Hacking DIOS MIOS (Lite)

[Wanderlei777]

Gonna grab the Wii versions, it makes, more sense Wii loaders and cios are much more mature.

 

[Fire-WSP]

I tried out my Iso of Metroid Prime Euro Version with Mios Dios 2.3. and it crashed after like 10 minutes of playing while scanning objects.
When i was scanning an object suddenly the game got stuck in a loop and it tried to reload something over and over again.
I had to press the Wii Power Button for 10 seconds to restart.
During my second run i came across another Problem with this Game. I was playing (Chozo Ruins) and went to pause screen.
Because i had an talk on Facebook i left it there for about one hour. Then the game suddenly crashed and went black screen.
In this case pressing the power button to reset was working directly.

My Game is a clean Dump and verified by redump.org
Somebody here said i could play the Metroid Prime Trilogy for Wii... yes i could but this is no reason for Mios Dios to have these problems

 

[themanuel]

Somebody here said i could play the Metroid Prime Trilogy for Wii... yes i could but this is no reason for Mios Dios to have these problems

And why not?

 

[Fire-WSP]

What a question is that? Think again!
Because these are propably Bugs in the programm and they should not happen regardless if there is a Wii compilation of a game or not.
Besides that, what ever cause that problems can also harm other games aswell.
It is not just about that Games start up on Mios Dios, they should also work flawlessly from start to end.
That there are problems present in a programm which is still working on is very normal and Bug Reports are there to solve those in the future.

 

[Maxternal]

I tested it with a couple of games but it did not work, crashed on me!

Thanks. Glad to know something official about it now.

 

[Maxternal]

Only reason was because I have original copies of the GC versions.

Actually, if you have the original copies available to make a CleanRip dump of you could always use Devolution which DOES support the disk swap. Most loaders that can use DM(L) can also use Devolution directly as well. It would save you some shopping/download time.
OR
you could just pop in the original disk and play it from the disk channel for that stretch where you have to swap disks and then go back to playing with DM(L) for the rest of it.

 

[Wanderlei777]

Only reason was because I have original copies of the GC versions.

Actually, if you have the original copies available to make a CleanRip dump of you could always use Devolution which DOES support the disk swap. Most loaders that can use DM(L) can also use Devolution directly as well. It would save you some shopping/download time.
OR
you could just pop in the original disk and play it from the disk channel for that stretch where you have to swap disks and then go back to playing with DM(L) for the rest of it.

I would use Devolution but I plan on playing RE CV which I dont have the GC discs for.

I notice with RE2 with the widescreen option turned on it causes some graphics glitches, like the storage boxes the lids only cover half of them, looks strange. With Wii set too 16:9 and TV set to 16:9/overscan, there is small border on the sides but they are a quarter of the size of black bars a normal 4:3 image would have, nothing looks stretched. If I force the tv to go 4:3 it looks squashed If anything. Apart from the slight widescreen issue the whole game ran fine, progressive scan is a real bonus.

 

[Maxternal]

I would use Devolution but I plan on playing RE CV which I don't have the GC discs for.

By all means I HEARD someone say that all RE games let you save before the swap so there's no problem. I'm not sure that's true with all of them. Haven't tried them myself. Even if you DO run into trouble, at least for those you do have the disks for, as long as you have a real memory card, switching to Devolution just for the disk swap part isn't that hard ... If you're lucky enough to be able to borrow a disk just for that swap point for CV, even better.

 

[themanuel]

What a question is that? Think again!
Because these are propably Bugs in the programm and they should not happen regardless if there is a Wii compilation of a game or not.
Besides that, what ever cause that problems can also harm other games aswell.
It is not just about that Games start up on Mios Dios, they should also work flawlessly from start to end.
That there are problems present in a programm which is still working on is very normal and Bug Reports are there to solve those in the future.

You are the one that needs to think again.

DM is free software (let's keep aside all cynicism about donations, etc.), being worked on by someone on his free time. It does a pretty complex task that nobody had been able to crack for years and there is a multitude of things that could go wrong and cause a game not to work or not to do so perfectly. Compatibility is still not 100% and there are some things that still don't work as in the original console (audio streaming, multi-disc games) so instead of saying "they should work flawlessly from start to end", you should just be patient, enjoy what you can do with DM (like being able to play almost all GCN games from USB/SD), and wait for those issues to be worked out, if at all.

Complaining won't make the problems get resolved faster.

 

[Fire-WSP]

Dude, please read my 2 posts again... carefully and then tell me one simple thing. Where can you spot a complain?
Right there is none. The first one was a simple bug report and the second a response to your question.
Yes the program it is free and i am very happy with it. The coder did a nice job and by reporting problems he can, when he have time and want to, fix it.
No more no less.

I am sure that the coder aims for the best possible compatibility so that the games work flawlessly from start to end. I dont care how long it takes all i did was reporting a problem.
And again for that it does not matter if there is a Wii Compilation of that game when we talk about a program to let Gamecube Games run.

While reading on the forum some posts people wrote like "i tried many Games on with Mios Dios and they worked" then i think well it is nice that they start but how is after playing it for longer than 10 minutes.
Something i did with Metroid. I am sure the coder has no time to play every game for a long time to find possible bugs so reporting problems can help.

