Hacking Is there a way to convert a .wbfs or .iso to .wad?

[MikaDubbz]

That may seem like an odd request, but if you'll enlighten me, I do have my reasons:

On my Wii U's vWii, I use an emunand on my SD card to launch all my Wiiware titles within USBLoader GX. This works great, and with a channel installed on my Wii U side, I am able to jump from the Wii U menu directly into USB Loader GX and this works wonderfully. Now, what I'd really like to do would be to load specific Wii games directly from my SD card and use the same emunand to play DLC I had installed to my emunand. (Specifically we're talking Rock Band and Guitar Hero game and a bunch of songs I added to the games). When loaded from my USB, this works without issue, even if I have the DLC downloaded from the emunand on my SD card or the USB drive (I made a copy so, I have one on both, I also have a very large SD card, so space isn't an issue). However, for whatever reason, USB Loader GX was never made to allow .wbfs Wii games to be loaded from an SD card, and instead must be loaded from a USB drive (this is despite the fact that Wiiflow and cfg usbloader can load games from the SD card no problem, but these both were giving me trouble loading DLC from the emunand, no matter what I did).

You might say, well just do what you're doing, load the games from your USB hard drive and get your emunand DLC that way. And sure, this answer works well enough, but it has 2 caveats. The first is not that important: its inconvenient, I can deal with having to get up and switch between my Wii U hard drive and my Wii/vWii hard drive, but it'd be nice if I could deal with this as little as possible, and the second is the bigger issue: for Rock Band 3, I'd like to play my keyboard controller, but this needs to connect with a small dongle. For whatever reason, the front 2 USB drives will not be read in any vWii USB loader, so this must go in a back port. But both my hard drives consume too much power to take up one port, so it has a y-cable to connect to both ports (the vWii hard drive is the same case and also uses the y-cable when connected). The Keyboard dongle has 2 ports that you can connect other USB devices to, so what you can do, and I do do, is put the dongle in the back, with one of the y-cables connecting to a slot on the dongle. My Wii U drive still gets enough power for this to work. However, my vWii drive still seems to need more power, so to make a long story short, I can't play all my DLC games in Rock Band 3 with my Keyboard on the Wii U, I can if I load the game from SD in another USB Loader and turn off emunand emulation as the other loaders are giving me problems in that department.

What I've realized though is that even though .wbfs files can't be read from my SD card in USB Loader GX, any .wad installed to my emunand on my SD card, shows up and loads just fine in USB Loader GX. So with all of that in mind, considering the loader allows you to install .wad files directly to the emunand, I'm curious to my main question here: IS there any way to convert a .wbfs or .iso file to .wad? Even if you got lost in my explanation there, just know that I do have legit reasons for wanting this, even if it sounds like something no one would ever truly need on the surface.

 

[Shadow#1]

That may seem like an odd request, but if you'll enlighten me, I do have my reasons:

On my Wii U's vWii, I use an emunand on my SD card to launch all my Wiiware titles within USBLoader GX. This works great, and with a channel installed on my Wii U side, I am able to jump from the Wii U menu directly into USB Loader GX and this works wonderfully. Now, what I'd really like to do would be to load specific Wii games directly from my SD card and use the same emunand to play DLC I had installed to my emunand. (Specifically we're talking Rock Band and Guitar Hero game and a bunch of songs I added to the games). When loaded from my USB, this works without issue, even if I have the DLC downloaded from the emunand on my SD card or the USB drive (I made a copy so, I have one on both, I also have a very large SD card, so space isn't an issue). However, for whatever reason, USB Loader GX was never made to allow .wbfs Wii games to be loaded from an SD card, and instead must be loaded from a USB drive (this is despite the fact that Wiiflow and cfg usbloader can load games from the SD card no problem, but these both were giving me trouble loading DLC from the emunand, no matter what I did).

