Hacking Can I load backups over network?

paintispaint · Jan 23, 2019

I may or may not have an unused 6TB NAS, a Wii U and a dream of the ultimate home console (well, nintendo wise anyway).

I want to get a complete library of all wii u, wii, gamecube, and vc games and access them on a hacked Wii U. There are a lot of things that could shut this down, but the most important one I can think of is:

Can I even load a backup from a SMB network share?

paintispaint · Jan 23, 2019

also as an aside I have to give modern vintage gamer on youtube credit for giving me the idea, I had no idea the Wii U was so versatile.

EmulateLife · Jan 23, 2019

I've never heard of any smb loading for Wii U, don't think it exists.

Deleted User · Jan 23, 2019

There is none. Wii needed a rewritten CIOS. Some work was started but abandoned long ago. WiiU would require a new loader to be written to mount WUD images.

I did all kinds of things from having 2 HDD's (1 for WiiU, 1 for Wii/GC/emu), then eventually just moved down to putting Wii/GC on a larger SD and WiiU on an external HDD. Would be nice to load from network though! I do that with the PS3.

SCOTT0852 · Jan 23, 2019

Nope, and loadiine was already slow enough...

paintispaint · Jan 23, 2019

Righto, thanks for the info people. Shame it can't be streamlined over network I don't think it would have been much slower than an HDD (depending on if the Wii U has 5g wifi/usb3.0).

Extrems · Jan 23, 2019

In theory, you could use a SBC with USB OTG to run a Linux USB Mass Storage gadget with the disk image on a network share.

paintispaint · Jan 30, 2019

Extrems said:
In theory, you could use a SBC with USB OTG to run a Linux USB Mass Storage gadget with the disk image on a network share.

This gave me an idea, I've gotten my old nvidia shield out and using cifs manager and a paid app called USB SHARE I've mounted my network share to a directory into /mnt and have shared it over usb.

Now being honest I don't even own a Wii U right now but that can wait, I'm going to pull out my old Wii and see if it'll recognize the "drive" and can load .wbfs from it. wish me luck. If that works I'll probably move forward with grabbing a used Wii U

also as a test: got 12MB/s copying a file from the usb 2.0 interface on my tablet, not sure how that'd compare to the read times from the dvd drive onboard but hopefully if it does work it's not *too* slow.

Extrems · Jan 30, 2019

That won't do, it has to be a block device that the Wii U can format.

AmandaRose · Jan 30, 2019

The other big issue that nobody has cover yet is you can only install 300 WiiU games and apps to the WiiU. So your dream of having the complete set of WiiU games on the WiiU isn't even possible because of this issue.

Sonic Angel Knight · Jan 30, 2019

AmandaRose said:
The other big issue that nobody has cover yet is you can only install 300 WiiU games and apps to the WiiU. So your dream of having the complete set of WiiU games on the WiiU isn't even possible because of this issue.

PS3 custom firmware have something similar to a virtual emulated drive. If the wii u could do that with games (Especially disc ones) then you wouldn't have to install that many titles. The system would just think it's a disc inserted into the system and play it using the single disc channel.

AmandaRose · Jan 30, 2019

Sonic Angel Knight said:
PS3 custom firmware have something similar to a virtual emulated drive. If the wii u could do that with games (Especially disc ones) then you wouldn't have to install that many titles. The system would just think it's a disc inserted into the system and play it using the single disc channel.

Yep but wouldn't that be near impossible due to the BCA WiiU discs have? For the WiiU to think a disc is inserted it needs to read the BCA on the WiiU disc but when dumping a game from disc the BCA is not copied so would be missing.

The Real Jdbye · Jan 30, 2019

paintispaint said:
I may or may not have an unused 6TB NAS, a Wii U and a dream of the ultimate home console (well, nintendo wise anyway).

I want to get a complete library of all wii u, wii, gamecube, and vc games and access them on a hacked Wii U. There are a lot of things that could shut this down, but the most important one I can think of is:

Can I even load a backup from a SMB network share?

