Hacking Nintendont

[uyjulian]

The Wii's internal SD slot is why SD reading is slow. I used a Class 10 Polaroid 64GB SDXC to run GameCube games through Nintendont and I get stuttering during Video cutscenes but I don't see those issues using a USB Card Reader. It's Nintendo's fault. Same with the underpowered USB ports on the Wii U.

As for UHS, the card I used above is a UHS-1 SDXC card too but the issue is not the card, it's the slow SD card slot that Nintendo used in the Wii and Wii U.

Huh, that's odd. I never get issues with my SD card, it works fine for me. I had an older SD card that caused Wii64 to stutter (Sandisk 8GB) but once I switched it to my new 64GB Sandisk it stutters less.

 

[TecXero]

Huh, that's odd. I never get issues with my SD card, it works fine for me. I had an older SD card that caused Wii64 to stutter (Sandisk 8GB) but once I switched it to my new 64GB Sandisk it stutters less.

It's fast enough to where you shouldn't have stuttering with NGC games, just slightly longer load times. With Wii games, however, it will be noticeably slow, especially noticeable with games that stream video from the disc while playing it for cutscenes.

 

[huma_dawii]

It's fast enough to where you shouldn't have stuttering with NGC games, just slightly longer load times. With Wii games, however, it will be noticeably slow, especially noticeable with games that stream video from the disc while playing it for cutscenes.

I dont understand why people says is slower... i use the SD card 256GB for Wii and GC games, and HAVENT noticed anything slower LOL xD

 

[ccfman2004]

I dont understand why people says is slower... i use the SD card 256GB for Wii and GC games, and HAVENT noticed anything slower LOL xD

I would get stuttering in certain games like Mario Kart Double Dash. The stuttering is most noticeable during the intro video. When I used a USB SD Card reader all stuttering issues I had were gone (except in games that did it on the real GameCube that is).

 

[huma_dawii]

I would get stuttering in certain games like Mario Kart Double Dash. The stuttering is most noticeable during the intro video. When I used a USB SD Card reader all stuttering issues I had were gone (except in games that did it on the real GameCube that is).

I will record that part for you in a video and i will show you that it doesnt happens to me.

 

[TecXero]

I dont understand why people says is slower... i use the SD card 256GB for Wii and GC games, and HAVENT noticed anything slower LOL xD

I noticed quite a bit of stuttering in cutscenes and longer load times with games like Rayman Origins using the Wii's SD reader. The SDXC card wasn't a cheap piece of crap, either. It was Class 10 and UHS-II. NGC games I haven't really noticed any issues.

 

[ccfman2004]

I will record that part for you in a video and i will show you that it doesnt happens to me.

Maybe the Wii U SD Slot is slower than the Wii's. Wouldn't surprise me. I would get stuttering every time on my Wii U with my Polaroid 64GB SDXC Class 10/UHS-I card. When I used the SAME SDXC card in a USB Card reader, the stuttering was gone.

 

[sonictopfan]

Maybe the Wii U SD Slot is slower than the Wii's. Wouldn't surprise me. I would get stuttering every time on my Wii U with my Polaroid 64GB SDXC Class 10/UHS-I card. When I used the SAME SDXC card in a USB Card reader, the stuttering was gone.

This could be true because on Wii it's quite fast actually, if formatted correctly I get saves and channels installed on it to load much faster than on real NAND and I'm using a 32GB one.

 

[FIX94]

I just got done porting over fatfs to the loader and I am really sad right now that it might've been for nothing, reading my usb games folder before took 3 seconds and now it takes a full 22 seconds, and 21.5 seconds of that are basically just for getting the internal game title so I really dont know what to do now...

 

[GerbilSoft]

I just got done porting over fatfs to the loader and I am really sad right now that it might've been for nothing, reading my usb games folder before took 3 seconds and now it takes a full 22 seconds, and 21.5 seconds of that are basically just for getting the internal game title so I really dont know what to do now...

If you send me your changes so far, I can take a look at it and see what's causing a bottleneck.

 

[FIX94]

If you send me your changes so far, I can take a look at it and see what's causing a bottleneck.

branched it to here:
https://github.com/FIX94/Nintendont/tree/fatfsloader
its all because of f_open in menu.c from what I can see, didnt help to pre-load the directories so I dont quite know what to do.

 

[ccfman2004]

branched it to here:
https://github.com/FIX94/Nintendont/tree/fatfsloader
its all because of f_open in menu.c from what I can see, didnt help to pre-load the directories so I dont quite know what to do.

Never give up, never surrender.

 

[zRukir]

A new day and a new realization that I should probably include some more information, too!

