Homebrew Homebrew app [DISCUSSION] Why I think, an updated version of Loadiine would be awesome (spoiler: circumvent 300 titles and 2 TB drive limit)

lordelan · Monday at 12:52 PM

Before anyone drops the usual "You want this and that (especially for free)? Then f*cking go around and do it yourself, nobody blocks you!" I gotta respond with the (also usual): "I can't. I'm not skilled enough which imho is not a reason not to try to inspire those who are to eventually do it or at least share my thoughts for what they are: A (hopeful) wish."

Ever since the "Brazilian exploit" became a thing (aka being able to install backups to an attached Wii U drive formatted by the Wii U itself with WUP Installer and now NUSspli) everyone soon lost interest in Loadiine except for a few that still use it for DS injects.

The reasons are obvious:

Loadiine is slow as f*ck (booting games takes ages)
space on hard drives is cheaper in a gigabyte per $ ratio than SD cards and offer more space
compatibility is 100% while Loadiine has many compatibility issues and thus forces users to check the compatibility wiki list
since games booted from Loadiine are booted inside a sandbox within the app Loadiine is injected into (e.g. Mii Maker) you can't play online (even not with Pretendo) and playtime won't be counted towards the activity app
lacks proper Aroma support
only works from SD cards in general except for that highly experimental and unstable Mocha FAT32 USB build that Dimok provided shortly before he left the scene (iirc)

However at the same time Loadiine still has many benefits in my opinion and if the downsides from above are being worked on, it has massive potential to become the greatest Wii U app of all time.
Benefits include:

theoretically no limits for the amount of games (goodbye, 300 titles limit) and space used (goodbye, Wii U only formatting USB drives to a max 2 TB partition) for storing games
uses the "Loadiine format" for games which is also being used for Cemu and comes with its own benefits:
- people who use both (Cemu and a real Wii U) would only have to keep games in one format without the need to pack/unpack back and forth
- easier modification of the files
  - when editing files or trying to swap the icon for example, there's no need to do it with ftpiiu, instead it can easily be done with a PC directly inside the games folders
- more control over which game update is being used
  - example: if you accidentally update Mario Kart 8 to the recently released 4.2 update and thus break compatibility with mods like Mario Kart 8 Ultimate you have a hard time downgrading the game again whereas you won't run into that issue if you just use the Loadiine format of the 4.1 update along with the base game (and DLC) in Loadiine
speaking of which: no annoying update nags when the Wii U "knows" there's a newer update for the game you're currently trying to launch
and last but not least...

It's beautiful!

I mean, look at it. Yes, we have Wii U themes now but especially with the upper image, it's basically WiiFlow/USBLGX but for the Wii U. At least it could potentially be, if Aroma and stable FAT32 USB support could be achieved and loading times could be drastically decreased.
And if the other issues (compatibility, online play and activity tracking play time) could be addressed too, it definitely could become the Wii U's "USB Loader" go to solution.
To be fair though, compatibility was (and in rare cases still is) an issue for the Wii's USB loaders as well so there's no way around debugging and bug fixing to increase compatibility there I guess.

Also if this would work out, we could store our games very comfortably on that same external FAT32 drive we're already using for the vWii anyway. This is especially interesting since there are ways to have bigger than the (usually "allowed" by FAT32) 2 TB.
Personally I'm rockin' a big 5 TB WD drive here for the vWii which houses all my GameCube and Wii games plus all RetroArch roms.
I know we can already have everything on one drive thanks to the amazing @SDIO but having everything even on that one same FAT32 partition would be even more comfortable, especially since everything can easily be accessed from a PC at any time.

I think that wish wouldn't have grown in the first place if the 300 titles and 2 TB limit wasn't (still) there but unfortunately it is.
And that being said, please do not use this thread to start another debate on why someone would even be limited by the 300 titles / 2 TB to begin with. There's enough reasons and they were given at enough places all over gbatemp already so please stick to the topic.

So, what do you think? Do you agree that such an update to Loadiine would be pretty nice or am I the only one who wants this?