Maybe? There are wifi enabled SD cards and USB HDDs, some of which you could run your own code on and mount a remote file share.
I can say for sure that it won't work with the stock functionality. But it could potentially work with Loadiine from SD, or Mocha's beta (and slow, only partially working and abandoned - but still working if you are willing to jump through hoops to install games) FAT32 USB support.

paintispaint · Jan 31, 2019

Hey all thanks for the continued input and commentary.

I saw a Wii u for $80 on FB marketplace last night and impulse bought it, going to try and see what I can and cannot do this weekend, wish me luck!

As for helping with some of the known issues already:
Probably going to have to have a second non network drive setup for the WiiU games themselves, and just use the network share for Wii (and maybe GC if they can share a drive?) games. I'm sad about this but I don't see a way around it and at least I can unload some of the storage hassle onto the NAS still.
Bypassing the 300 item limit seems possible with the system config menu tool available through homebrew, is this correct? I also am looking at the all in one guide and it looks like loadiine supports USB loading directly if I read the phrasing right ("USB = WUP Installer Method, redNAND, or sigpatched sysNAND (CFW), Loadiine GX2 using latest Mocha").
I also need to find out what redNAND and sigpatched sysNAND are and if they'll be useful in achieving my goals or better than loadiine in general.

paintispaint · Feb 1, 2019

Sweet Jesus it works (kind of)

I later did a test of Smash bros for Wii. U off the actual 1TB HDD I have for testing and it took...well I stopped timing it after 4 minutes. Oddly enough once it was in the game it wasn't laggy between menus or even loading battles so not sure what's up there.
Would probably be worse over network so I'm really looking at the idea of installing them as channels instead if that'll improve load times unless someone has any tricks for speeding up loadiine.

Deleted User · Feb 2, 2019

Yeah, Loadiine is just way too slow to be useful. If you think 4 minutes is bad, try playing something like SM 3D World or Twilight Princess, the 30-1min load times between zones is brutal. If you install them as channels, they have to be installed either to the NAND (which doesn't have much space) - or to USB, but the caveat being that it has to be a WiiU formatted drive which means it can only contain WiiU games. You can't partition it, as the console formats the entire drive.

I just ended up buying a 256GB SD card and put the GC/Wii stuff on that, and having a single external USB for WiiU - about as minimal as I could get. But sadly network loading never got off the ground for Nintendo.

Do enjoy NAS loading of PSX, PS2, PS3 through the NAS though. But I figured my setup is about as simplified as it can get. I used to have two drives with one hidden, but required caddies with power. THis way I have all the older games on SD since they take up less space, and a console powered WiiU disc.

cvskid · Feb 2, 2019

gunner007 said:
Yeah, Loadiine is just way too slow to be useful. If you think 4 minutes is bad, try playing something like SM 3D World or Twilight Princess, the 30-1min load times between zones is brutal. If you install them as channels, they have to be installed either to the NAND (which doesn't have much space) - or to USB, but the caveat being that it has to be a WiiU formatted drive which means it can only contain WiiU games. You can't partition it, as the console formats the entire drive.

I just ended up buying a 256GB SD card and put the GC/Wii stuff on that, and having a single external USB for WiiU - about as minimal as I could get. But sadly network loading never got off the ground for Nintendo.

Do enjoy NAS loading of PSX, PS2, PS3 through the NAS though. But I figured my setup is about as simplified as it can get. I used to have two drives with one hidden, but required caddies with power. THis way I have all the older games on SD since they take up less space, and a console powered WiiU disc.

With loadline being slow is that an issue with the program itself or an issue with not using a class 10 sd card?

Deleted User · Feb 2, 2019

It's the console itself. The SD reader inside the WiiU isn't all that great - and the issue with Loadiine is you're using unpacked files. Some games like SM3DW and others have 12-13K+ files. So large number of small size files + seek time = sadface.

