Hacking USB Loader GX: Black screen when loading Wii games

[Greenie17]

ah, it crashes with 1271 ?
try 1268 and do the same (changing the view, etc.) to see if it has the same problem. It's maybe a bug in latest version only.

if you have a code dump, please take a readable screenshot of it, and provide the exact revision number of the loader you are using.
it'll help find the bug.

Loader revision number on boot up shows verion 3.0 rev 1271.
credits shows: Rev1271 IOS249 (Rev 65535) + AHB (d2x v10beta52 base56)

Crash image:

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

Loader revision number on boot up shows verion 3.0 rev 1271.
credits shows: Rev1271 IOS249 (Rev 65535) + AHB (d2x v10beta52 base56)

Crash image:

I'll try 1268 next but I am pretty sure this was happening on 1268 since I just recently upgraded to 1271 to see if it fixed the issue.

 

[Cyan]

thanks for the clean screenshot.
I checked the values, and I'm not sure it's interested or not. so far, it seems a crash in libogc. (the way it talks to IOS, or a problem with multi threading).
I don't know what causes it. I never had a crash by just changing views.

does it crash when you launch the game ? as it seems related to IOS it might be when it reloads IOS to launch the game.
I know there is a bug if you launch a game too fast after booting the loader but before seeing the free hdd space value at the bottom of the loader. It can be a crash, or a cause for black screen at game launch too.
I don't think it's your problem because you said it happens after spending time in the loader's interface, changing views/layouts.

 

[Greenie17]

thanks for the clean screenshot.
I checked the values, and I'm not sure it's interested or not. so far, it seems a crash in libogc. (the way it talks to IOS, or a problem with multi threading).
I don't know what causes it. I never had a crash by just changing views.

does it crash when you launch the game ? as it seems related to IOS it might be when it reloads IOS to launch the game.
I know there is a bug if you launch a game too fast after booting the loader but before seeing the free hdd space value at the bottom of the loader. It can be a crash, or a cause for black screen at game launch too.
I don't think it's your problem because you said it happens after spending time in the loader's interface, changing views/layouts.

Thanks for the quick response. No the only time a crash like in the screenshot occurs is when I am on the game selector screen and I change the different display selector views. Seems like if I do this fairly quickly it will crash. Keep in mind I am not selecting any games to play here. Just changing views (from grid to list to carousel view). If I try to play nearly any game (some do play) it go to a black screen as if it's going to load the game and then nothing happens. My remote control loses sync and flashes and the Wii has to be literally powered off as nothing ever happens.

 

[Cyan]

how many games do you have?
are you displaying many from different origin (wii, gamecube, nand, emu ?) at the same time?
if you do, try to display only one device (USB, or SD) to see if the usb access is maybe the problem (too slow? I don't know)

Maybe one of your game is crashing the loader.
if it has a wrong animated banner, or a wrong cover, etc.

 

[Greenie17]

how many games do you have?
are you displaying many from different origin (wii, gamecube, nand, emu ?) at the same time?
if you do, try to display only one device (USB, or SD) to see if the usb access is maybe the problem (too slow? I don't know)

Maybe one of your game is crashing the loader.
if it has a wrong animated banner, or a wrong cover, etc.

Sorry for delay in response. Was out of town. I have almost 1,200 games on the hard drive. I am pretty sure nearly ALL of them as US NTSC Wii games all on a single partition of a 4TB USB external hard drive.

As far as the animated banner or wrong cover I have no idea where it would of come from but that being said it's totally possible. Thanks.

 

[Cyan]

you have a lot of games. (I don't even have 100 to do my tests).
maybe the loader has memory leaks or issues refreshing that much games. I don't know.
or maybe one if causing the crash, but to be sure you'll have to take time to do more tests.

cut your game list in half (move half the game to another folder), and try again. if it still crash, try the other half only. if both are crashing, either both half have wrong games or covers, or it's just a memory issue of the loader, or a hdd too slow to refresh fast enough, etc.
if one half doesn't crash it means the problem is part of the half, cut the problematic half in two and try again until you find the crashing game.


you can try by enabling only wii games, instead of mixing origin (wii, gamecube, emunand, etc.)
someone reported to me that gamecube were a lot slower for the loader to get found & listed in the interface.

