Hacking USB GX Loader Black screen when attempting to start a game

[SwishD]

Hi everyone,

I am using USB GX Loader through the homebrew channel, I have one game on my 128GB USB drive and it worked well the first few times I launched the game, but eventually the Wii started to crash after launching the game: no more screen output, the Wii-Mote wasn't responding (disconnected from the Wii), nor did any button on the Wii. Initially, I just solved this issue by unplugging the Wii and plugging it back, and this was enabling me to start the game again. This became more and more frequent until I got this black screen 100% of the time.

I googled this issue but didn't find anything convincing (I have a PAL Version of the game, 4th letter of the game tilte is a P, so I forced PAL Version 60 and 50Hz but that didn't help).

Is this a known issue? How could I figure out what I did wrongly?

Thank you very much for your help!

 

[Dragonballfan]

Hi everyone,

I am using USB GX Loader through the homebrew channel, I have one game on my 128GB USB drive and it worked well the first few times I launched the game, but eventually the Wii started to crash after launching the game: no more screen output, the Wii-Mote wasn't responding (disconnected from the Wii), nor did any button on the Wii. Initially, I just solved this issue by unplugging the Wii and plugging it back, and this was enabling me to start the game again. This became more and more frequent until I got this black screen 100% of the time.

I googled this issue but didn't find anything convincing (I have a PAL Version of the game, 4th letter of the game tilte is a P, so I forced PAL Version 60 and 50Hz but that didn't help).

Is this a known issue? How could I figure out what I did wrongly?

Thank you very much for your help!

I am having the same problem. I start a game once with usb loader gx then after it doesn't work

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

The issue is exactly the same, the Wii-more disconnects, the black screen and the Wii crashing. I have a 32gb PYN usb formatted to FAT32 with an allocation unit size of 32 kilobytes. The cIOS is the latest downloaded just recently too.

 

[SwishD]

Hello again,

I was following this tutorial; [can't post links, the link is in the description of the video I mention later in this sentence] more specifically a video that was using this tutorial: [don't have rights to post YT videos, it's a 37 mins long video about this topic, if you used it you'll know which one] but around minute 18 he made a mistake. He uses v10 beta 53 in his video whereas in should be w10 beta 52. In the screenshot in the guide it says it's v10 beta 53 but there's a note that specifically asks you to use v10 beta 52.

So I re-did the cIOS installation following the tutorial without watching the video, after that my USB GX Loader started to crash in the main menu, so I formatted again my USB Drive to FAT32 (allocation unit 32kb), put 1 game on my USB Drive using the Wii Backup Manager program, now the USB Loader GX runs correctly, I can launch my game and land on the main menu, but when I press "+" to continue to go the following menu my game crashes, I have a black screen, nothing is responding and the TV is making a weird noise. The sound is the same frequency and doesn't stop or cut, as if I'd be constantly pressing a number on a phone

I thought it was solved when the game was launching, and was already writing the post telling how I had done it but before posting the reply I noticed this issue. What an emotional roller-coaster!

Edit: Solved, at least temporarily. I just took another random USB Drive that was laying in the house. It's just 8GB, and it was native FAT32 16kb. What solutions would I have to be able to use a larger driver?

 

[Cyan]

Flash drives are barely compatible. this is written all over the forum for 8 months in all those "Black screen, please help" threads nobody reads and just feel like creating a new cloned issue : DON'T USE FLASH DRIVES !
if you find a working one, it's only a half working one (you can't dump games to the drive. writing to the drive can corrupt all your partition : downloading covers, downlaoding cheatcodes, saving a setting, saving a nintendont savegame, etc.)

the real solution is to use a real HDD, not a flash !
PC: prefer western digital or seagate. don't use toshiba HDD!

 

[Dragonballfan]

Actually I fixed it just now by putting the game video settings to 'system default' while playing with the settings.

 

[Cyan]

Then it wasn't the same problem.
your problem was playing a game from another region, or just forced a video mode instead of using "disc default" (to force the region of the game) or "console default" (to force the region from the console).

the best option is still "disc default", to set the video mode to the one from your disc.
if you play a NTSC game on a PAL wii, you need a NTSC video mode (based on your game's region)
if you play a PAL game on a NTSC console .... yeah that's USA people's problem. TVs are rarely PAL compatible and you need to force NTSC, that's why "console default" did a thing to keep ntsc signal, or use a component cable instead of composite.

 

[Dragonballfan]

oh

Then it wasn't the same problem.
your problem was playing a game from another region, or just forced a video mode instead of using "disc default" (to force the region of the game) or "console default" (to force the region from the console).

the best option is still "disc default", to set the video mode to the one from your disc.
if you play a NTSC game on a PAL wii, you need a NTSC video mode (based on your game's region)
if you play a PAL game on a NTSC console .... yeah that's USA people's problem. TVs are rarely PAL compatible and you need to force NTSC, that's why "console default" did a thing to keep ntsc signal, or use a component cable instead of composite.

oh okay so now I understand more. Thank you that'll help for troubleshooting in the future.

 

[SwishD]

@Cyan: Is it only HDD? You're saying no flash drives, but what about SSDs? The Wii can't make use of USB 3.0, should I try to get a 2.0 drive? Is there anything else I should know? (I know it's a lot of questions but I don't want to buy something useless again) Thank you for the information - I'll get a drive of a Seagate or WD, thank you for the tip. To be honest I've read many threads but I must have overlooked this very important detail!

Flash drives are barely compatible. this is written all over the forum for 8 months in all those "Black screen, please help" threads nobody reads and just feel like creating a new cloned issue : DON'T USE FLASH DRIVES !

the real solution is to use a real HDD, not a flash !
PC: prefer western digital or seagate. don't use toshiba HDD!

 

[Cyan]

some users reported SSD to be working fine.
but maybe they are like flash drives (working randomly, and badly, read mode only?), because SSD are made of flash electronic devices, so I don't know you'll have to test.

The wii can read USB3.0 drives, it just reads it in backward compatible USB2.0 standard.
USB3.0 is useful on your computer to transfer ISO to the drive. but I don't think you really need it, it's not that slow, unless you plan to have the full Wii library on that drive?

If you find a USB2.0, it should work better (because old drives seems to have better compatibility than newer). but 3.0 should work too, you just need to be sure to set the IOS to 58 in the homebrew you use to initialize the drive properly.
though, if you want to be sure, I'd go with a small (less than 2TB) usb2.0. This way, you can format it to FAT32 without issues, it could even be a 512bytes/sector drive, instead of a 4096bytes/sector drive. sector size is a physical size of the drive's plate, you can't change it, and some homebrew are not compatible (mostly neek and neek2o).
drives bigger than 2TB are sure to use 4k/sector.