Glitchy Japanese characters on installed WiiWare/VC wads

HNKMaster · Sep 23, 2024

After trying for years with WiiWare stuff on virtual NAND without much success, I decided to try installing them onto an SD card, which is working now. Since USB Loaded GX had options that allowed for japanese characters to render, I wanted to know if there's a way to do the same for installed channels, as for know those are glitched. This is a japanese only issue, obviously western releases are out of the question.

Vague Rant · Sep 23, 2024

I'm purely speculating here but I think you might be able to fix this using the Generic Wii Patcher tool. You would first need to extract your WAD file in order to obtain the main.dol (usually named 00000001.app in NAND titles IIRC?) and then decompress the main.dol since those are compressed in WiiWare titles. This is a pretty dumb way to get lzx (the compressor/decompressor), but personally I got it from the RiiConnect24 WiiWare Patcher.

So step by step, you would:

unpack the WAD (e.g. with ShowMiiWads)
copy the 00000001.app into the same directory as lzx
run lzx -d 00000001.app in the command prompt to decompress the file
rename the file to something ending in .dol to make the next step easier
open the file in Generic Wii Patcher (which expects a .dol extension)
click "Search" under "Console language detection"
switch to "Japanese" and click "Patch to new language"
save the patched main.dol and rename it back to 00000001.app
compress it again with lzx -evb 00000001.app
pack the WAD again, e.g. with ShowMiiWads
install WAD

Again, I'm kind of just speculating that this would work, I haven't tried this myself.

water_kooler · Sep 23, 2024

Is the a way to fix the virtual arcade wads for Solvalou and Starblade?
These wads were only released for the Japanese region.
The text in menus do not work.
I don't mind if the text is in Japanese, as long as it works.

HNKMaster · Sep 24, 2024

Vague Rant said:
I'm purely speculating here but I think you might be able to fix this using the Generic Wii Patcher tool. You would first need to extract your WAD file in order to obtain the main.dol (usually named 00000001.app in NAND titles IIRC?) and then decompress the main.dol since those are compressed in WiiWare titles. This is a pretty dumb way to get lzx (the compressor/decompressor), but personally I got it from the RiiConnect24 WiiWare Patcher.

So step by step, you would:

unpack the WAD (e.g. with ShowMiiWads)

copy the 00000001.app into the same directory as lzx

run lzx -d 00000001.app in the command prompt to decompress the file

rename the file to something ending in .dol to make the next step easier

open the file in Generic Wii Patcher (which expects a .dol extension)

click "Search" under "Console language detection"

switch to "Japanese" and click "Patch to new language"

save the patched main.dol and rename it back to 00000001.app

compress it again with lzx -evb 00000001.app

pack the WAD again, e.g. with ShowMiiWads

install WAD

Again, I'm kind of just speculating that this would work, I haven't tried this myself.

Couldn't extract the .dol file to do the rest, so I didn't get results.

Vague Rant · Sep 24, 2024

water_kooler said:
Is the a way to fix the virtual arcade wads for Solvalou and Starblade?
These wads were only released for the Japanese region.
The text in menus do not work.
I don't mind if the text is in Japanese, as long as it works.

The process I described might also work for those games. It's worth mentioning that somebody also made an English translation hack for the VC Arcade release of Starblade.

water_kooler · 2024-10-11T19:07:37+0100

Vague Rant said:
The process I described might also work for those games. It's worth mentioning that somebody also made an English translation hack for the VC Arcade release of Starblade.

Hello, I obtained the 00000001.app file using the ShowMiiWads program.
Is there a way to extract the dol file like you said? I found LZX in the Auto-WiiWare-Patcher.
Hopefully the file will extract, I can apply the changes, then recompress back into a wad.

Vague Rant · 2024-10-12T14:10:19+0100

@water_kooler It's not that the .dol needs to be extracted from the 00000001.app, rather it is the 00000001.app. If you decompress the .app file with lzx -d 00000001.app, it will replace the compressed file with an uncompressed version with the same file name. The only way you'd really know it worked is to check the file size of 00000001.app before and after decompression and see that it got bigger.

Once it's decompressed, you can literally just rename the file from 00000001.app to main.dol, because that's all it really is. Then you can do anything you want with that main.dol like running it through Generic Wii Patcher as I mentioned in the post above. Once you're done, you can compress it again by renaming it back to 00000001.app and running lzx -evb 00000001.app.

LZX is a command line app, so you need to use it from the command prompt. If you're not familiar with the command prompt, I find the easiest way to use it is to go to the folder where your lzx.exe and 00000001.app are stored then click inside the address bar (the thing that says like "> This PC > Local Disk (C:) > Games > Wii > LZX"; obviously your path is different to mine). In this box, type cmd and press Enter. That will open the command prompt already inside this folder, so then you can just copy-paste the commands I gave above.

water_kooler · 2024-10-12T15:33:49+0100

Vague Rant said:
LZX is a command line app, so you need to use it from the command prompt. If you're not familiar with the command prompt, I find the easiest way to use it is to go to the folder where your lzx.exe and 00000001.app are stored then click inside the address bar (the thing that says like "> This PC > Local Disk (C > Games > Wii > LZX"; obviously your path is different to mine). In this box, type cmd and press Enter. That will open the command prompt already inside this folder, so then you can just copy-paste the commands I gave above.

Thanks for the tips. I'm away from the computer, but I will leave an update once I have a chance to try this.

Glitchy Japanese characters on installed WiiWare/VC wads

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