Hacking How do I handle large 4GB+ WAD files?!?

HarveyHouston · Mar 29, 2019

I have a 4.7GB WAD file. I don't have a program that will open it (ShowMiiWads won't even recognize it) and it won't copy over to my SD card or any FAT32 device without giving me the "file too large" error. It has downloadable content for one of my games. How do I install it?

Things I've tried:

Reformatting an USB storage drive makes Homebrew Channel apps (like Some YAWMM Mod) not recognize it.
Simply changing the partition type doesn't work either.
I wanted ShowMiiWads to see it, but it doesn't even appear on the list of WADs in the folder where it is.
I've tried smashing my head against the desk. It got rid of my headaches, but did nothing for my WAD problem.

RandomMan25XX · Mar 29, 2019

Fat32 has a limit of 4GB, and what the hell even is it/why the hell is it so damn huge, it wouldn't be installed to the nand because the Wii nand is only 512MB
(I'll beat you to it and say it myself, that's what she said)

Cyan · Mar 29, 2019

There's no WAD this big.
a game on Wii cannot be bigger than 40MB (nintendo's choice and console restriction).

So, your wad is NOT a wii file, hence why a Wii's wad tool cannot recognize it.
that's not because the extension is .wad that it's a wii game, nor that it's installable.

wad is also a known package format (different than Wii format) for lot of PC content, like doom.
it doesn't mean that doom can be installed on Wii.

if it's really a Wii file, it could be a custom made wad file containing a lot of files, multiple games in a single packed wad file, but there's no way it could be installed. that's just like putting everything in a zip or rar, for whatever reason. but that's not what you have, it's only a stupid idea to do that.

again, if it really was a Wii file, for whatever reason someone decided to pack the games to this format, there should be an explanation how to use it. there's no way you just found a random file and you expect it to be for the wii, if you went to a website specifically for a Wii game and you get a 4GB file, there's an info, a readme, a .nfo, something, even users comments. you can't just expect random files to be what you want.

HarveyHouston · Mar 29, 2019

Cyan said:
There's no WAD this big.
a game on Wii cannot be bigger than 40MB (nintendo's choice and console restriction).

So, your wad is NOT a wii file, hence why a Wii's wad tool cannot recognize it.
that's not because the extension is .wad that it's a wii game, nor that it's installable.

wad is also a known package format (different than Wii format) for lot of PC content, like doom.
it doesn't mean that doom can be installed on Wii.

if it's really a Wii file, it could be a custom made wad file containing a lot of files, multiple games in a single packed wad file, but there's no way it could be installed. that's just like putting everything in a zip or rar, for whatever reason. but that's not what you have, it's only a stupid idea to do that.

again, if it really was a Wii file, for whatever reason someone decided to pack the games to this format, there should be an explanation how to use it. there's no way you just found a random file and you expect it to be for the wii, if you went to a website specifically for a Wii game and you get a 4GB file, there's an info, a readme, a .nfo, something, even users comments. you can't just expect random files to be what you want.

It's titled DLC-for-RB.wad. I'm pretty sure it's for the Wii.

Cyan · Mar 29, 2019

are you displaying file extension?
can't it be DLC-for-RB.wad.zip ?
maybe all WAD are packed into a zip ?

Larsenv · Mar 29, 2019

A pack of Rock Band DLC is very large, and this is the result if you pack all of it (there's more than this btw) into one WAD. I never found any tools to handle it.

Illuminaticy · Mar 29, 2019

Yeah he's right on this, never thought about it until someone brought it up though- since we don't have a way to split .wads
Rock Band 2 DLC 1-5 is 5gb each
Rock Band 2 DLC 1-3 is 4.1gb each
So you can't use them on emuNAND, since it requires fat32 (pretty sure its fat32 only...)
Interesting. How the hell can you install/use them lol

XFlak · Mar 29, 2019

Unless I'm mistaken, you could install it to an emulated Nand using showmiiwads/showmiinand. The wad itself would be on your C drive (ntfs) and it should be unpacked into smaller files during the process of installing it to a fat32 emulated Nand

Edit: I've not tried it in this particular case before but couldn't you unpack the wad, split it up, and repack it into smaller chunks? Not sure what the point is since it's too large to install to real nand anyway and the above method I describe should work without splitting the wad up. The only reason to split the wad would be if you wanted to install just some of the DLC on the real nand, but you would be limited to the Wii's memory capacity so still wouldn't be able to install ALL the DLC from this massive wad even if it was broken into smaller chunks

Edit2: I just realized you said that showmiiwads doesn't play nicely with this wad file rendering my primary suggestion moot, my bad

Ryccardo · Mar 29, 2019

Illuminaticy said:
So you can't use them on emuNAND, since it requires fat32

Since the console can only have (less than) 512 MB, the individual content files inside are certainly less

Assuming showmiiwads doesn't screw up with such a large file, that could be an option (I never tried)

Cyan · Mar 29, 2019

ohh, you are right, I didn't thought about it being an extracted pack from emuNAND into a wad. I didn't know there were that much DLC.
sorry I spoke like I knew it all

Like I said above, the file is not provided with a nfo, readme or anything to explain how to use/install it?

