Hacking Nintendont

[SaulFabre]

Is there any chance that NTFS support could be added to Nintendont please?

Unfortunately trying to add NTFS support to Nintendont could kill both Nintendont and even the Wii/Wii U

Quote from @pedro702:

pedro702 (carnage702):
@FIX94 said that it would be too much memory to take on the nintendont dol file, nintendont already has a custom usb fat32 codding instead of the regular homebrew apps one due to memory constraints and ntfs would be much bigger, at least from what i remember him saying, so yeah not gonna happen and 99% of people just use fat32 for all homebrew stuff since most apps dont support ntfs.

Original message from: https://github.com/FIX94/Nintendont/issues/841#issuecomment-741112637

 

[fandango]

Unfortunately trying to add NTFS support to Nintendont could kill both Nintendont and even the Wii/Wii U

Thank you for the quick reply. But is this really true?
Nintendont's dol is only a fraction of the size of ULGX and Wiiflow, but these other loaders support NTFS without memory issues.
I'm not doubting @FIX94, but maybe things have changed since he said that?

 

[pedro702]

Thank you for the quick reply. But is this really true?
Nintendont's dol is only a fraction of the size of ULGX and Wiiflow, but these other loaders support NTFS without memory issues.
I'm not doubting @FIX94, but maybe things have changed since he said that?

its not about raw filesize is about ram memory usage, nintendont needs all the ram it can get, do remember that the wii has very little ram and nintendont is running in the background all the time while running stuff like memory card emulations, game code, audio code, audio streaming and so on, everything is running and then running the game.

thats why you you use 16mb memory card the disc swap games will not swap because you will be without ram to make them swap.

Also usb loaders use an cios to run the usb code for them so they arent doing background stuff like nintendont does, nintendont doesnt use any cios, it just uses the official wii ios58.

 

[fandango]

Also usb loaders use an cios to run the usb code for them so they arent doing background stuff like nintendont does, nintendont doesnt use any cios, it just uses the official wii ios58.

Thank you for the information. So why can't Nintendont be modified to use cIOS to run the USB code (or anything else that it can), so that it saves memory usage?

 

[pedro702]

Thank you for the information. So why can't Nintendont be modified to use cIOS to run the USB code (or anything else that it can), so that it saves memory usage?

because the entire point of nintendont is to no use cios, nintendont runs totally free of everything, that is why it works easily on wii,wiiu or wiivc injects.

if it used cios you would need make people install nintendont cios and most of them would screw everything up, p then you would need a cios for wii a diferente cios for wiiu and then you would need a totaly diferent method for wiivc injects, and eve then you would need to modify the entire nintendont code to adapt to cios which would probably need to be rewritten from scratch.

there is a reason why no homebrew emulators use ntfs either dont you ever noticed? no snes,nes,md,tg16,n64,psx,etc.No emulator uses that format because people dont want to make anyone install different cios just to use homebrew it would be a mess you already have like 3 different cios just for usbloadergx/wiiflow since some games dont like a cios and others only work with different ones.

If it was just add a few line of codes every homebrew app would support ntfs and right now none do, only the wii iso loaders.

 

[ccfman2004]

Also there is literally no reason to use NTFS as GameCube games are about 1.36GB (1.46GB on Mac) and you can split Wii ISOs into 3.99GB segments so FAT32 is perfectly fine and way less demanding than NTFS would be.

 

[godreborn]

afaik, usb loader gx can use ntfs, but as said, it's not really worth it as most things are limited to fat32.

 

[fandango]

Also there is literally no reason to use NTFS as GameCube games are about 1.36GB (1.46GB on Mac) and you can split Wii ISOs into 3.99GB segments so FAT32 is perfectly fine and way less demanding than NTFS would be.

For YOU there is no reason to use NTFS, but for ME there is. I have a collection of all the GC and Wii games on a 4TB disk. But making a hard disk over 2TB work with FAT32 is technically tricky, and only works reliably with WD disks, and only with certain partition tables and cluster sizes. To do it you need old tools like WDQuickFormatter.exe and guiformat-x64.exe which are Windows only. Plus because of the 4GB filesize limitation you have to split all the games. I've done all this, but's a real pain to do. Whilst NFTS doesn't have any of these issues.

And I do wonder what will happen in the future once SSDs take over? I guess there wont be any FAT32 solution for 4TB SSDs, although I realise this is a long way off.

Some people mentioned that other homebrew, such as emulators, don't support NTFS. I don't have any of these, but if I did I would just run them from a FAT32 SD Card instead with the emulated games on it.

So personally I think there is a case for Nintendont supporting NTFS, although it appears others disagree.
I understand that it would be technically difficult. But hell, I would be happy with a Nintendo fork that replaces the FAT32 USB driver with a NTFS USB driver, so everything goes on a NTFS USB disk!
But I see from the posts here that at the moment there doesn't seem to be anyone willing to take on my request for NTFS support, which is a shame.

