Hacking Finding free space

[duo22]

Having just recently installed a modchip and being new to the wii hacking scene I have a few questions before i put to much more effort into my current project. I have been messing around with Trucha Signer and with the help of a few tutorials managed to swap some English SSBB files with their Japanese counterparts. Some obviously wouldn't work though because of size, with the counterpart being larger then the one i wanted to replace. I thought it was a lost cause until I read the helpful post about the fst.bin structure.

So to get to my actual question, if there was unused space on the iso large enough to fit the file could i change the offset (and size) in the fst.bin to point there or would I have to push back all of the files after it to maintain the directory structure? Is there an easy way to find any empty space? To use SSBB as an example, knowing that the "how to play" falls at the end of the first layer. but ends on the second layer and has to be linked out in the dvd5, could I use that room to put in the _en files that are to large to simply replace where they are at?

Any help would be appreciated, I think I'm having more fun messing around in Trucha and XVI32 then I am actually playing SSBB. Sorry for another topic related to SSBB, I know they have flooded all the wii scene boards, but felt this was a little above the "help me get ssbb working" type posts and would probably just get lost there.

 

[cracker]

I'm not sure if the game would run fine if you mixed the LBAs of files around (hell I don't even have a Wii

). But I do know for sure that you would have to push all the files' LBAs around or else the you would start executing unexpected 'code' and you would crash the game.

 

[SleepyPrince]

I wonder if your "how to play starts on 1st layer and ends on 2nd layer" is right or not
because I dont know which offset falls on which layer
I did take a look at the fst.bin file and the free space I can find is before and after the file called "border.dat"
before : about 40mb
after : about 205mb
this "border.dat" was what I thought as the separation of the 2 layers

also I think you can use the space of the dummy1.dat and dummy2.dat
but they are at the beginning and end of the file structure
it may become a nightmare if you want to puch files around

 

[duo22]

To tell you the truth I'm not positive, I seem to recall seeing a post by vv saying it did after noticing that the first relinked fst.bin would receive an error about 4 mins into the idle video. I'll try to find that post, it was somewhere in the "How to create dvd5 SSBB NTSC-USA with fully playable SS emissary" thread.


Edit:
After going back to the fst.bin, you're right to question, the Howtoplay should end before the second layer starts at like 4248275744 with the second layer starting somewhere around 4269998080 (2084960 sectors * 2048 bytes/sector right? offset FE830000), though I suppose they could put or pad the layer break wherever they want as long as the game doesn't use the full second layer which i doubt it does.
http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=78029&st=240 Is what i was referring too.