Xflak thought the same thing than me, but I'll add details.

So, I think this wad has been created by installing all DLCs on emuNAND/Neek, and then using a tool to pack all the files in the DLC folder (small files, not 4GB+) into a big wad file. For example BlueDumpMod, or ShowMiiNAND.
The wad is big because it has a lot of small files in it, and once you install it back to emuNAND you don't care about being in FAT32 because you'll have small files back into the DLC folder.
the big wad file can be located on a NTFS partition, then use a wad manager to install/unpack it to your emuNAND.

I'm more curious to know why ShowMiiWads didn't recognize your wad file. Maybe it has a size check? like I said games are supposed to be 40MB max, and therefore could have a check on file size to prevent installing anything bigger.
I'm also curious to see the file content, if you could send me just the header (like for example 1MB? no copyright in it, it's the header) it should contain the file list, checksum and the location where the files are meant to be installed to.

There are other tools to extract wads, like Wadder, or CustomizeMii, you could extract the wad on your computer, and copy the files manually on emuNAND, or repack it in parts.
or even on Wii with some wad managers capable of installing to emuNAND, or usbloadergx.

what you can try :
put the wad on NTFS partition
put your emuNAND on FAT32 partition (sd or usb)
use an emuNAND you don't care (or make a backup first), or make a new NAND dump, on FAT32 partition with enough free space (4 or 5GB)
from USBLoaderGX: try to install that wad from the wad installer tool in the features menu.
I'm curious to see if USBGX detects it as bad wad too, or if it sees its file content just fine. it might crash because of memory issue, but shouldn't put 4GB in memory at once so there's a chance it can work.
note that it might take a lot of time to parse 4GB, let it do the work until its completed or you have an error message. if you force shutdown the process it can corrupt your partition.

HarveyHouston · Mar 29, 2019

Quite a bit to process. Let's see...

Cyan said:
Like I said above, the file is not provided with a nfo, readme or anything to explain how to use/install it?

Nope. Not a thing.

Cyan said:
So, I think this wad has been created by installing all DLCs on emuNAND/Neek, and then using a tool to pack all the files in the DLC folder (small files, not 4GB+) into a big wad file. For example BlueDumpMod, or ShowMiiNAND.
The wad is big because it has a lot of small files in it, and once you install it back to emuNAND you don't care about being in FAT32 because you'll have small files back into the DLC folder.
the big wad file can be located on a NTFS partition, then use a wad manager to install/unpack it to your emuNAND.

I'm more curious to know why ShowMiiWads didn't recognize your wad file. Maybe it has a size check? like I said games are supposed to be 40MB max, and therefore could have a check on file size to prevent installing anything bigger.
I'm also curious to see the file content, if you could send me just the header (like for example 1MB? no copyright in it, it's the header) it should contain the file list, checksum and the location where the files are meant to be installed to.

I can send you the header, I guess. Do I do that through a hexadecimal editor? I have one that can show data files in binary, ASCII, hex, and octal. How many characters (approximately) should I print here?

Cyan said:
There are other tools to extract wads, like Wadder, or CustomizeMii, you could extract the wad on your computer, and copy the files manually on emuNAND, or repack it in parts.
or even on Wii with some wad managers capable of installing to emuNAND, or usbloadergx.

what you can try :
put the wad on NTFS partition
put your emuNAND on FAT32 partition (sd or usb)
use an emuNAND you don't care (or make a backup first), or make a new NAND dump, on FAT32 partition with enough free space (4 or 5GB)
from USBLoaderGX: try to install that wad from the wad installer tool in the features menu.
I'm curious to see if USBGX detects it as bad wad too, or if it sees its file content just fine. it might crash because of memory issue, but shouldn't put 4GB in memory at once so there's a chance it can work.
note that it might take a lot of time to parse 4GB, let it do the work until its completed or you have an error message. if you force shutdown the process it can corrupt your partition.