 

[Greenie17]

you have a lot of games. (I don't even have 100 to do my tests).
maybe the loader has memory leaks or issues refreshing that much games. I don't know.
or maybe one if causing the crash, but to be sure you'll have to take time to do more tests.

cut your game list in half (move half the game to another folder), and try again. if it still crash, try the other half only. if both are crashing, either both half have wrong games or covers, or it's just a memory issue of the loader, or a hdd too slow to refresh fast enough, etc.
if one half doesn't crash it means the problem is part of the half, cut the problematic half in two and try again until you find the crashing game.


you can try by enabling only wii games, instead of mixing origin (wii, gamecube, emunand, etc.)
someone reported to me that gamecube were a lot slower for the loader to get found & listed in the interface.

Interesting take. I wouldn't think that would matter but I can try it. Interesting if I just keep it on one view I can totally scroll through them all with no problems. Do you think this could be related to the screen just going to black and needing to reboot when launching the game?

I'll try to remove a bunch of games. Or can I just create folders and move them into groups of say 100?

 

[Greenie17]

Interesting take. I wouldn't think that would matter but I can try it. Interesting if I just keep it on one view I can totally scroll through them all with no problems. Do you think this could be related to the screen just going to black and needing to reboot when launching the game?

I'll try to remove a bunch of games. Or can I just create folders and move them into groups of say 100?

Right now I have a folder called wbfs on the drive with 1,249 wbfs files in it. Some are larger than 4GB and split. I also have a Games folder with Intellivision Lives! [GIVE4Z] and an apps folder with homebrew_browser in there. That's it. So I will move half the games out of the drive and let you know what happens.

 

[Greenie17]

Right now I have a folder called wbfs on the drive with 1,249 wbfs files in it. Some are larger than 4GB and split. I also have a Games folder with Intellivision Lives! [GIVE4Z] and an apps folder with homebrew_browser in there. That's it. So I will move half the games out of the drive and let you know what happens.

OK I removed nearly half the games. Down to 604 games. And I moved to GRID view and moved the cursor around and it actually locked up hard. See pic. Very odd. This never happened before. I had to power off.

 

[Cyan]

it's really strange that it locks like that.
and you said you had problem with older versions too?

I suppose the hdd free size is wrong too. is it ever good, or always wrong?
it might be a 64bit calculation issue for drives bigger than 2TB, maybe only on NTFS.

 

[Greenie17]

it's really strange that it locks like that.
and you said you had problem with older versions too?

I suppose the hdd free size is wrong too. is it ever good, or always wrong?
it might be a 64bit calculation issue for drives bigger than 2TB, maybe only on NTFS.

I had the same black screen issues with an older version (that again was working perfectly) in another room. I am wondering if the Hard Drive need a be reformatted. Maybe I'll back it all back and format and copy like 10 games over and see what happens there. By older version what do you recommend?

 

[Cyan]

1268 was used by lot of people for a year, without a report about this bug. at least, no report on gbatemp. I rarely look at reports on sourceforge.

 

[Greenie17]

1268 was used by lot of people for a year, without a report about this bug. at least, no report on gbatemp. I rarely look at reports on sourceforge.

Update for today. I got all games backed off and put 10 back on and tried to view game grid and it crashed hard. I have now formatted as exFAT and put 3 games on. Viewing on different grids works. the disc space still shows 11990624894976.00GB of 120022. No idea what that number is or how it is coming up with it. I tried running the 3 games and all 3 ran. This is not to say it's all fixed but it's a good sign. Next to try is to put 20 games on including the one that crashed all the time (Wii Party) and see what happens.

 

[Greenie17]

Update for today. I got all games backed off and put 10 back on and tried to view game grid and it crashed hard. I have now formatted as exFAT and put 3 games on. Viewing on different grids works. the disc space still shows 11990624894976.00GB of 120022. No idea what that number is or how it is coming up with it. I tried running the 3 games and all 3 ran. This is not to say it's all fixed but it's a good sign. Next to try is to put 20 games on including the one that crashed all the time (Wii Party) and see what happens.

OK I added 10 more games including split files and Wii party and they ALL RUN and no more crashing on the menu screen. Next step is to put all the games back on and try. Seems to me a reformat so far has fixed it. Though I did go from NTFS to exFAT. I don't think that should matter though. I guess one thing I can try for testing purposes is a reformat back to NTFS and copy 10 games over and see what that does. Need to take off for the rest of the night but will report back tomorrow my findings.