If there are enough people to support that opinion we could consider starting a bounty or something.

tmnr1992 · Monday at 2:51 PM

It would be nice to have an updated Loadiine so it becomes something similar to USB Loader GX but for Wii U games, with lots of settings like video modes, cheats and all that stuff, but like you already mentioned, we now have @SDIO's USB partition and SDUSB plugins, which make the 300 title and 2tb limits irrelevant, since you can just put your Wii and Gamecube games on your first partition, and your Wii U, DS and N64 games on the second one.

lordelan · Monday at 2:57 PM

tmnr1992 said:
since you can just put your Wii and Gamecube games on your first partition, and your Wii U, DS and N64 games on the second one

While this is true...

tmnr1992 said:
which make the 300 title and 2tb limits irrelevant

...this has nothing to do with it. No matter where you install the Wii U games to, be it an SD card, a separate partition on your (vWii) drive or a dedicated drive, they will still appear on the Wii U homescreen (and thus counting towards the 300 title limit) and you are still limited to 2 TB for that Wii U partition, no matter where it is.
SDIO stated in a few posts that it might be theoretically possible that more than 2 TB can be used (although not officially shown in the Wii U menu) but that's still a finicky solution.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not an expert by any means and am just repeating things I (think I) read here and there.

tmnr1992 · Monday at 3:35 PM

lordelan said:
...this has nothing to do with it. No matter where you install the Wii U games to, be it an SD card, a separate partition on your (vWii) drive or a dedicated drive, they will still appear on the Wii U homescreen (and thus counting towards the 300 title limit) and you are still limited to 2 TB for that Wii U partition, no matter where it is.

What I meant is that you can have Wii U, Wii and Gamecube games all in a single HDD, but only Wii U games will count towards the title limit, since Wii and Gamecube games will be in a fat32 partition loaded via USB Loader or Wiiflow, so it would be difficult to reach the 300 title limit with only Wii U and DS games.

lordelan said:
SDIO stated in a few posts that it might be theoretically possible that more than 2 TB can be used (although not officially shown in the Wii U menu) but that's still a finicky solution.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not an expert by any means and am just repeating things I (think I) read here and there.

The latest version of USB partition states:
use 64bit addition for lba (support partitions to end beyond 2TB)

it's worded in a weird way so I'm not sure, but I'm guessing you can have several 2tb partitions? If so it would still be more than enough. I have more than 60 Wii U games and they're around 280gb.

lordelan · Monday at 3:48 PM

tmnr1992 said:
What I meant is that you can have Wii U, Wii and Gamecube games all in a single HDD, but only Wii U games will count towards the title limit, since Wii and Gamecube games will be in a fat32 partition loaded via USB Loader or Wiiflow, so it would be difficult to reach the 300 title limit with only Wii U and DS games.

I'm aware of that but I never brought Wii and GameCube games (at least when launched from within the vWii) to the table in this discussion. I'm only talking about things you install to the Wii U home menu (which are exactly the things you could have in Loadiine instead). However, injects that you install that way obviously do count towards that limit and with DS injects alone (DS VC injects are the best and probably even only practical way of playing DS games on a Wii U) it's pretty easy to reach that limit.
MikaDubbz made a good post about that here.

tmnr1992 said:
I have more than 60 Wii U games and they're around 280gb.

To be fair, the 2 TB are not as limiting as the 300 titles, I agree with you here.

tmnr1992 · Monday at 4:34 PM

lordelan said:
I'm aware of that but I never brought Wii and GameCube games (at least when launched from within the vWii) to the table in this discussion.

The reason I mentioned Wii and Gamecube is because if you only count Wii U and DS I think reaching the title limit would be much more difficult and something 97% of users will not have issues with, unless your goal is to have the entire Wii U and DS game library.

lordelan said:
I'm only talking about things you install to the Wii U home menu (which are exactly the things you could have in Loadiine instead). However, injects that you install that way obviously do count towards that limit and with DS injects alone (DS VC injects are the best and probably even only practical way of playing DS games on a Wii U) it's pretty easy to reach that limit.

I don't think there's even 100 good Wii U games, for DS on the other hand there are quite a few good ones, maybe around 120, so that's somewhere between 180 and 220 games worth checking out and there's still room for more, but that's just my opinion.

SDIO · Monday at 6:42 PM

To my understanding the performance problems with Loadiine come from the FAT32. And to my knowledge it wasn't even using the terrible slow Wii U built in FAT32 driver but already the fatfs driver. So if you don't want to spend a significant amount on developing a more performant FAT32 driver for the wii u with caching and everything it's either FAT32 or performance but not both. If you want good performance, you want it on wfs.