You might say, well just do what you're doing, load the games from your USB hard drive and get your emunand DLC that way. And sure, this answer works well enough, but it has 2 caveats. The first is not that important: its inconvenient, I can deal with having to get up and switch between my Wii U hard drive and my Wii/vWii hard drive, but it'd be nice if I could deal with this as little as possible, and the second is the bigger issue: for Rock Band 3, I'd like to play my keyboard controller, but this needs to connect with a small dongle. For whatever reason, the front 2 USB drives will not be read in any vWii USB loader, so this must go in a back port. But both my hard drives consume too much power to take up one port, so it has a y-cable to connect to both ports (the vWii hard drive is the same case and also uses the y-cable when connected). The Keyboard dongle has 2 ports that you can connect other USB devices to, so what you can do, and I do do, is put the dongle in the back, with one of the y-cables connecting to a slot on the dongle. My Wii U drive still gets enough power for this to work. However, my vWii drive still seems to need more power, so to make a long story short, I can't play all my DLC games in Rock Band 3 with my Keyboard on the Wii U, I can if I load the game from SD in another USB Loader and turn off emunand emulation as the other loaders are giving me problems in that department.

What I've realized though is that even though .wbfs files can't be read from my SD card in USB Loader GX, any .wad installed to my emunand on my SD card, shows up and loads just fine in USB Loader GX. So with all of that in mind, considering the loader allows you to install .wad files directly to the emunand, I'm curious to my main question here: IS there any way to convert a .wbfs or .iso file to .wad? Even if you got lost in my explanation there, just know that I do have legit reasons for wanting this, even if it sounds like something no one would ever truly need on the surface.

No

 

[MikaDubbz]

No

lol, yeah, I've gathered that much by looking around for quite a while. I guess what I'm really getting at here, is for anyone that knows what they're doing in the Wii scene, if they would be interested in putting something together for such a thing, if it isn't too much to ask. Totally get if it is though.

 

[Shadow#1]

lol, yeah, I've gathered that much by looking around for quite a while. I guess what I'm really getting at here, is for anyone that knows what they're doing in the Wii scene, if they would be interested in putting something together for such a thing, if it isn't too much to ask. Totally get if it is though.

It will never happen

 

[YOUCANTSTOPME]

I guess what I'm really getting at here, is for anyone that knows what they're doing in the Wii scene, if they would be interested in putting something together for such a thing, if it isn't too much to ask. Totally get if it is though.

lol

 

[MikaDubbz]

It will never happen

K, well you're only one person. You may well be right, but never say never. If I catch the attention of the right person with the right itch to scratch, this could end up being just the kind of thing they'd be interested in tackling as a little project. I'll keep this topic out there in the event that one day it just may catch that right person's interest. And if it does, just know that I'll watch this thread, and I'll always be interested in such a development, so if so, mysterious possible person from the future, just reply to this thread or send me a PM. Cheers!

 

[Shadow#1]

K, well you're only one person. You may well be right, but never say never. If I catch the attention of the right person with the right itch to scratch, this could end up being just the kind of thing they'd be interested in tackling as a little project. I'll keep this topic out there in the event that one day it just may catch that right person's interest. And if it does, just know that I'll watch this thread, and I'll always be interested in such a development, so if so, mysterious possible person from the future, just reply to this thread or send me a PM. Cheers!

For the fact 512MB available to vWii and some that's taken from the Wii OS

 

[MikaDubbz]

For the fact 512MB available to vWii and some that's taken from the Wii OS

Emunand's can be as large as your storage's space. While such a .wad could obviously never be installed to the proper nand of the Wii or vWii, it should in theory be installable to an emunand with hundreds of GB's of storage.

 

[CheatFreak47]

Hi, what you are asking for in the title is more or less impossible for a few reasons, but mostly it's to do with these formats being fundamentally different. Games on the Wii are coded to run essentially bare metal, this means that the interfacing for NAND and/or reading from a Disc is kind of hardcoded into the game (of course all that goes through IOS and that's why USB Loading and EmuNAND is possible) but I think you get the picture.

These things aren't possible to just run some generic process on to convert them.

