Hey everyone,
it has been a while since my last post. I've been really busy in the past weeks but unfortunately not with wii u developement. I have a project for a customer and I need to meet a few deadlines. So there was absolutely no time left for me to also work on the wii u. Since the beginning of this year I worked only 2 or 3 hours on mocha in total. Actually i have been feeling bad for not spending as much time with my family as before that project and start to regret ever taking on it but thats another story...
So the reason I am writing this post is to let you know that I just pushed my wip source code to github in the hope that someone is interessted in it and can use some of it to maybe continue or even finish this up since I don't see me working on it in the next two or three weeks. I should have done this push a month ago as the source code wasnt moving since about a month anywhere, sorry. I will probably continue working on it at some point but it wont happen anytime soon. I didn't follow the wii u scene or any posts on gbatemp and it might be that this is not even needed anymore and in that case you guys can ignore it ;-). Otherwise...
I don't remember exactly where I stopped or how I used it but as far as I remember here is the summery of what works and what not:
What's working:
* USB FAT32 partition is mounted the same way as WFS if the "/usr" path is on it
* games do launch and save games do work (if copied manually to the /usr path)
* copying save games in settings to usb works
* copying whatever from usb works in settings
* USB FAT32 is primary FAT drive when mounted and replaces sdcard (homebrews and everything else is loaded from usb and not sd)
What's not working:
* copying games to USB (some titles worked, e.g. youtube)
* installing games to USB (wupinstaller fails with error code empty because files are 0 bytes)
* removing titles works only partially (quota remove is kinda buggy)
* symlinks don't work at all (only matter in install process)
To the reason why installing and copying games does not work:
Well it is not as much as it does not work completely. It does the process of the installation or the copy process successfully and it even takes as much time to do it as it would usually do but all the files that are 0 bytes if you look at it on a PC though the files and folders are all there. As far as I have figured it out and remember it correctly, the MCP module links the usb path to /vol/mcp_devmgr01 and copies over the files. This process seems to still have some issue. The ACP module uses an own direct mount and it seems to work fine for save game copy. I am thinking it is connected to the symlinks not working correct as I saw that function failing in the logs.
The biggest disappointment was when I first tried launching a game. I chose Super Mario 3D World as that was the perfect game to test the speed. I was very disappointed to see that it was freakishly slow....even slower than loadiine in my opinion. So the reason that loadiine is so slow with some games is not that the SD access is so slow but that the FAT32 driver implementation of Nintendo on the wii u is just crap. I mean I knew that it wasnt very good but I didn't expect that.... So this was one very big drop in motivation to actually finish this USB FAT32 access. It is not really good usable for games due to its speeds. Anyway, if you guys want you can try it out for yourself but don't use the current github version as your default one as it is probably buggy and even some old features might be broken now. It is work in progress.
Nevertheless FAT32 USB is a nice little feature and it is nice that you can make it work natively. If we would replace the Nintendo FAT32 driver complely this could probably be made usable for games but thats a shit load of work.
Well maybe someone wants to continue the work on my current attempt to work with the native driver for now and finish this. I will join on the work again when I got a bit more free time again.
Anyway if anyone got questions to anything in the code or maybe how the stuff works, you can pm me. I would understand it as the code is not clean at all, has many debug and testfunctions and isn't really selfexplanatory. I will answer all questions when I find the time (though it might take a few days or weeks).