 

[pedro702]

For YOU there is no reason to use NTFS, but for ME there is. I have a collection of all the GC and Wii games on a 4TB disk. But making a hard disk over 2TB work with FAT32 is technically tricky, and only works reliably with WD disks, and only with certain partition tables and cluster sizes. To do it you need old tools like WDQuickFormatter.exe and guiformat-x64.exe which are Windows only. Plus because of the 4GB filesize limitation you have to split all the games. I've done all this, but's a real pain to do. Whilst NFTS doesn't have any of these issues.

And I do wonder what will happen in the future once SSDs take over? I guess there wont be any FAT32 solution for 4TB SSDs, although I realise this is a long way off.

Some people mentioned that other homebrew, such as emulators, don't support NTFS. I don't have any of these, but if I did I would just run them from a FAT32 SD Card instead with the emulated games on it.

So personally I think there is a case for Nintendont supporting NTFS, although it appears others disagree.
I understand that it would be technically difficult. But hell, I would be happy with a Nintendo fork that replaces the FAT32 USB driver with a NTFS USB driver, so everything goes on a NTFS USB disk!
But I see from the posts here that at the moment there doesn't seem to be anyone willing to take on my request for NTFS support, which is a shame.

nintendont is an open source project if you know how to code you can fork it and do as you please, but dont expect anyone to do months of work to get anything like ntfs on nintendont just because. You can run nintendont from the sd card too, just get a big enough sd card and put a load of gc games in there.

Like people said there is very little incentive on ntfs on the wii in general because most wii homebrew does not support it, the only 2 apps that support it are usb loaders, nothing else supports it.

 

[fandango]

nintendont is an open source project if you know how to code you can fork it and do as you please, but dont expect anyone to do months of work to get anything like ntfs on nintendont just because. You can run nintendont from the sd card too, just get a big enough sd card and put a load of gc games in there.

Like people said there is very little incentive on ntfs on the wii in general because most wii homebrew does not support it, the only 2 apps that support it are usb loaders, nothing else supports it.

Thank you. Yes I will consider buying a 1TB SD Card for the GC games once they come down in price.

 

[godreborn]

yeah, don't laugh at the pos that is psx-place.

 

[pedro702]

Thank you. Yes I will consider buying a 1TB SD Card for the GC games once they come down in price.

you dont need to have a complete roomset of the gc to enjoy it, never understood why people need to have entire roomsets when they will play less than 10% of what they have in their lifespan...

 

[fandango]

I've read that running GC games from SD isn't recommended because the Wii's SD Card slot can be slow.
So instead I'm gonna: format my 4TB disk with a 3TB main NTFS partition for Wii games, and a 1TB FAT32 secondary partition for GC games. Wish me luck!

 

[jeannotte]

So instead I'm gonna try this: format my 4TB disk with a 3TB main NTFS partition for Wii games, and a 1TB FAT32 secondary partition for GC games. I think the only mucking around I need to do is make sure that the FAT32 partition uses 32k clusters.

hello,

use an external hard drive larger than 2TB, see here ===>https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-...-on-a-wii-as-a-single-fat32-partition.602038/

 

[fandango]

Oh it looks like running an emuNAND via neek only works from a FAT32 disk? Damn!
Although you can run it on SD Card with some limitations.

 

[pedro702]

Oh it looks like running an emuNAND via neek only works from a FAT32 disk? Damn!

like i told you, the only apps that support ntfs are wiiflow and usbloadergx, the wii homebrew isnt coded for ntfs and it isnt even normaly supported by the wii homebrew tools.

 

[Mortjsf]

Just Posting a Thank you for this!

 

[fandango]

Nintendont saves GC raw game saves in a saves folder on the same drive as the GC games.
Could I please request that a new 'Force Saves to SD' setting be added.
Enabling it would allow the saves to be on SD Card whilst the games are on USB disc.

This would be extremely helpful for me because:
I regularly backup my SD Card but not my USB disk as it only contains games that don't change.
Accessing the saves via Savegame Manager is faster if they are on SD.

I hope this is the best place to make suggestions, but if better somewhere else then please let me know.

 

[pedro702]

Nintendont saves GC raw game saves in a saves folder on the same drive as the GC games.
Could I please request that a new 'Force Saves to SD' setting be added.
Enabling it would allow the saves to be on SD Card whilst the games are on USB disc.

This would be extremely helpful for me because:
I regularly backup my SD Card but not my USB disk as it only contains games that don't change.
Accessing the saves via Savegame Manager is faster if they are on SD.

I hope this is the best place to make suggestions, but if better somewhere else then please let me know.

not gonna happen, nintendont cant mount 2 diferent setups at the same time, that is why when you start nintendont you have to pick between sd /usb so that only one device is mounted while the gc games are running. nintendont can only mount one device at a time.

 

[N7Kopper]

Nintendont saves GC raw game saves in a saves folder on the same drive as the GC games.
Could I please request that a new 'Force Saves to SD' setting be added.
Enabling it would allow the saves to be on SD Card whilst the games are on USB disc.

This would be extremely helpful for me because:
I regularly backup my SD Card but not my USB disk as it only contains games that don't change.
Accessing the saves via Savegame Manager is faster if they are on SD.

I hope this is the best place to make suggestions, but if better somewhere else then please let me know.

Your only alternative is to use a physical memory card if you're on Wii. If you're on Wii U you have to deal with it.