MBR+FAT32 has the same limitation as wfs, both can only address 2^32 lbas. What you did with the format utility was increasing the lba size from 512bytes to 4k. That would also allow the Wii U to use 16TB with wfs. Data Management will displax the free space wrong, but in the logs you see it is using the full size and NUSspli shows the space correctly. But I never bothered to fill it up.
But most HDDs don't support changing the sector size, so that won't work in general. With the USB Partition thing I offered adding 4k emulation to enable more than 2TB but no one wanted it. So I don't think that is a real problem.

For the thing with the updates: has someone ever tried to just use SDcaffine to use an older update?

For the 300 title limit, is that really a problem? It seems more like an inconvenience for piracy hoarders. And to get around that you would just need a replacement for the menu. Something like Launchiine. Maybe one could rip out most of the backend from Loadiine and just use it's gui as a menu replacement. But I doubt there is enough interest to spend time on that.

RedColoredStars · Monday at 7:23 PM

There's not even 300 titles for the Wii U worth having. Even if you include Gamecube and Wii games.

SDIO · Monday at 7:35 PM

tmnr1992 said:
The latest version of USB partition states:
use 64bit addition for lba (support partitions to end beyond 2TB)

it's worded in a weird way so I'm not sure, but I'm guessing you can have several 2tb partitions? If so it would still be more than enough. I have more than 60 Wii U games and they're around 280gb.

The MBR uses two 32bit fields to define a partitions boundies. The first is the start lba and the second the size in lba.
Assuming 512byte sectors, that means a partition needs to start before 2TB and can have a max size of 2TB. So the end can be at almost 4TB. But that means the absolute sector address in the range of the partition can be bigger than 2TB, so it doesn't fit in 32bit and would wrap around if only 32bit are used for the absolute address. The block level interfaces on the Wii U already use 64bit addresses, so they allow addressing more than 2TB. But the plugin only treated it as a 32bit number, when adding the partition offset, which would cause problems in the case mentioned, where the partition extends beyond the 2TB absolute device address. That just fixes that and treats it as a 64bit number when doing the addition.

lordelan · Monday at 11:38 PM

SDIO said:
To my understanding the performance problems with Loadiine come from the FAT32. And to my knowledge it wasn't even using the terrible slow Wii U built in FAT32 driver but already the fatfs driver. So if you don't want to spend a significant amount on developing a more performant FAT32 driver for the wii u with caching and everything it's either FAT32 or performance but not both. If you want good performance, you want it on wfs.

MBR+FAT32 has the same limitation as wfs, both can only address 2^32 lbas. What you did with the format utility was increasing the lba size from 512bytes to 4k. That would also allow the Wii U to use 16TB with wfs. Data Management will displax the free space wrong, but in the logs you see it is using the full size and NUSspli shows the space correctly. But I never bothered to fill it up.
But most HDDs don't support changing the sector size, so that won't work in general. With the USB Partition thing I offered adding 4k emulation to enable more than 2TB but no one wanted it. So I don't think that is a real problem.

For the thing with the updates: has someone ever tried to just use SDcaffine to use an older update?

For the 300 title limit, is that really a problem? It seems more like an inconvenience for piracy hoarders. And to get around that you would just need a replacement for the menu. Something like Launchiine. Maybe one could rip out most of the backend from Loadiine and just use it's gui as a menu replacement. But I doubt there is enough interest to spend time on that.

Love your insights. That clears many things up.
If we can only have faster speeds or FAT32, I guess I go with the latter. So "simply" a newly compiled/updated Loadiine build to work with Aroma would be nice to at least cover all VC injects up to (and including) DS. For those, the loading times are still okay-ish I guess but at the same time VC injects are the only possible way to reach that 300 titles limit.

A home screen replacement on the other hand would obviously be a nice option but that's a major task on its own, seeing how XorTroll struggles with uLaunch (a qLaunch replacement for the Nintendo Switch) for years now. He recently did a big rewrite but it still has a lot of bugs. The only good thing about the Wii U is that it's very unlikely that any new firmware update will be released (and even if, nobody would need it since the lifespan of game releases is over and we've got all we need in terms of the FW) so anything that anyone comes up with wouldn't have to be adjusted to work again after each FW update.

No matter how you look at it and which solution the community might come up with to "fix" it, the 300 titles limit sucks imho. If I were to just inject NES, SNES and GBA games, that should be plenty already. Plus all Wii U games, DS injects, some N64 and maybe even some Wii/GC for convenience. None of those (except DS) are "needed" since there's RetroArch and USB Loader GX but options are always a good thing and being able to have everything at one place (the Wii U home screen) is a good thing too. Just my humble opinion.