 

[Cyan]

I have now formatted as exFAT

exFAT is not supported by USBLoaderGX. not any other homebrew but Nintendont.
unless it's supported by the current LibFAT used by usbloadergx without knowing it, but it could be bad and you can lose your data/partition completely.

I recommend you format to FAT32 32k/cluster to be safe, as I wouldn't be happy if you lose 1000+ games at once, better do it now that you have only 10 games on it.

 

[Greenie17]

exFAT is not supported by USBLoaderGX. not any other homebrew but Nintendont.
unless it's supported by the current LibFAT used by usbloadergx without knowing it, but it could be bad and you can lose your data/partition completely.

I recommend you format to FAT32 32k/cluster to be safe, as I wouldn't be happy if you lose 1000+ games at once, better do it now that you have only 10 games on it.

hmmmm.... Well.... It's loading and working and playing (which is awesome considering what was happening). But that being said, I just did a ntfs format and put 10 games on. All grid views are also fine and all games are now playing. So it was def something with the hard drive. Either I had something on it that the Wii didn't like or something happened with the partition. I suppose it could still be a problem with all games on which I will try next. But that will take me a few hours to copy them all on. I'll post the findings.

 

[Cyan]

okay, good to know it also work fine with NTFS.
it's best to use it instead of exFAT. apparently it works (I didn't know!), but to be safe I prefer you keep using NTFS.
that's too bad that you don't use FAT32 because you could also play gamecube games on the same partition.

you can use SD card, or another drive, or other partition with FAT32 if you need.

 

[Greenie17]

okay, good to know it also work fine with NTFS.
it's best to use it instead of exFAT. apparently it works (I didn't know!), but to be safe I prefer you keep using NTFS.
that's too bad that you don't use FAT32 because you could also play gamecube games on the same partition.

you can use SD card, or another drive, or other partition with FAT32 if you need.

Great to know. Thank you for all the insight and helping me through this. I'll post up once they are all back on and what the grid / games do.

okay, good to know it also work fine with NTFS.
it's best to use it instead of exFAT. apparently it works (I didn't know!), but to be safe I prefer you keep using NTFS.
that's too bad that you don't use FAT32 because you could also play gamecube games on the same partition.

you can use SD card, or another drive, or other partition with FAT32 if you need.

Great to know. Thank you for all the insight and helping me through this. I'll post up once they are all back on and what the grid / games do. I wonder if the games folder with Intellivision Lives! [GIVE4Z] and an apps folder with homebrew_browser maybe was causing issues. Since the format those are obviously gone. All I have now is the wbfs folder with all the games in it. It had to be either one of those folders or just a corruption on the drive itself. Very odd.

 

[Cyan]

if it was caused by one of the file or folder on your card, I think it's only caused by games in loaded/scanned folder : wbfs for wii, games for gamecube, emuNAND folder you set if you enabled it.
it shouldn't be crashing due to other homebrew in apps folder.

why do you think intellivision Lives would cause the issue? it didn't have a iso or wbfs in it?
if it's a proper wii game ISO format, it shouldn't crash the loader. actually, the ISO is not even scanned as long as you don't launch it. it only scans the folder's name to get the TitleID (here "give4z") and use it to search for the game's title in Wiitdb.xml, if not found it'll use the folder's name as game's title.

 

[Greenie17]

if it was caused by one of the file or folder on your card, I think it's only caused by games in loaded/scanned folder : wbfs for wii, games for gamecube, emuNAND folder you set if you enabled it.
it shouldn't be crashing due to other homebrew in apps folder.

why do you think intellivision Lives would cause the issue? it didn't have a iso or wbfs in it?
if it's a proper wii game ISO format, it shouldn't crash the loader. actually, the ISO is not even scanned as long as you don't launch it. it only scans the folder's name to get the TitleID (here "give4z") and use it to search for the game's title in Wiitdb.xml, if not found it'll use the folder's name as game's title.

OK so I got ALL the games back on and changed to the 'CHANNEL GRID' view and it complete crashed (same as that pic I included in an earlier post). The carousel works fine and the games DO load. So the games play now. But there is def a memory leak or something with a lot of games and the channel grid.

As far as your q about intellivision lives, I am not sure that was what was causing it. Just throwing out the things that changed. I doubt that was the problem since that was on there when it was working. Maybe the drive was just messed up.