I'm sure I'm not the first to think about this, but since the USB loaders (GX, CFG, Flow) are already able to display covers and start games by selecting a specific game in a list, maybe it could be possible to add support to launch roms from their covers. I think it would be great to see most games, nes, snes and others, by covers ( or screenshots ) with the same 3d / 2d / list graphics effects, all in a single interface.
This would require a couple of things that aren't done currently.
- First, the GX emulators don't yet support loading a single rom based on parameters.
- Second, the USB loaders don't display covers of non-wii ISOs/Wbfs yet
- Third, the covers of the roms aren't the same size as the wii covers.
- Fourth, the folder structure and file names would need to be strict (same file name for the cover, the game rom, and perhaps the game information text)
- Fifth, the USB disk would probably need to be FAT32, (but this might not be a requirement, as the roms could be on SD too).
- Finally, the USB loader would need to be able to call a different emulator with some parameter (command-line parameter with the dol app, or saving a parameter in a temp file read by the emulator as a last resort idea) of the selected game.
Now, I know that this is a pretty big wish, that might actually be too big. However, most of these parts aren't that big to implement individually. Since most of these apps are open source, this might actually be possible. As a programmer, I could do a lot of legwork. However, there are a couple of other programmers that already have all the knowledge and the environment setup done that could do it faster than I.
Since a lot of heads are a lot better than a single one, I wanted to share the idea. If I'm not the only one who thinks that this could be great, maybe this can be done and we can have a great platform to launch all kind of games.
This would require a couple of things that aren't done currently.
- First, the GX emulators don't yet support loading a single rom based on parameters.
- Second, the USB loaders don't display covers of non-wii ISOs/Wbfs yet
- Third, the covers of the roms aren't the same size as the wii covers.
- Fourth, the folder structure and file names would need to be strict (same file name for the cover, the game rom, and perhaps the game information text)
- Fifth, the USB disk would probably need to be FAT32, (but this might not be a requirement, as the roms could be on SD too).
- Finally, the USB loader would need to be able to call a different emulator with some parameter (command-line parameter with the dol app, or saving a parameter in a temp file read by the emulator as a last resort idea) of the selected game.
Now, I know that this is a pretty big wish, that might actually be too big. However, most of these parts aren't that big to implement individually. Since most of these apps are open source, this might actually be possible. As a programmer, I could do a lot of legwork. However, there are a couple of other programmers that already have all the knowledge and the environment setup done that could do it faster than I.
Since a lot of heads are a lot better than a single one, I wanted to share the idea. If I'm not the only one who thinks that this could be great, maybe this can be done and we can have a great platform to launch all kind of games.