With the USB Partition thing I offered adding 4k emulation to enable more than 2TB but no one wanted it. So I don't think that is a real problem.

I think that not a big enough amount of people dove into this and I'm well aware that we're talking about a very niche amount of people anyway regarding this but just to be sure: Your USB Partition (still) supports that theoretically?

For the thing with the updates: has someone ever tried to just use SDcaffine to use an older update?

I somehow doubt that works but it's still a good idea. However that's only a plaster. And since SDcafiine replaces files on the fly it's like you copy the files of v4.2 over the files from v4.1 which might be fine as long as v4.2 didn't introduce any new files that won't be overwritten and cause issues.

The MBR uses two 32bit fields to define a partitions boundies. The first is the start lba and the second the size in lba.
Assuming 512byte sectors, that means a partition needs to start before 2TB and can have a max size of 2TB. So the end can be at almost 4TB. But that means the absolute sector address in the range of the partition can be bigger than 2TB, so it doesn't fit in 32bit and would wrap around if only 32bit are used for the absolute address. The block level interfaces on the Wii U already use 64bit addresses, so they allow addressing more than 2TB. But the plugin only treated it as a 32bit number, when adding the partition offset, which would cause problems in the case mentioned, where the partition extends beyond the 2TB absolute device address. That just fixes that and treats it as a 64bit number when doing the addition.

Did I get that right? Even if I found a drive with the right byte size and had tools to change the partition table to MBR, I could not put the Wii U WFS partition behind a 4 TB FAT32 partition? So it would have to start before the end of the first 2 TB?
Would this work then instead for anything vWii and Wii U related with your plugin?

Code:

|<-- 2 TB WFS partition -->|<-- 4 TB FAT32 partition -->|

Or does your plugin already circumvent these issues and this is fine?

Code:

|<-- 4 TB FAT32 partition -->|<-- 2 TB WFS partition -->|

ploggy · 2024-07-16T00:08:31+0100

Aroma Beta17 released with an update that massively helped with file access performance, it helped Retroarch Aroma ALOT, maybe worth compiling Loadiine with the latest Wut if possible just to see if that helps with those performance problems?

This change I believe?

Patch the Cafe OS FAT32 driver to improve readdir and stat performance. (Thanks: @GaryOderNichts)

pakiguy · 2024-07-16T00:37:50+0100

I think what will be better is something like WiiFlow for the WiiU that opens within the app and does WiiU, Wii, and GameCube with box art and more, and will fix the 300 box limit because it is inside the app. but the 2TB will still be a problem for the Wiiu. and that is what I think Loadiine needs to become.

MikaDubbz · 2024-07-16T19:42:15+0100

tmnr1992 said:
The reason I mentioned Wii and Gamecube is because if you only count Wii U and DS I think reaching the title limit would be much more difficult and something 97% of users will not have issues with, unless your goal is to have the entire Wii U and DS game library.

Spoiler alert: its not. Also, if you're like me, you still install your favorite choice GameCube and Wii games directly to the Wii U home menu, even though I do still also have separate Nintendont and USBLoader GX channels. Especially since you can gain GamePad control for many Wii games this way, which you'll never have if you only load Wii games from USBLoader GX.

SDIO · 2024-07-16T19:43:46+0100

lordelan said:
Did I get that right? Even if I found a drive with the right byte size and had tools to change the partition table to MBR, I could not put the Wii U WFS partition behind a 4 TB FAT32 partition?

No? That was assuming 512byte sektors. If you change to 4k sectors you have to multiply everything by 8

tmnr1992 · 2024-07-16T20:29:22+0100

MikaDubbz said:
Spoiler alert: its not. Also, if you're like me, you still install your favorite choice GameCube and wii games directly to the Wii U home menu, even though I do still also have separate Nintendont and USBLoader GX channels. Especially since you can gain GamePad control for many Wii games this way, which you'll never have if you only load Wii games from USBLoader GX.

I basically made a list of every Wii U game I'd ever want to play, and ended up with around 68 games. if I include my DS collection, which is around 120 games (assuming they all work on the Wii U), that's still under 200 games. For Wii and Gamecube I use USB Loader GX and just play them with a Wii classic controller pro, the gamepad feels too bulky so I only use it for games that can't be played without it. I probably won't be reaching the title limit unless I start installing shovelware.

