Hacking Enabling 480p for SM64 USA VC on non NTSC Wii

[SwareJonge]

For the past couple of days i've been playing SM64(USA version) on my PAL Wii and i noticed something odd, the Video was in 480i instead of 480p while my wii was set to 480p in the settings.
I decided to take a look at the intructions of the game itself and well, it seems like it only checks for if component cables are plugged in when tvmode is set to NTSC.

Decompiled output in ghidra:

Spoiler: Decompiled Output in Ghidra

So i've decided to recode this and managed to get PAL 480p working by extracting the WAD, opened 00000001.app in HxD and changed everything from 0x265C to 0x2747(Length: 0xEC) with my own code which fits perfectly fine (there's even some space left currently filled with nops) due to Nintendo's lack of optimization.

for the ones interested: here's the assembly source with some minor documentation and a precompiled binary

Assembly file is compiled with CodeWrite, other compilers might not work.

 

[Maeson]

This is pretty interesting! I personally did not have issues to play an NTSC US SM64 on my PAL Wii at 480p (launching it through USB Loader GX though) if my memory serves me right, but I always thought changing the video mode in the games themselves is better.

Could this be used for other VC titles? Maybe even Wiiware?

 

[SwareJonge]

This is pretty interesting! I personally did not have issues to play an NTSC US SM64 on my PAL Wii at 480p (launching it through USB Loader GX though) if my memory serves me right, but I always thought changing the video mode in the games themselves is better.

Could this be used for other VC titles? Maybe even Wiiware?

I know forcing video modes via USBLoaderGX is a solution to this but i had some issues when i reset the console.
It should be possible to adapt this for other VC Titles but for some reason MPAL is sometimes not included thus my code wouldn't fit(unless i cut that part out but idk how i feel about that) and i would need to port the addresses for the functions called in the code(shouldn't be hard to do). Luckily there i have a workaround but it makes the code a little messier.

 

[SaulFabre]

This is so very interesting

 

[CallmeJoe]

How do you make the Mario 64 run in 480p on a non ntsc wii? is there a guide?

 

[totakeke95]

I think the latest mod version of USB Loader GX is already capable of forcing any video mode on VC and WiiWare games regardless of region.