However, reading your OP, it is worth mentioning that you should be able to boot Wii games from the SD card through cIOS, USB Loader GX just doesn't support that functionality. I believe that WiiFlow does support booting Wii games from SD card, so you may want to look into that.

 

[MikaDubbz]

Hi, what you are asking for in the title is more or less impossible for a few reasons, but mostly it's to do with these formats being fundamentally different. Games on the Wii are coded to run essentially bare metal, this means that the interfacing for NAND and/or reading from a Disc is kind of hardcoded into the game (of course all that goes through IOS and that's why USB Loading and EmuNAND is possible) but I think you get the picture.

These things aren't possible to just run some generic process on to convert them.

However, reading your OP, it is worth mentioning that you should be able to boot Wii games from the SD card through cIOS, USB Loader GX just doesn't support that functionality. I believe that WiiFlow does support booting Wii games from SD card, so you may want to look into that.

Mmhmm, and if you read my full post, then you'd know that I actually do use Wiiflow to load the games from my SD card, but for whatever stupid reason, both Wiiflow and CFG Usbloader have issues with reading the DLC on my emunand from my SD card. It's very frustrating: one loader can read my emunand from my SD Card no problem, but can't load .wbfs titles from my SD card, while the other loaders can load my games from the SD card, but fail to properly load my emunand (when loaded from the SD card, loads fine from USB drive, but that too is part of my specific problem when you read the whole thing).

Thank you for the insight as to why this can't simply be done though. I do appreciate that beyond a simple, 'it's not gonna happen' kind of post.

 

[Shadow#1]

Like I said it's never going to happen

 

[MikaDubbz]

Like I said it's never going to happen

Yes, you were suuuuuper helpful, thank you. Like I said, I appreciate the insight from the guy who properly says why, over the person who just comes in and says it wont happen and then leaves without a proper explanation.

 

[Deleted-236924]

If Wiiflow and cfg usb loader fail to load DLC from emunand, what actually prevents you from just having the dlc installed to sysnand for that particular game, and running it from SD card that way?

 

[MikaDubbz]

If Wiiflow and cfg usb loader fail to load DLC from emunand, what actually prevents you from just having the dlc installed to sysnand for that particular game, and running it from SD card that way?

DLC is far larger than the vWii/Wii's NAND. I have like 800 songs for Rock Band and 500 or so for Guitar Hero, they load great off the emunand, but could never fit on the proper nand. At best I could maybe get like 10 extra DLC songs with the amount of space they allocated in the actual nand.

 

[CheatFreak47]

Thank you for the insight as to why this can't simply be done though. I do appreciate that beyond a simple, 'it's not gonna happen' kind of post.

It's okay, I think people in here need to realize that this sort of thing has equivalents on newer systems, where going from the physical format to the digital format is entirely trivial. (eg, 3DS, Wii U, Switch). This just isn't the case for the Wii, for similar reasons that it isn't possible to convert DS games to DSiWare and vice versa.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution for your Rock Band 3 problem aside from just saying to buy some externally powered USB Hard Drives and use those instead, so you don't have extra ports being used. USB Loader GX had the best support for cIOS based EmuNAND, and unfortunately, it's the only loader that didn't support loading Wii games from SD card.

 

[Deleted-236924]

I found something which could be of interest.

http://customscreators.com/index.php?/topic/14630-how-to-playing-customs-on-wii/page-147

That being said, I don't know if any of this stuff would work on vWii, since Wii stuff isn't always directly compatible with vWii.

Another option, if you have a flash drive, you can get the smallest one you can find that could fit the wbfs for Rock Band 3 on it, and install it on there. It's fiddly, because you'd have to swap between hdd and flash drive whenever you wanted to play that specific game, but it shouldn't have any problems with usb power, as long as your flash drive doesn't require so much power to function. A flash drive should be fine for Wii, it doesn't really write to the drive since the games save to nand and usb loader config writes to SD. It just reads game data. And even if for some reason vWii decides to just wear out flash drives faster than it would wear out hard drives, that doesn't really matter too much because a 8GB flash drive should be relatively cheap to replace, if it dies, and you don't lose any important data, you can just write the wbfs back to it and continue from where you left off.

