Cannot play Wii games

[rcpd]

So here's an odd one I can't find anyone who has had the same issue. I own a Wii. Have owned it for years. Never hacked it because I have emulators that work just as well. I found out how to convert your disc's into WBFS files so the Wii knows how to see them. I did this many moons ago to my discs just in case they ever broke. Even better, they work on emulators!

Well, then I got tired of having standard computers and went and bought a MacBook Pro M3 Pro. Why? Cause I have an iPhone, iPad, and a couple old school iPods. Might as well go full Apple like an idiot fan boy, eh? So I went out and bought that laptop and an Apple watch. Here's where things start getting interesting because, the MacBook Pro M3 Pro cannot have Windows installed. At all. So it took me a while to get used to the Apple operating system, but it wasn't too bad. Now its easy as heck to use and actually enhanced my Linux usability. Now you know, I can't run Windows. So I looked into how to hack my Wii on my Mac.

I knew this was going to be able. I started here: https://wii.hacks.guide/ and I followed the guide for "If you can use an SD card Wiibrand" method. It was successful and I know this because using SysCheck on the Wii's Homebrew Channel tells me zero errors and appropriate logs. I can share that if you need to see it. So at that point, I figured I'd start getting ready for items to play my disc files over playing my actual discs. This is where things start getting bad.

Having a Mac, it doesn't really like the NTFS or FAT32 file systems. I can format drives to that file system, but then I basically cannot use the drives. Plus, every single tutorial for this says I should be using FAT32 drives and not NTFS drives. Well crap. I own Windows 11, so I looked around for any old machine I might have that can do this faster. Nope. So I found an affordable good virtual machine program on Mac called UTM. It lets me run Windows 11 in a virtual machine, so I set that up and have it running right now. Its very effective, but be careful because for some reason Microsoft thought the virtual hard drive (if under 256Gb) needs to be FAT32 so you cannot put anything over 4Gb on that virtual machine. Already fighting me. Found a way to create a folder on my Mac that then gets sent to the UTM machine that I can view and use appropriately. So now, I am able to use Windows to create a drive for my Wii and convert my disc files to be seen on that Wii.

So I did. Lets start out by saying I used NVMe devices plugged into an adapter that makes them USB. They work. I have like 6 of them and have verified them all before starting this whole process. I went with a 500Gb drive. Formatted it FAT32/32kb cluster size. Just fine. Created the "games" folder for GameCube images. Put them in there. They went find, but one of my games was too large so I had to shrink the volume into two separate volumes and name them appropriately. Then in installed Nintendont. And it does work. I can play GameCube games fine using my WaveBird controller.

Next, I went on to Wii. Not having a Windows machine here sucks worse than the GameCube part. I had zero way to convert my Wii games from ISO to NTFS, plus a LOT of my Wii games are larger than a FAT32 drive can accept. I researched this pretty hard and found that a few years ago, someone created a Mac program called Witgui. It was only designed to run on MacOS 10.9 Maverick but not much later than that. Well, I got it to work on 14.4.1 fine. Wasn't easy, but I thought it was worth it. So I hooked my drive up and let Witgui look at it. Huge mistake. It formats the drive as WBFS and essentially makes the drive unusable anywhere but my virtual machine and only to fomrat. My Mac cannot even see it. Why not, lets try it anyway. So I convert all of my game files to WBFS and transfer them over to the drive. Then I try playing them. They worked!

Well, now you assume I have a way to play Wii and GameCube games. But I don't, and heres why. That WBFS drive? I can put GC games on it. They are not shown in any application on the Wii that plays them. Not Nintendont or anything else. So I created another FAT32 drive and put all of my GC games on it. Yup. So I then took all of the WBFS files and put them on that FAT32 drive. Nope, do not play. Even better. Neither do the GameCube games anymore. Then I tried the same thing with multiple partitions. One for Wii formatted WBFS and one for GameCube formatted FAT32. Doesn't work.

So I went back into my Windows machine and tried the normal Wii Backup Manager. Can't use it because of the stupid 4Gb limit. If the disk files are not on the OS, it will not use them so I could not point it at my attachment on my Mac. Its utterly useless to me.

Whats going on? I can't have two drives because its not possilbe to use two drives on the Wii at the same time. But I don't get whats going on with my Wii in that it will not use a FAT32 drive with both Wii and GameCube games ont it. I can see both. GameCube will play. Wii will not. If you load USBLoaderGX and load a Wii game, its taking you back to the Wii menu. Try and use WiiFlow WFL? Does the same thing, right back to the Wii menu. Why?

 

[XFlak]

You can save both wii and GC games on a fat32 drive. Ideally wii games should be saved as wbfs files. If u transfer games using a tool like wiibafu or wii backup manager (if using Windows) it will automatically split them into 4gb parts so they can be saved to fat32 drives.

