Hacking Boot Wii disc from menu and use with homebrew?

[WB3000]

I had an idea for using the Wii ISO template on HackMii. If I put a DVD enabled emulator (Ex: FCEU) as the main.dol, would I be able to add ROM(s) to the disc as well, and have them be read by the emulator? It would make it possible to create an autobooting emulator pointed towards the ROM on disc, so you could essentially have a classic in disc format.

I don't know whether it's possible or not, seeing as how Wii discs have different partitions, etc.

 

[ether2802]

You need to do the experiment, extract every part from a game, well just the game partition, and re-ensemble with the WiiScrubber tool that creates that partition, just swap the main.dol for the fceugx.dol, and do a rebooter with the Gamma Launcher and at the rest of the DVD place the roms, you'll only need one partition for the emulator and another partition for the roms...!!!

 

[WB3000]

I've created another partition, but there doesn't seem to be a way to add files, at least in WiiScrubber. You can extract the partition, so if I can modify it and pack it back in it should work...

EDIT: I was able to create a new partition, and add some random .nes file into it. I'll burn a test copy and see if this thing runs...

EDIT 2: The disc only loads through a IOS249 System Menu (no loaders, they code dump). FCEUGX loaded as expected, but it displayed "Invalid DVD" when attempting to load the file list from disc.

 

[ether2802]

From wiibrew.org/wiki/FCE_Ultra_GX

From DVD
ROMs can be burned to a DVD-/+R (4.7GB max size & ISO 9660 file format) but you need to install DVDx on your Wii.

So it may be hard to get it done...!!!

 

[ArchangelX]

Well, this would be possible, however, you'd probably need something like a WOD/ISO9660 hybrid disc.
Don't ask me how to do that, because I really don't know. I've seen it done somewhere before, but I don't remember where.
There's also a slight chance that wouldn't work either.

However, what you _can_ do, is modify the code of FCEUGX to use joedj's libwod which allows usage of standard WODs as a pathname such as: "wod:/roms/rom.nes" to access the roms/rom.nes file from a WOD.

Dunno if you got any of that, but it's something to consider.

 

[WB3000]

Well, this would be possible, however, you'd probably need something like a WOD/ISO9660 hybrid disc.
Don't ask me how to do that, because I really don't know. I've seen it done somewhere before, but I don't remember where.
There's also a slight chance that wouldn't work either.

However, what you _can_ do, is modify the code of FCEUGX to use joedj's libwod which allows usage of standard WODs as a pathname such as: "wod:/roms/rom.nes" to access the roms/rom.nes file from a WOD.

If there was some method of creating a hybrid disc, it would remove the need to edit the FCEU source. I'm no expert in disc filesystems, but perhaps get a standard ISO 9660 ISO, pad the Wii ISO template, and then do a copy /b to merge them together. That working would depend on the Wii being able to still accept the disc and read it properly, as well as FCEU being able to locate the standard section of the disc.

The WOD idea sounds good, I'll look into that.

 

[ether2802]

yeah I think the most viable way of doing this, is modifying the code for the use of wod disc, I don't think it would be really hard...!!!

 

[Screemer]

a couple of weeks ago i saw a rom-compilation with a different emulators. as far as i remember it was a gamecube-disc-image. maybe this could be helpful. pm me for more informations.

Here is a working NTSC rom pack for the Nintendo Wii.

Contains the following Emulators and Roms for NTSC region Wii Systems:

NES (772 Roms)

SNES (744 Roms)

Sega Master System (268 Roms)

Sega MegaDrive\Sega Genesis (713 Roms)

PC Engine\Turbo Grafx 16 (96 Roms)

 

[WB3000]

a couple of weeks ago i saw a rom-compilation with a different emulators. as far as i remember it was a gamecube-disc-image. maybe this could be helpful. pm me for more informations.

Since there's no loaders capable of booting GCN backups, it would end up being a modchip-only solution. I'd like to get to the point where I can have a banner representing the game on disc, with an autobooting emulator on launch.

 

[Tichinde925]

The Emulators use DVDX to search for roms on the DVD.

Is the normal install of DVDX installed?

 

[WB3000]

The Emulators use DVDX to search for roms on the DVD.

Is the normal install of DVDX installed?

I'm running on 3.2U with DVDX installed. I've been trying to compile with WOD support, but sadly I have no idea what I'm doing in the FCEU source.

I submitted a feature request to the Google Code site, perhaps the authors will add the feature officially.