End of line

 

[marcioap1]

I'm afraid you can't, however some games like Resident Evil let you save before swapping disks, I haven't tried those since I got RE0, RE1 and RE4 on Wii but I hope it works for RECV, some said it worked, as for games like TMNT2 and TMNT3 if you select a level and get an error message, restart your Wii, load the other disk and select that level and it will work fine, that's how I beat both games, some people reported games like Zelda and Metal Gear not working, dunno about those cause I don't have them, but yeah two disk games still have some issues!

Thanks for the info. As far as I can remember, there is a save point in the disc swap... At least in the Dreamcast version of RE Code Veronica...

 

[themanuel]

Sorry if I got carried away but when you say “there is no reason for DIOS MIOS to have these problems”, it can come across as self-entitlement and lack of appreciation for the work that has been done so far. Now, that being said, after reading your responses I realize you are probably not the kind of person that would do that, but that sentence could be interpreted that way.

Now, did you start a new game from scratch?
I will play it tonight for a while to see if I run into the same issue.

Also, are playing with everything on default or are you:
- Playing without a disc in the drive?
- Using NMM?
- Forcing 480p?
- Forcing widescreen?
- Anything else that might be noteworthy?

Regards.

 

[Fire-WSP]

^^ also sorry on my side. i propably formulated that sentence a bit wrong.
No i am not that kind and i also dont like that kind of people who think the have a right to get everything directly, show no respect or are not patient.
I also understand your reaction

Yes i started from scratch.

iso is verified good
EU Version
No disc in the drive
No NMM since i use a real Memory card 251 from Nintendo
No forcing to 480p i had it on Auto
No widescreen force
No Cheats
No Debugger
I use a wavebird

For the first Issue i was scanning everything possible until he crashed into a loop
The second issue was that i put the game to the pause screen for like an hour or so.
Nothing else... well except that i dindt tried again because of lack of time. At the second run i just did not scan except the stuff i had to.

 

[themanuel]

^^ also sorry on my side. i propably formulated that sentence a bit wrong.
No i am not that kind and i also dont like that kind of people who think the have a right to get everything directly, show no respect or are not patient.
I also understand your reaction

Yes i started from scratch.

iso is verified good
EU Version
No disc in the drive
No NMM since i use a real Memory card 251 from Nintendo
No forcing to 480p i had it on Auto
No widescreen force
No Cheats
No Debugger
I use a wavebird

For the first Issue i was scanning everything possible until he crashed into a loop
The second issue was that i put the game to the pause screen for like an hour or so.
Nothing else... well except that i dindt tried again because of lack of time. At the second run i just did not scan except the stuff i had to.

Thanks.
Next time you play it, could you throw a disc in the drive?
It can be any Wii or GCN disc. I believe there are still some games that don't fully work without a disc, although this is mostly related to streaming audio, which MP doesn't have.

 

[sdoc96]

but how is after playing it for longer than 10 minutes.

The second issue was that i put the game to the pause screen for like an hour or so.

These things ^ make it sound like drive/usb sleep mode of some kind. Try another drive or see if DML/SDCard does the same thing, if you're looking for a process of elimination.

 

[Maxternal]

Hmm, just a thought about the drive sleeping problem (since it was supposedly fixed a long time ago but people are still showing symptoms that it's not)
It could just be that to "solve" it, DM constantly reads from the disk. A problem might arise if what it's doing is constantly reading the SAME sector. If the drive has some sort of internal cache and happens to keep that same sector cached the whole time it wouldn't actually need to read from the disk and might still put it to sleep.

I don't really understand the line of code that was added when the "fix" was added but (r19?) but if it is just pinging the same sector, a possible fix would be to make it choose a random or even just the next sector each time.

 

[sonictopfan]

I too have this problem when pausing the game for a while or have no BGM for a while the game always crashes, mostly happens with games with audio streaming like Crazy Taxi, making the games unplayable from USB, running them from SD should work fine but it's a bit annoying having to switch to DML every time I wanna play a game and copying the data to SD!

@themanuel Yes there are still games that require a disk to be inserted, I can confirm Spider-Man The Movie and Sonic Gems Collection!

@Wanderiei777 I still think it's better if you get the Wii version and put your mind in ease instead of having to use Devolution if you don't mind buying/downloading it, at least you're gonna save space on your hard drive and make sure the game will work fully, plus you'll save space from the Memory Card!

@Marcioap1 Yeah I remember the Dreamcast version had a save point and I believe the Gamecube one did too, I actually own thig game legally on Gamecube and on Dreamcast, both US/JAP on Dreamcast for the extra content in the JAP version!

 

[PsyBlade]

A problem might arise if what it's doing is constantly reading the SAME sector. If the drive has some sort of internal cache and happens to keep that same sector cached the whole time it wouldn't actually need to read from the disk and might still put it to sleep.

I don't really understand the line of code that was added when the "fix" was added but (r19?) but if it is just pinging the same sector, a possible fix would be to make it choose a random or even just the next sector each time.

r19 is the revision with the supposed fix
it does indeed read the same sector over and over again (as far as I can tell)
all hdds have at least some MB internal cache to spead up repeated reads, do prefetch and do write caching
I too think some drives might not restet their spindown timer on a cache hit

this should really be testet
unfortunatly I have no build environment for DM
nor do I acually use DM

a patch should be comparativly easy
someone who compiles DM should be able replace sector 23 by something a bit more random

 

[themanuel]

More progress on quadforce.

 

[seam]

More progress on quadforce.

yea that was from a few days ago... i dont think crediar is going to be releasing a new version of quadforce ever. so i wouldnt get my hopes up(or other peoples).