Depending on games, sometimes you can have better luck with changing cluster sizes. But there's just some games like the SM3DW and LOZ that just have so many small files that you end up with 30sec to 2 min load times between levels/cutscenes. I know when I originally played SM3DW, it was like 2 minute load times on a 128GB SD. Made dying painful XD

For some games with few large files, Loadiine works well. It just got cast aside once USB support was a thing and the cost of HDD was cheaper than SD. That's why when USB support arrived, I just turned my SD card into a Wii/GC/homebrew.

remlei · Nov 28, 2021

Im also looking for a way to load my game backups over a NAS instead of slapping a dedicated external hdd on it.

since my NAS have something like 60TB of usable storage, why not dedicate a 2TB of iSCSI access to Wii U, but I need a way to make that iSCSI mount to work on wii.

but hey, raspberry pi zero w have this thing called OTG, and since linux also have this thing called usb_gadget, so why not combine those two things and see if it works.

so what I did is use a fastest read speed uSD card that I have for minimal boot time. All I need to do is basically follow this instruction to convert the pi zero w into a USB Drive that relies on NAS with iSCSI and make the SD card read only after I configured it.

after that, I test the thing if it works, plugged it on my PC, wait about 15seconds and whoala, Windows thinks I plugged in a external hdd, though I still need to initialized the drive using Disk Management, and format the drive using other formatting tool to fat32. after that, I tried adding games to it, the transfer rate is really slow though, around 5-7MB/sec. plugged it to a wii u, run Configurable USB loader, and bam, the game appears on the list, run the game and it works! The load speed is just a little bit slower compared to a actual hdd (because wifi) but hey once the game loaded the game is smooth.

I also have raspberry pi 4 and tested the same thing but this time connected to a Wired ethernet cable at 1gbit connection. and the load times is comparable with USB HDD. I ended up switching to pi zero because, there are hats out there that basically add a USB A male on it making it look like a flash drive albeit a bit bigger.

the total cost for me to do this is around 30USD with Pi zero w and the hat with USB A Male on it, uSD card is something I already have so maybe add another 5-10USD for the total price if you dont have one.

bobbintb · Jan 28, 2023

remlei said:
Im also looking for a way to load my game backups over a NAS instead of slapping a dedicated external hdd on it.

since my NAS have something like 60TB of usable storage, why not dedicate a 2TB of iSCSI access to Wii U, but I need a way to make that iSCSI mount to work on wii.

but hey, raspberry pi zero w have this thing called OTG, and since linux also have this thing called usb_gadget, so why not combine those two things and see if it works.

so what I did is use a fastest read speed uSD card that I have for minimal boot time. All I need to do is basically follow this instruction to convert the pi zero w into a USB Drive that relies on NAS with iSCSI and make the SD card read only after I configured it.

after that, I test the thing if it works, plugged it on my PC, wait about 15seconds and whoala, Windows thinks I plugged in a external hdd, though I still need to initialized the drive using Disk Management, and format the drive using other formatting tool to fat32. after that, I tried adding games to it, the transfer rate is really slow though, around 5-7MB/sec. plugged it to a wii u, run Configurable USB loader, and bam, the game appears on the list, run the game and it works! The load speed is just a little bit slower compared to a actual hdd (because wifi) but hey once the game loaded the game is smooth.

I also have raspberry pi 4 and tested the same thing but this time connected to a Wired ethernet cable at 1gbit connection. and the load times is comparable with USB HDD. I ended up switching to pi zero because, there are hats out there that basically add a USB A male on it making it look like a flash drive albeit a bit bigger.

the total cost for me to do this is around 30USD with Pi zero w and the hat with USB A Male on it, uSD card is something I already have so maybe add another 5-10USD for the total price if you dont have one.

Sorry to revive an old thread but there isn't much info on this. Have anyone tried this on a Pico?

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