In any case though, if you can't find a satisfactory solution, I'd recommend looking/asking for a solution to getting DLC to work off emunand with Wiiflow or cfg usb loader, you might want to make a new thread for that though because it seems like this one is a little beyond saving.

 

[MikaDubbz]

I found something which could be of interest.

http://customscreators.com/index.php?/topic/14630-how-to-playing-customs-on-wii/page-147

That being said, I don't know if any of this stuff would work on vWii, since Wii stuff isn't always directly compatible with vWii.

Another option, if you have a flash drive, you can get the smallest one you can find that could fit the wbfs for Rock Band 3 on it, and install it on there. It's fiddly, because you'd have to swap between hdd and flash drive whenever you wanted to play that specific game, but it shouldn't have any problems with usb power, as long as your flash drive doesn't require so much power to function. A flash drive should be fine for Wii, it doesn't really write to the drive since the games save to nand and usb loader config writes to SD. It just reads game data. And even if for some reason vWii decides to just wear out flash drives faster than it would wear out hard drives, that doesn't really matter too much because a 8GB flash drive should be relatively cheap to replace, if it dies, and you don't lose any important data, you can just write the wbfs back to it and continue from where you left off.

In any case though, if you can't find a satisfactory solution, I'd recommend looking/asking for a solution to getting DLC to work off emunand with Wiiflow or cfg usb loader, you might want to make a new thread for that though because it seems like this one is a little beyond saving.

Honestly, even if there is a different solution to getting all the DLC to load on my SD card in the vWii through a different method, it sounds like it'd be a headache. I followed some tutorial years ago to get the emunand running that I have with all the Rock Band and Guitar Hero DCLs/tracks that I had (legit tracks too, not customs) for my OG Wii, and I can't locate the files I had installed in the past for all those songs again, I've looked. I'm sure they're out there, but I have no ambition to go through that whole process again. Fortunately, I didn't have to adjust anything to get said emunand reading properly on the vWii when I had upgraded to the Wii U years ago.

I've thought of your flash drive idea as well, it's a conclusion I too have come to. But I can't find any of my old flash drives for the life of me. So this likely means I'll have to spend a few bucks on a new one. Which is fine enough, but I really would have preferred to not have to spend any extra money, and really was hoping for the easy method where I don't have to mess around with my configuration every time I want to play these titles, but these really are small complaints at the end of the day. I'm really just concerned about convenience more than anything, and I recognize that that probably ranks low on other people's concerns, especially for such a specific problem. Regardless, I'll get by. Thanks for trying to help though, I really do appreciate it.

 

[Crazynoob458]

never, wiiu or not the wii is 500 mb big games are typically 4gb so no

 

[MikaDubbz]

never, wiiu or not the wii is 500 mb big games are typically 4gb so no

oh lol, no need to bother, I actually was able to find a setup quite awhile ago for my Wii U that gives me everything I was looking for here: my Rock Band/Guitar Hero saves with all the many extra songs loading from my hard drive's emunand while still connecting the dongle to connect the keyboard controller. The key was using a USB hub with one of the hard drives y-cable ends connected there, and the other has to be connected in the other back port not taken up by the usb hub. Then I can connect the usb dongle in one of the extra hubs, and that actually works!

 

[Crazynoob458]

oh lol, no need to bother, I actually was able to find a setup quite awhile ago for my Wii U that gives me everything I was looking for here: my Rock Band/Guitar Hero saves with all the many extra songs loading from my hard drive's emunand while still connecting the dongle to connect the keyboard controller. The key was using a USB hub with one of the hard drives y-cable ends connected there, and the other has to be connected in the other back port not taken up by the usb hub. Then I can connect the usb dongle in one of the extra hubs, and that actually works!

nice i wasnt going to go into emunand but have fun