Edit: a syscheck will help confirm your wii mods are up to date

https://gbatemp.net/threads/posting-a-system-check.300279/

If running your Windows virtual machine, you can drag and drop your syscheck.csv onto modmii.exe and it will tell you what to do (if anything)

https://modmii.github.io

If you're missing cios 249 for example, or its stubbed, u won't be able to launch wii games until this is fixed. Nintendont will work just fine with a stock IOS58 to launch GC backups

 

[rcpd]

You can save both wii and GC games on a fat32 drive. Ideally wii games should be saved as wbfs files. If u transfer games using a tool like wiibafu or wii backup manager (if using Windows) it will automatically split them into 4gb parts so they can be saved to fat32 drives.

Edit: a syscheck will help confirm your wii mods are up to date

https://gbatemp.net/threads/posting-a-system-check.300279/

If running your Windows virtual machine, you can drag and drop your syscheck.csv onto modmii.exe and it will tell you what to do (if anything)

https://modmii.github.io

If you're missing cios 249 for example, or its stubbed, u won't be able to launch wii games until this is fixed. Nintendont will work just fine with a stock IOS58 to launch GC backups

I am no longer running Windows because its basically useless by Microsoft. its gotten to the point that I'm going to Walmart to buy a cheap ass Windows laptop just to do this.

Having both Wii and GC games on my FAT32 drive does not work. GameCube does, Wii does not. Has not. Even now, does not. I have to have two different drives. One formatted FAT32 for GameCube and one formatted WBFS for Wii. They both cannot be plugged in at the same time.

Post automatically merged: Apr 15, 2024

Here is my SysCheck

SysCheck ME v2.5.0 by blackb0x, JoostinOnline, Double_A, R2-D2199 and Nano
...runs on IOS58 (rev 6176).

Region: NTSC-U (original region: JAP)
System Menu 4.3U (v513)
Priiloader installed
Drive date: 02.13.2007
Homebrew Channel 1.1.2 running on IOS58

Hollywood v0x11
Console ID: 50554034
Console Type: Wii
Shop Channel Country: United States (49)
Boot2 v4
Found 69 titles.
Found 47 IOS on this console. 14 of them are stubs.

IOS4 (rev 65280): Stub
IOS9 (rev 1034): No Patches
IOS10 (rev 768): Stub
IOS11 (rev 256): Stub
IOS12 (rev 526): No Patches
IOS13 (rev 1032): No Patches
IOS14 (rev 1032): No Patches
IOS15 (rev 1032): No Patches
IOS16 (rev 512): Stub
IOS17 (rev 1032): No Patches
IOS20 (rev 256): Stub
IOS21 (rev 1039): No Patches
IOS22 (rev 1294): No Patches
IOS28 (rev 1807): No Patches
IOS30 (rev 2816): Stub
IOS31 (rev 3608): No Patches
IOS33 (rev 3608): No Patches
IOS34 (rev 3608): No Patches
IOS35 (rev 3608): No Patches
IOS36 (rev 3608): No Patches
IOS37 (rev 5663): No Patches
IOS38 (rev 4124): No Patches
IOS40 (rev 3072): Stub
IOS41 (rev 3607): No Patches
IOS43 (rev 3607): No Patches
IOS45 (rev 3607): No Patches
IOS46 (rev 3607): No Patches
IOS48 (rev 4124): No Patches
IOS50 (rev 5120): Stub
IOS51 (rev 4864): Stub
IOS52 (rev 5888): Stub
IOS53 (rev 5663): No Patches
IOS55 (rev 5663): No Patches
IOS56 (rev 5662): No Patches
IOS57 (rev 5919): No Patches
IOS58 (rev 6176): USB 2.0
IOS60 (rev 6400): Stub
IOS61 (rev 5662): No Patches
IOS70 (rev 6912): Stub
IOS80 (rev 6944): No Patches
IOS222 (rev 65280): Stub
IOS223 (rev 65280): Stub
IOS248[38] (rev 65535, Info: d2x-v11beta1): Trucha Bug, ES Identify, NAND Access
IOS249[56] (rev 65535, Info: d2x-v11beta1): Trucha Bug, NAND Access, USB 2.0
IOS250[57] (rev 65535, Info: d2x-v11beta1): Trucha Bug, NAND Access, USB 2.0
IOS251[58] (rev 65535, Info: d2x-v11beta1): Trucha Bug, NAND Access, USB 2.0
IOS254 (rev 65281): BootMii
BC v6
MIOS v10
Report generated on 04/15/2024.

 

[XFlak]

As much as I prefer windows, u should be able to do everything using other OS's.

You may have a drive that is incompatible when in fat32 for wii games but not GC games. Or it may just not work with GX (next update should improve compatibility) and may work if u try Wiiflow lite or cfg

Syscheck looks fine, most likely its either a psrtial hdd compatibility issue or an issue with how you're saving transferring games to usb. Both wiibafu and Wii backup manager should be able to do the job.

 

[rcpd]

Same issue. I went to Best Buy and bought a Windows laptop. I can get Wii games to load on USB. I can get GameCube games to load on USB. I absolutely cannot get both of them to be on the same USB. Its gotten to the point that I've over it. I'm going to disconnect it, put it back where I found it, and hope I never see it again because I will trash it.