Hacking Showing banner screen on USB Loaders

themanuel

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Is it possible, in theory, for a backup loader to show the banner video of each game when clicking on it?
I know some loaders play the banner audio of the game, but showing the whole banner video, would make the ultimate loader, in my opinion.
That is the only part of the Wii gaming experience that is lost when using a backup loader.
 

themanuel

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Hey, Pip:
From your comments on the post I've linked below, it sounds like you have seen a video of that awesome theme in the picture shown on that same post.
Where can I see this video, if it's not some kind of joke?

I would love to have that theme if it existed...
 

themanuel

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Yeah, that's a good way to go about it.
Still, launching them all from the same location while still being able to see the banners would be really cool.
I'll look into Crap, though.
 

CarbonX13

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I don't think it's possible based on how the banner is made. The video itself is made a certain resolution, and a loader that scales the resolution down (so it won't disrupt the rest of the loader, unless you want the banner to pop up and cover the entire screen) would be a big hassle to make. Banners are meant to be a certain resolution, which is why banner bricks are when they're of an improper resolution. Scaling the banners may be physically impossible for loaders...
 

themanuel

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Thanks for the insight, CarbonX13.
I can't imagine the banner resolution would be that much different from the resolution currently used by the loaders. If this is the case, the solution would be to simply run everything at the same resolution. However, I do recognize that I have no idea about the challenges involved, and I'll bet they are many. It would take someone who really wanted to see his happen and had the necessary skills. I've learn not to say "impossible", when it comes to emulation and software hacks.
 

giantpune

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CarbonX13 is completely wrong.

There is really 1 big reasons this is not done. The reason is simply because nobody has completely reverse engineered the banner format and written a player for them. We already know how to take them apart, play the sounds, display the images. It is the correct laying out and animating all these images which is lacking. The resolution is not an issue, as even the lowest level wii GFX api allows scaling of images.

Once this gets done, and there is actually a way do display a working, animated banner, will come the second issue... The big delay involved in reading several banners. The way the system menu does it, it reads the banners for the current page and the next page. So, it stores 24 banners. Once you press the button to move to page 2, it reads ahead and loads the banners for page 3.

This works pretty good for the system menu which is reading 1 exact file ( already decrypted ) at a time from flash memory. Then it turns that file into a banner. However, to read a banner from a disc game, the loader must mount the game. This involves telling the cIOS to mount it, then the cIOS searching the HDD for the correct game, then actually opening the file, then reading the filetable to find the banner, then reading the banner ( which must be decrypted in IOS - this happens quickly, but is still a necessary step ), then turning that data into an animated banner, then closing the disc.

For all this to happen for every single game, every single time a banner needs to be shown, Im guessing that you will have a noticeable lag in the loader. And people with 500 games might as well not use that loader; it would take 5 minutes to get to the games in the middle of the list.
 

themanuel

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Thanks, giantpune.
I think you've given me more hope than I had at the beginning. If the first hurdle is ever overcome, I think the second one would be easily handled by pre-storing the information needed to animate the banner. This way, it is loaded from some cache, whether on the SD card or the HDD itself, whichever is faster.
You would have to add this information every time you install a new game, but it would always be available after that. There may still be some lag but maybe some additional caching could be implemented.
I could be totally wrong, but sounds like a possible path.
 

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