Hacking Emulated NAND for Rock Band 2 DLC

[mvgc3]

I have been messing around with Rock Band DLC stuff for a little while now. I started with the hacked song shop, where everything is labeled as purchased, but I obviously ran out of space pretty quick. After learning that Rock Band 2 doesn't support SDHC (I got a two pack of 4GB cards, one of which I don't even use, and felt it would be wasteful to go buy a new card, cheap or not. Plus 2GB isn't THAT much more than the built in NAND capacity).

I did quite a bit of searching, on the assumption that with all the crazy stuff people can do with the Wii some sort of workaround would be possible. I finally found a post in the middle of the RawkSD thread here about using Hermes' cIOS and uLoader to emulate the NAND. So I tried it out, but it takes probably 10-15 minutes just to start the game. Since then, I've used the other tools to download all the DLC to my PC, and if I can load it all in a reasonable amount of time from the hard drive, I'd be pretty happy (right now I'm using the DLC managers to pick out songs I want, then using the WADunpacker tool to get the files needed to put on the NAND. It's tedious to say the least). That leads me to my two questions.

Would loading the DLC from a USB drive be faster than using the SD card?

Does the amount of DLC have an effect on the loading time? Would having ALL the songs make it take like 2 hours?


Thanks!!

 

[hellohey]

link post plz XD?

 

[mvgc3]

Here you go, hellohey!

He does a really good job at explaining everything you need.


Does anybody know anything about my questions? I haven't seen this discussed outside of that post really, just a few references to it. I'd just try it myself, but it would take a lot of time and slow my computer down quite a bit (its getting kind of old), just to have to undo everything if it doesn't work. If someone knows already it would save me a lot of time.

Thanks again!

 

[ShakaHeath]

I didn't try the NAND Emulation of uLoader on a SDHC Card but I can tell you it won't take longer if you put all the DLC on your HDD!
My HDD is full of the 870 tracks available (as last week) and it only take like 5 minutes to load then it's fine!

What I've done is:
-Install all sZXE tickets (A, B, C and D)
-Download a song per ticket (you can have a list of songs and on which ticket they are stored on Rawk SD Wiki but remember THEY DO NOT SUPPORT PIRACY so don't ask them!)
-Dump the NAND using BootMii
-Unpack the NAND and erase all titles except sZXE using ShowMiiWads
-Feed your virtual NAND with your DLC in the right folders

I'm using an old 70GB Seagate Baracuda ATA IV and it's pretty fast (well 5 minutes is always better than 15 knowing that the game is ran off of the same drive).
Going to dowload the latest DLC now

 

[mvgc3]

Awesome, thanks for the info! I'll give that a shot then.

 

[jpref]

Awesome, thanks for the info! I'll give that a shot then.

@mvgc3 - if you can get this working , could you post a simple tutorial for the rest of us (programs used, etc)?

 

[ShakaHeath]

He can not because it's against the rules but we can discuss it by PM.

 

[mvgc3]

jpref - I posted a link to the post explaining how to get it working. If you're talking about the entire list of DLC, then as Heathcliff said, linking to it directly is not allowed on these forums.

Just Google "Download: DLC Unlocks & Tools - RB2 / GH - NTSC / PAL". You should come across the site with what you need. Apparently they updated the tools to be easier. I haven't looked at the new ones closely, but they seem to be more automated than the ones I used.


I'm working on rearranging the partitions on my hard drive, which is taking a LONG time. I'll probably get everything set up on it tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes!

 

[jpref]

thanks... one question though , what did you use to dump the nand as showmiiwads does not support bootmii backups. I am using CIOSXRev19 4.2U and unable to dump using RealWND. This should be enough to get me going.

**update: noticed the recommended approach is to use Simple FS Dumper 0.42 with sneek/triforce . Ill keep at er

 

[mvgc3]

You don't use Sneek or Triforce with this. uLoader emulates the NAND (as far as I can tell at least). I used FSToolbox (as was recommended in the post I linked to) and had no problems.

I wish it wasn't taking so long to fix my partitions. Apparently the partition manager decided it was necessary to move all of the files even though I was only adding onto an existing partition with space I got from my old WBFS partition. Ah well, it should be done by the time I wake up in the morning.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

 

[clusten]

Does the amount of DLC have an effect on the loading time? Would having ALL the songs make it take like 2 hours?

NO, takes about 10-15 min (the emulated nand size is 20gb aprox.)

 

[ShakaHeath]

thanks... one question though , what did you use to dump the nand as showmiiwads does not support bootmii backups.

In fact it does... Tools>Extract BootMii Dump.

 

[jpref]

thanks, found it , just been busy with life for the past couple days to get this going.

 

[wiifan420]

Just WOW. I didnt know there was a successful way to run DLC from a HDD yet. Still sounds like kind of a pain to get it all running. Great job to whoever figured this out.

 

[mvgc3]

It's really not. You make a NAND dump and change a few settings in uLoader.

Getting ALL of the DLC on there is slightly more involved, but the explanation for each part (downloading it and then moving it to the HHD) are more than suffient. I didn't have any problems at all.

 

[Xras]

You don't even need to make a NAND dump for Uloader+RB2 to work.
All you need to do is start up Uloader, select RB2, goto settings, edit cfg#2, select usb, click copy save to usb and you're done.
You can also click copy DLC to usb to transfer your DLC.
Downside on copying DLC is that it will only work for gen1 songs (SZAE).
To get the other gens on your HDD, you'll need to use some tools, which i won't mention here....
*cough* google *cough*

X

 

[mvgc3]

I tried that at first, and it didn't work for me. Once I made a NAND dump, everything worked fine. Maybe I just missed a part.

Anyway, a NAND dump will get all generations of your DLC copied over

If that worked out for you, then great. The more ways we can do something the better!

 

[happydance]

too bad can't get customs to work with it

 

[Xras]

too bad can't get customs to work with it

+1

 

[ShakaHeath]

Yeah and we probably won't be able to do that until RawkSD team release RawkSD 3... We'll all probably be dead before it happens...