I haven't tried Wadder or CustomizeMii. I suppose I could try it. Looking for them now...

EDIT: Neither one works. CustomizeMii only uses a WAD file that is 2 GB or less, and WADder thinks it's an invalid WAD.

HarveyHouston · Mar 29, 2019

The first thousand characters or so, in ASCII:

I think the "sZJE" is a clue...

XFlak · Mar 29, 2019

You can try wadmii to unpack the wad, it's a cmd line tool bundled in ModMii's support folder, or Google for the app on a standalone basis.

The original was created by @Leathl, @giantpune made a mono mod that works in Linux, and the version ModMii uses is a wadmiiIsh mod made by @cwstjdenobs... I can't remember for the life of me what I needed him change from the original but I'm sure it was important, lol, so I would use his wadmiiIsh mod if you're running windows. Actually if my memory serves it was to avoid false positive antivirus reports that were being reported on the original

HarveyHouston · Mar 29, 2019

XFlak said:
You can try wadmii to unpack the wad, it's a cmd line tool bundled in ModMii's support folder, or Google for the app on a standalone basis.

I only found the one in Wii.cs Tools 0.3. It doesn't work. It gives me an arithmetic error.

XFlak · Mar 29, 2019

So download modmii, and navigate to its support folder, and use that version

Larsenv · Mar 30, 2019

XFlak said:
You can try wadmii to unpack the wad, it's a cmd line tool bundled in ModMii's support folder, or Google for the app on a standalone basis.

The original was created by @Leathl, @giantpune made a mono mod that works in Linux, and the version ModMii uses is a wadmiiIsh mod made by @cwstjdenobs... I can't remember for the life of me what I needed him change from the original but I'm sure it was important, lol, so I would use his wadmiiIsh mod if you're running windows. Actually if my memory serves it was to avoid false positive antivirus reports that were being reported on the original

Why did you tag 3 people who aren't even active on this forum anymore...

XFlak · Mar 30, 2019

I like giving props where it's due, also I always impress myself when I can spell cwstjdenobs' name from memory, lol

Cyan · Mar 30, 2019

I'm also not found of notifying users for no reason. writing their name is fine enough, but sending a request for them to come and check this thread is annoying for them if they ever decide to come back.
that's not only for you, but a lot of users are doing it, and that's why lot of devs just disabled the notification system and then aren't aware when we really call them.

anyway, that's too bad that all the tools you tried didn't recognize the file.
could you try the wad manager from USBLoaderGX?
maybe it's corrupted? or incomplete. too bad your file doesn't come with a sfv or md5, or sha1 to verify you have all good 4GB data.

It looks like it's a Wii file based on the header you screenshot, but you took only the header in ASCII, which is full of ".........." and useless if we want to verify the data, like header size (the 4 first bytes), tmd length (tmd is file list, which is what I want to see).
what you shown is not enough to check the wad content, I need to see more.
if you are on windows, hexeditor can be used to copy the first bytes of a file into another file, but there's no easy method except copy/paste.
if you are on linux, you can use dd to copy only specific size into another file.

I think 1MB is enough to get the tmd and beginning of the data.
if you don't know how to do that, just make the same screenshot, but from the hex values now.

Too bad the file is so big, that's not easy to parse manually to verify all file's content.

XFlak · Mar 30, 2019

Interesting take on it. Perhaps I will avoid tagging folks unnecessary going forward. Personally I like being notified when I'm mentioned places and reading about what folks are saying about me. But I can see the other argument so I'll try to use tags more sparingly from now on... Except for @DeadlyFoez, I'm gonna tag him in all my posts just to mess with him, lol (we're pals IRL so I'm allowed, he can't ignore me if I really need his help cuz I'll just call him or knock down his door, lol). I'm kidding of course, I just needed this one useless last tag to get it out of my system and I won't "use" again

Brawl345 · Mar 30, 2019

HarvHouHacker said:
sZJE

I have a Rock Band 2 WAD Installer from... somewhere? Might be relevant. Description:

Make sure you have all 3 WAD files sZAE sZBE and sZCE in your WAD folder (SD:\WAD)
Install all 3 WADs sZAE sZBE and SZCE with this program.
Press the + button to install each WAD.
Make sure you see the error -1017 when installing.
This error will confirm that it has been installed correctly.
Return to list of WADs once you have installed both WADs successfully.
Press HOME to return to the HBC

I have attached it.

EDIT: Wait it's not for sZJE

Sorry

Hacking How do I handle large 4GB+ WAD files?!?

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