Hacking One game per flash drive, possible to bypass loader screen?

[sandwolf]

I have my wii set up with modmii's USB channel [it searches for various folders to run "(sd|usb)/apps/usbloader_gx" and such], bootmii, priiloader and the HBC.

To keep things organised and smaller than a stack of DVDs I'm interested in putting one backed up game per flash drive.
I don't really want to store more than one per drive as I want one-click game access, without adding a channel for each game.
I don't know enough to work out what I'd need to do, or if it is even possible, and being a long time lurker of GBAtemp I'm sure someone here must know.

Basically, having softmodded the wii and installed the USB loader channel, can I create boot.dol's or something, so that I can put in a flash drive, click the USB loader channel, and get booted automatically into the one game on that flash drive?
Obviously it would have to work for different games on different drives, I don't mind having to put work into each drive building custom unique dols or whatever - I just want the simple plug-and-play offered by discs while using it.

If this is explained somewhere, I apologise and would appreciate directions
Thank you to anyone with any thoughts

 

[pwsincd]

Your aware here that you store them all on a USB HD right ?

 

[sandwolf]

Haha I am yes, that's what it does at the moment. I wanted to skip the scrolling/moving/cursoring involved with choosing the game from the screen. I quite like the whole one at a time thing associated with DVDs, but they don't work without a modchip.

 

[Smuff]

Haha I am yes, that's what it does at the moment. I wanted to skip the scrolling/moving/cursoring involved with choosing the game from the screen. I quite like the whole one at a time thing associated with DVDs, but they don't work without a modchip.

They do if you install a backup loader ?

 

[spinal_cord]

To summarise, you want to turn your Wii into a sort of cartridge based system?

 

[The_Dragons_Mast]

Well I think in theory it should be possible to some degree.

1st you need to make a channel/app that autoboots a certain game on your flash drive. I only know how to do that using WiiGSC/Crap but there are probably other newer ways if you bother to look around.

2nd make the game on each drive named the same as the one you made the channel/app for. In theory that should lead to the booting of whatever game in the current flash drive since the loader only looks at the title as far as I know.

Give it a try & see if it works or no .

 

[pwsincd]

I knida get ya , but if you have a very few games then its very little scrolling etc, however if you have lotsa games then aint you gonna have loadsa flash drives to fumble through ?

I personally use wiiflow and use categories to fine tune the finding of games

 

[sandwolf]

To summarise, you want to turn your Wii into a sort of cartridge based system?

Hah, since you put it that way, yes. It's no different to DVDs really, just more compressed and more reusable.

Well I think in theory it should be possible to some degree.

1st you need to make a channel/app that autoboots a certain game on your flash drive. I only know how to do that using WiiGSC/Crap but there are probably other newer ways if you bother to look around.

2nd make the game on each drive named the same as the one you made the channel/app for. In theory that should lead to the booting of whatever game in the current flash drive since the loader only looks at the title as far as I know.

Give it a try & see if it works or no .

Yeah, I'll have to have a play. I did have a look at WiiGSC/Crap earlier but I didn't quite "get" it, I'll have to give it a proper try and actually install the channel it creates. If it uses the unique ID code rather than the title (RRRR00 or whatever) then it'll probably damage the save capability if I change that. Thanks, I'll post back if it does/doesn't work when I've had a go.

I knida get ya , but if you have a very few games then its very little scrolling etc, however if you have lotsa games then aint you gonna have loadsa flash drives to fumble through ?

That's a fair point, they are going to stack up - maybe this will be more a project of curiosity than actual use, I'm still interested in getting it to work. Haha true on the limited amount of work, it just seemed unnecessary given how customisable wii soft-hacks are.
I might look into the source of some of the open-source loaders.

 

[Maxternal]

Another option is I understand it's possible to extract the DOL out of a channel so you might be able to do that with the channel created by Crap and then put it on your flash drive in /apps/somename/boot.dol and then have a forwarder channel set to autoboot that particular path so when you switch out flash drives you would also be switching out the Crap autoboot DOL file that points to the right game that's on that flash drive.