Game : Super Smash Bros. Melee (20XX) (v1.02) (Non-Disc)
Describe Issue : Nintendon't leads to a black screen after "Init card... Done!"
Region : NTSC
Wii/Wii U : Wii
Nintendont revision : Latest
Last known working revision (if any) : I don't know what version number the latest is lmao
Loader used (if any) with revision no. : None(?)
SD/USB Pen/USB HDD : SD
SD/USB Pen/USB HDD make, model, size, format & cluster size : Sandisk for Wii, FAT32, 2GB(1.98GB)
ISO 1:1/compressed : 1:1
McEmu/Real Mem card and size : Real Mem card, 4MB (512 blocks)
Native on/off : Off
Controller used if Native off : Normal Gamecube Controller
Composite/Component/HDMI: TV input is AV. What does that translate to...?
Anything else you want to explain: idk lmao

 

[GerbilSoft]

So I did some hax and submitted a pull request for my "menuhax-v2" branch. This improves the UI and memory consumption a bit.

I also started to work on some preliminary cleanups before merging in the FatFS loader changes: https://github.com/GerbilSoft/Nintendont/tree/FatFS-use-in-loader - among other things:

• Instead of two copies of FatFS, split it out into its own directory, fatfs/. This directory will have two Makefiles: one for ARM, one for PowerPC. (Currently only Makefile.arm is present, though I'll add Makefile.ppc in a few minutes.)
• Compile ARM code as Thumb. This reduces the code size by quite a bit. (The assembly code is still left as-is; I'm not sure how to properly convert that to Thumb. Basic testing shows nothing broke in Melee and SA2B, which is good.)
• Use drive numbers instead of function pointers in the kernel. This was done in FIX94's FatFS loader branch, so I did it in the kernel as well to make it easier to share everything. This doesn't seem to add much overhead.
• Improved dependency generation in the ARM code by generating dependencies while compiling instead of in a separate step.

I'll work on merging in the FatFS loader code tomorrow, and try to figure out why it was making the game list loading so slow.

EDIT: Just tested the fatfsloader branch, and the game list loads in around the same time as master for me, though I only have 59 games on my GCN partition...

 

[GreyWolf]

A new day and a new realization that I should probably include some more information, too!

Game : Super Smash Bros. Melee (20XX) (v1.02) (Non-Disc)
Describe Issue : Nintendon't leads to a black screen after "Init card... Done!"
Region : NTSC
Wii/Wii U : Wii
Nintendont revision : Latest
Last known working revision (if any) : I don't know what version number the latest is lmao
Loader used (if any) with revision no. : None(?)
SD/USB Pen/USB HDD : SD
SD/USB Pen/USB HDD make, model, size, format & cluster size : Sandisk for Wii, FAT32, 2GB(1.98GB)
ISO 1:1/compressed : 1:1
McEmu/Real Mem card and size : Real Mem card, 4MB (512 blocks)
Native on/off : Off
Controller used if Native off : Normal Gamecube Controller
Composite/Component/HDMI: TV input is AV. What does that translate to...?
Anything else you want to explain: idk lmao

The version number is at the top of the screen. The latest version is 3.398. The latest dol is always here.

Does the unpatched game work?

 

[Toni456]

Edit: Not an actual issue, managed to get it working.

 

[FIX94]

• Compile ARM code as Thumb. This reduces the code size by quite a bit. (The assembly code is still left as-is; I'm not sure how to properly convert that to Thumb. Basic testing shows nothing broke in Melee and SA2B, which is good.)

I intentionally set it to NOT be thumb, it was thumb originally. If you need space then I'd rather just give the kernel more room (I planned for 1MB total anyways).
anyways I just merged your pull request, I think these are pretty cool changes.

 

[GerbilSoft]

I intentionally set it to NOT be thumb, it was thumb originally. If you need space then I'd rather just give the kernel more room (I planned for 1MB total anyways).
anyways I just merged your pull request, I think these are pretty cool changes.

Is there a particular reason for not wanting Thumb? I'm not really too sure of the intracacies of Thumb vs. regular ARM code other than Thumb being smaller. I'll revert that, though I'm not too sure of what changes need to be made to increase the code size to 1MB other than the linker script. (I saw various other changes last time the code size was changed and I'm not sure how they go together.)

 

[FIX94]

Is there a particular reason for not wanting Thumb?

because of its nature thumb is missing quite a lot of instructions, especially on the older ARM version the wii and wiiu carry, so certain operations have to be worked around in some really weird ways in order to work, taking up quite a lot of extra ticks, a great example is everything regarding float, this ARM revision in wii and wiiu is missing a FPU. also jumping from arm to thumb and back always comes with some very weird extra code generated on the side which has to be executed every time and we need those jumps a ton on everything because of syscalls. I changed sizes not too long ago in this version, the files in question are kernel.ld and Patches.c.

 

[GerbilSoft]

All right then. I'll revert the Thumb change and increase the sizes when I get home later today.