulation
-added savegame dumping
-added force devolution option
-added devolution, DIOS MIOS and emu nand info to info menu
-some fixes

(default nand emu path is "usb:/nand", to set a custom path edit the config.txt: "nand_emu_path=usb:/yourpath")

http://code.google.com/p/cfg-loader-mod/downloads/detail?name=cfg70MODr46.dol

 

[stsaerox]

Every version keep is crashing for me when using nand emulation and loading or downloading HQ cover. I think that it is an ios related problem. Which of them should I check? Is one of them ios 56? I think I should update or reinstall them...

 

[wildstoo]

The cover cache generation code seems to be very unstable when trying to cache a very large number of covers.

You can reproduce this by placing a very large number of games on the drive (300+), transferring covers to the drive and making sure the cache folder is empty. On loading CFG will attempt to populate the cache folder immediately.

At this point either it'll simply cause an exception and dump out, or the UI will freeze up completely (but the music will continue playing, and HD accesses continue in the background).

Occurs in every version I've tried. The only working solution I've found is to remove some games. I don't know what the specific number of covers it will happily cache is, or whether there's a memory limit I'm hitting.

Perhaps a menu option to rebuild the cover cache (without displaying the main UI) with some kind of progress indicator would be good?

 

[R2-D2199]

Can you try some older versions and the original v70?
And please post pictures of the code dumps.

 

[wildstoo]

When it dumps does it save the dump anywhere or do I have to literally take a photo of the screen?

 

[R2-D2199]

You have to literally take a photo of the screen.
I think I will add Wifi logging later.

 

[wildstoo]

Here's a photo of the screen when it dumped out.

It seems to only occur when you have a very large number of games on the drive. Pretty sure about this one.

Sometimes (not always) when downloading individual covers it freezes here. All you can do is restart the Wii.

After a restart, the cover you were downloading appears like this. Again, this only seems to happen when there is a very large number of games on the drive. It seems to occur more regularly if the game has an HQ cover (not sure: this might be due to lack of testing).

Btw, v70 (no mod) was totally stable, but that might be because the GC games don't appear in it (no DM support) which may have let it fall below whatever limit it's hitting.

Update: I cleared the cache folder again and started R46. It began loading covers. I clicked into an individual game with A, then back out to the flow with B and it instantly dumped like this.

 

[stsaerox]

Yes maybe it is because I have many GameCube Games now that weren't before which means more covers. It also started while I start using DML. Maybe it is connected somehow.

What about the Nand emulation problem? When I load with full or partitial, loader freezes when I press start (I'll sent picture in some hours I'm going to work now)

 

[R2-D2199]

Please try some older versions to determine what change is responsible for the cover problem.
http://code.google.com/p/cfg-loader-mod/downloads/list