Another option is you could edit the META.XML file for the USB loader and have it boot with the same argument that the Crap channel would pass to it for that game (for example, I know that just the 6-digit game ID for the game by itself is all that's needed for WiiFlow to autoboot. MIGHT BE THE SAME FOR OTHER LOADERS. DON'T KNOW.) and have it, along with the boot.dol file for the loader, on the USB drive. You'd have to craft a different meta.xml file for each flash drive but it could work. You might have to always open if from HBC, though, UNLESS there's a forwarder channel that pays attention to the meta.xml file, too.


Either of these ideas I don't quite know how to do myself. I know you can extract a DOL from a channel but I don't know what program does it and I know you can put arguments into the meta.xml file but I don't remember how to format it (I saw an example commented out in the NOT64 meta.xml file but don't remember how it went.)

hope to have at least helped a little bit.

 

[Clydefrosch]

do you really want to go through all that trouble and buy dozens of usb flashdrives, just to save yourself the trouble of scrolling through a few games on a screen? (and at the same time replace that with checking through a stack of usb flashdrives?)

 

[sandwolf]

Another option is I understand it's possible to extract the DOL out of a channel...

Another option is you could edit the META.XML file for the USB loader and have it boot with the same argument that the Crap channel would pass to it for that game...

Either of these ideas I don't quite know how to do myself...

hope to have at least helped a little bit.

That sounds promising, didn't realise you could extract wads
Also, I'll have a look into arguments, might even switch to WiiFlow if it can do that.

I've managed wad extraction using.. CustomizeMii.

I haven't got it working yet but I did want to thank you for the reply.

Currently trying to get my head around what files need to go where to try the crap method.

Edit:
Well loading the extracted crap dol from the hbc, starts loader gx straight into the game.
ModMii Classic has built me a dol that looks for apps/sandwolf/boot.dol
Just got to work out how to install that as a channel now, it works fine from hbc.

I like the idea of just editing the meta files, could you explain the WiiFlow method? I can't find any instructions for that anywhere.

 

[spinal_cord]

Home consoles shouldn't be using moving parts anymore to start with. With flash memory being much cheaper these days, I bet the cost of creating game cards would easily be covered by the savings of producing all of the dvd drives. Making the consoles cheaper to build, quieter and cheaper to run, the games wouldn't cost much more if anything to make, if you take into account the fact that they'd be mass producing whatever format memory card they'd use.

 

[Hielkenator]

If you really want something like this, check out UNeek.
Loads games like they come from Disc. And you can keep all your games on ONE hdd.
Remember you can easily wear out your USB connection socket on you Wii if you frequently connect and detach.
Same is true for the SD Card slot.

Besides this I really do NOT see any benefit in what you are trying to do.
Also usb sticks have a limited read/write lifecycle., they won't last forever, in fact a regular drive will last MUCH MUCH longer.
It seems like a lot of people don't know this at all. It the biggest culprit for the SSD HDD tech.
For this reason in about a few years SSD drives will be obsolete again and we will be using the Regular drives again with even bigger capacity and better technology.
SSD gets unrealiable after about 5000 writes. Before that it gets a lot slower.
Same is true for all cell based storage. ( flash etc )

 

[Maxternal]

I like the idea of just editing the meta files, could you explain the WiiFlow method? I can't find any instructions for that anywhere.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_Channel#Optional_meta.xml_XML_nodes


And I looked into this. This should work with GX and CFG as well as WiiFlow so no need to switch loaders. I think uLoader can do it, too, but you have to put a # symbol before the GameID.
(It will work with any loader that works with Crap channels but I don't know the arguments are "worded" exactly the same for all of them.)

Basically, you would just add this to the meta.XML file somewhere in the middle without being nested inside anything else other than the <app> tags.

<arguments>
<arg>GameID</arg>
</arguments>

replacing the "GameID" part with the actual 6-digit Game ID of the game you want to start. (you might still have to run it from HBC. I don't know if forwarder channels pay any attention to the meta.xml file).

 

[sandwolf]

Hey, sorry all for the delay in replying.
You've made some excellent points and given helpful advice, so thank you all
Maxternal especially since my last post for looking into the meta stuff.
I'll bear in mind the wear and tear on the ports.