Quaztab:
Hi, this is very interesting that you give this info to all of us!! But please, what tool do you use to DEPACK and REPACK Pak files to do that? What tool do you use to convert audio file from stereo to mono so it works afterwards?
Also, I notice It seems some Openbor games were made to work with a "specific" version of openbor....so if you update your DOL file to latest, only those that work with the latest will work it seems!! So it seems the good ways would be having differents version of openbor, test which game are compatible with the version, and put them in the adequate directory of the openbor Version. Your thoughts about this?
This is a cut and paste from a post I made on Reddit a whiles back:
It's odd that when you search this sub for OpenBOR threads that it's pretty empty. For those unaware, OpenBOR is a public domain side-scrolling fighting engine with a TON of user created content. Wii Mundo has some dedicated links which have Wii specific optimized games, which I definitely recommend checking out, but the Wii is not confined to just those games.
I've been fiddling with OpenBOR tweaking games to get them to work on the Wii, and have some tips to share when it comes to the Wii version. First:
- The Wii has memory issues with some, and especially newer, OpenBOR games.
This is not a surprise because the Wii in general has lots of issues with memory and arcade emulation. There are ways to get incompatible games to run though, and it comes down to unpacking an OpenBOR PAK, tweaking the innards to make them smaller, then recompiling it. The programs you need to do this are part of the OpenBOR package and the batch files to do this are called "Paxplode.bat" to unpack a PAK file into a DATA directory, and "Packer.bat" to compress the DATA directory into a PAK.
- Goldwave is an audio tool that can shrink and convert audio files for Wii compatibility.
What makes Goldwave especially useful is that it can batch convert audio files in subdirectories. Wii OpenBOR does not support stereo audio files. If you play a game PAK on OpenBOR Wii and you hear a lot of static instead of sound effects, it's likely the sound effect is in stereo and needs to be converted. Conversion to mono also shrinks the memory requirements of the PAK and can make an unplayable PAK playable. So you can take a PAK, "paxplode" it, convert the audio to mono through Goldwave, "packer" it back into a PAK and then have something that works and sounds fine.
- Wii OpenBOR will keep working until it runs out of memory.
What this means is that you could find a game, load it, play it for a long while, and then have it crash in one of the later/last levels because the Wii ran out of memory from loading new level assets. Bad news is this sucks, good news is that the engine usually remembers where it left off, so you can reload OpenBOR and that PAK, choose to load a save game, and pick up where you left off.
Here's the interesting thing about the Wii version of OpenBOR. It will only load into memory what is requested, but will never unload it from memory. So if you crash on level 10, the game will have in memory 10 levels of unique assets. But if you load a save from a fresh reboot, it will load level 10 and only know what's in level 10, and nothing prior.
There are programming triggers in the OpenBOR programming language that you can set to direct memory to dump assets from memory once dispatched to free up for new assets once they are no longer needed, but for some reason this does not work on Wii. In my experience playing with those unload from memory triggers, it made the memory issues worse. Would appreciate advice if I'm wrong in this assessment.
........
There's a literal ton of OpenBOR content out there. There's a lot of Beats of Rage palette/sound swap clone games, which are occassionally interesting, but there's also a lot of creative content too. I'm hoping to start a discussion on the PAKs that perform well on Wii.