But since my console started giving me the error 140-1600 the disc drive no longer works and neither does vWii, so while I find a reliable repair shop I might consider installing everything to the Wii U menu. I have like 140 Wii and 150 Gamecube games so I need to exclude a few ones, so I'd end up with maybe 100 for Wii, 110 for Gamecube, 50 for Wii U, and then use the remaining slots for DS and N64. In this scenario I'll reach the 300 title limit easily, but I think that's still a very reasonable amount of games for each console (except DS, but not every injected DS game works anyway, or at least that was the case last time I checked).

MikaDubbz · 2024-07-16T20:35:54+0100

tmnr1992 said:
I basically made a list of every Wii U game I'd ever want to play, and ended up with around 68 games. if I include my DS collection, which is around 120 games (assuming they all work on the Wii U), that's still under 200 games.

Spoiler alert: we're different people with different tastes in games (we all are), and it's silly to assume that your preferences in games is reflective of all or even most other gamers. i've been at that 300 title limit for years with just a vast collection of games that I love, and I still wish I had more room for many more great games I want. I'm happy that the 300 title limit doesn't really apply to you, that's great. It still applies to others all the same though.

CORE · 2024-07-16T21:02:45+0100

I have to concur an updated Loadiine would be great more stable less crashing.

I use it for Injects N64 and NDS all with custom Artwork Icons and Background images.

It is really useful for testing and developing without Wup Installs.

Helps with 300 Title limit as mentioned to make that AIO Nintendo that makes the Switch pale in comparison with native GameCube Wii and DS functionality.

I use a 1TB SSD Wii U,EShop

I use a 1TB SD Card - Wii,Wiiware,GC,N64,SNES,NES,NDS,GB,GBC,GBA,VB,G&W.

SD Card Fat32 64KB Cluster Size.

Currently you can use an SSD run as a spoofed SD Card with custom Mocha SD Card you basically duplicate the folders etc on SD Card on your USB SSD because you loose SD Card access temporarily running the Mocha SD Firmware.

Supposably runs better and faster but I have not noticed Super Mario 3D World still runs shitty.

https://github.com/dimok789/loadiine_gx2/issues/177

https://github.com/xavave

Scroll down page for info I have the build somewhere but original links gone if somebody else has them or can send the dev a pm please share.

Evilengine · 2024-07-16T21:46:42+0100

I support the idea, just instead of putting so much work into a revised loadiine, creating more tiramisu plugins, that improve the main system or a real CFW/alternative system (like launchiine https://github.com/wiiu-env/launchiine ) would be the best.

tmnr1992 · 2024-07-16T22:09:14+0100

MikaDubbz said:
Spoiler alert: we're different people with different tastes in games (we all are), and it's silly to assume that your preferences in games is reflective of all or even most other gamers. i've been at that 300 title limit for years with just a vast collection of games that I love, and I still wish I had more room for many more great games I want. I'm happy that the 300 title limit doesn't really apply to you, that's great. It still applies to others all the same though.

I forgot to mention that it's a list of games exclusive to the Wii U, which according to Wikipedia that's 40 games, (there's a few more if you count Switch ports, and I ended up adding a few third party ones as well). So you can literally have the entire Wii U exclusive game library and still have plenty of room left.

My point is that there are ways to get around the title limit if that's the only issue, since the only games that must be installed to the Wii U menu are Wii U and DS, for everything else there are alternatives. And before @SDIO released his USB plugin it was a bit more understandable to be annoyed by that limit, since we needed 2 HDDs connected at the same time if we wanted Wii and Gamecube games on top of the 300 Wii U titles. But as you mentioned, we all have different preferences, and it's cool to have the option to play Wii games directly from the Wii U menu with a gamepad and it would definitely be better to not have the 300 title limit, regardles of anyone reaching it or not.

But excluding any personal setup preferences, if the title limit is the only issue, and even if you like games of all genres, I seriously doubt anyone can name more than 300 Wii U and/or DS games that they've actually played for at least a couple hours and enjoyed to the point that they would consider playing or beating them again (but if there's anyone who can I'm genuinely curious to see your list of games).

Homebrew Homebrew app [DISCUSSION] Why I think, an updated version of Loadiine would be awesome (spoiler: circumvent 300 titles and 2 TB drive limit)

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