Thank you for your message.
No harm taken, I tried to not put oil on the fire and just let it go.
At my work I'm also confronted with a lot of anger and unhappy people, it's sometime hard for me to keep calm too. My work emotions also often reflect here. after a hard day, I'm easily irritated.
Sideskroll:
I'll try to answer everything, but most options are specific and you might not know what they are used for, that's why you think things are not working correctly, or not expectedly.
First, about the Channel name.
internal Channel's names are read at loader's launch. To access the NAND you need AHB access.
when launching from the forwarder, it's using IOS58+AHB which grants NAND access to the loader.
The loader then read the channel's list and titles, then reload to cIOS if requested by the user.
If you launch from HBC, AHB is not always granted.
It depends on your Meta.xml, it must contains <ahb_access/> tag to get NAND access at launch.
If you don't have it, the loader can't read the channels names, so they are either undefined, or listed based on their TitleID ("UNEO" or the ASCII number).
It should read the channel title correctly if you set your meta.xml correctly.
About video now:
On Wii, there's no "real" 16:9.
All games and application running in Wii mode are using a stretched picture.
To looks like the game is widescreen, the game is squeezing the picture (compressing, and losing pixel informations, details etc.) to fit more data on the picture.
Then the TV is stretching that squeezed picture to fit the full 16:9 area as if it was a real 16:9 picture. the circles looks like circle again, you see more data on the side, but you lost elements on the screen.
All wii games and gamecube games are rendered to 640*480p, 640*528, 640xHeight. everything is 640 width, even on widescreen setting. there's no more pixels rendered.
One resolution allows up to 708*480, which USBLoaderGX uses if the user has widescreen set (to enable more pixel on screen instead of fake stretched widescreen, but it's still not a real widescreen ratio).
It's hard to explain without a picture.
WiiU, on the contrary, has a real widescreen mode, with full resolution.
1920×1080, or 1280x720, or 854×480
Like you noted, games looks sharper when using 4:3, because they are rendered to their original size, the way they were designed.
There's no streched effect.
As the WiiU allows proper widescreen setting, or proper 4:3 setting by adding black borders (instead of setting the TV to output a 4:3 picture, it's done by the console, as some TV can't force 4:3 when using hdmi1080p).
So, nintendont added a setting to select if a game should use the WiiU 4:3 or 16:9 setting.
That setting is passed as argument from the loader to nintendont.
It's located in the nintendont settings section (global settings > loader settings > Gamecube > nintendont > WiiU widescreen)
This is the setting wich will affect the game's ratio when using nintendont.
If you don't enable WiiU widescreen, nintendont will always render in 4:3, it doesn't check the current video mode used by the console. It's a setting that the user choose in nintendont or in the loader.
As this setting could become useful for Wii games played on WiiU, I also added the ability to switch widescreen on/off inside the loader so the user can launch a Wii game with the video mode selected.
Wii games are not forcing the video mode, there's no setting, it's doesn't even know there is a real widescreen setting as wii never had such a setting, so it's keeping the current widescreen setting set by the user in the loader.
It's in features and not in "per game" setting because not all wii games benefit from 4:3. (resident evil, mario party)
I don't know if I made myself clear, as there are a lot of different element to take in account with video mode.
the game rendering mode is different than the console's output mode, and different than the TV mode.
You have 3 different thing to "play" with when rendering a picture. without understanding the one you are affecting it's difficult to display your picture correctly.
In addition to this 3 possibilities, Nintendont has a "widescreen patch", which fake the viewport to output even more data on screen.
It's the same setting that Wii game are using to fake the ratio setting based on the System menu video setting (the one used to squeeze and fake 16:9 by rendering more data on screen)
just remember that Wii doesn't have a real 16:9 and games looks better in 4:3, but you see less elements on screen.
you have to choose what you prefer. It could depend on the game you play too, how the ratio is affecting the sharpness etc.
USBLoaderGX is using a little more pixels in width, but it also looks better in 4:3, the fonts are nicer, as it's still not a full 16:9 but the TV is fitting the picture in full area so it's a little stretched.
One day, I'll try to make a visual representation of all I explained.
any idea why since the last few revisions, UsbLoaderGx no longer loads Nintendont correctly? I read in the Nintendont thread that it has to do with using HID devices. anyone know?
Edit: the interesting i notice is that if i load a gamecube game through usbloader gxi get the following message on Drive size inside nintendont = nanGB Section size: -1
Since Nintendont r303, Autoboot+HID is not working.
If you want to use HID, you need to disable autoboot.
Nobody tried to set a different setting for "nintendont setting file" ?
I didn't have time to check why it's doing it.
A user reported that using Autoboot directly from HBC doesn't create this issue, so it's something from this loader. I will have to check what's wrong.
