Hacking USB Loader GX

[blackb0x]

Is there a way to intergate gc2wiimote to usb loader gx?

It's not fully open source yet, but even if it was it'd be difficult to add into any other loaders since it'd require so many changes.

 

[fandango]

Is there a way to intergate gc2wiimote to usb loader gx?

Err, what is the point in emulating a Wiimote on a real Wii? Why not just use a real Wiimote?

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

Wouldn't a setting like the one that you're suggesting defeat the actual purpose of the lock though? Like it's a parental feature, so you shouldn't ever want the loader to be unlocked by restarting it

I only suggested having the ability to default to being unlocked and not just locked simply because it felt incomplete for any such setting to have an option to only default to being locked and not either locked or unlocked.

Blocking write access to your config file will result in some unintended behaviour, but is there any reason to block write access if game sorting worked the way you want it to?

When write access is not blocked, it actually doesn't quite sort in the way I desired.

Or rather, it sorts correctly, but the problem is that USB Loader GX remembers what game you last loaded and therefore, the next time you load USB Loader GX, it will show whatever part of the list or page that game was on.

I personally use the "Channel" view and sort by most played so, if the game I ran is only rarely played and is on like page 5 or something, then the next time I launch USB Loader GX it would default to showing page 5 again. Blocking write access allows USB Loader GX to instead always default to showing page 1 which is where all of the most-played games are, meaning it's much more likely that anybody turning on the Wii console is going to want a game on the first page, not the 5th page or the like (the most played game has a play count in the 500 range, the second most played is over 100, meanwhile the highest played game on just the second page, let alone the 5th page, is only like 20; on page 5 you're looking at low single-digit play-counts like maybe 3 or so).

I also know that the list mode, at least when sorted by A to Z, similarly remembers what the last game you played was and defaults to scrolling to that part of the list, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same IMO undesirable behavior occurs when sorting by most played in list mode as well (or quite possibly all of the different view modes).


BTW regarding undesirable behavior, the only undesirable behavior I've found is that changes to any global settings are lost the next time I launch USB Loader GX (and I usually set the global settings just a single time which I do so with write access allowed, and then afterwards re-disable write access); the only other settings that I know of that are lost (GUI lock enable/disable as well as which page was last viewed) are the two things that I don't want to be remembered anyway.

 

[fandango]

I actually like the way it remembers and takes you to the last game you played in the list. It makes sense to do this for the A-Z list. I guess it doesn't make sense to do it for the most played though.

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

I actually like the way it remembers and takes you to the last game you played in the list. It makes sense to do this for the A-Z list. It doesn't make sense to do it for the most played though.

This is 100% my logic.

That previously-mentioned friend of mine uses A-Z for his USB Loader GX (which he only uses for GameCube games), and the part I didn't mention is that it was me that actually set him up with it including setting it to A-Z (he bought his Wii used and already soft-modded, but its USB HDD has become temperamental recently so I had to re-set him up). It only made sense for me to set it to A-Z by default because I specifically added all of the GameCube games I owned on disc (upwards of 30; he meanwhile has like 9 GC discs but 5 of which I also own), and it's not like he knows exactly what games I owned so a simple A-Z makes more sense in terms of discovery and sorting through unknown games.

But since my Wii sees the vast vast majority of its game-time across only a few handful of games, it only makes sense for me to use the "sort by most played". I also use channel view partially because it's easier visually for people with sub-par eyesight which is something I need to accommodate for on my Wii setup (particularly of the more elderly kind) and also because it's logistically identical to the standard Wii menu which, again, is useful when accommodating for people of the more elderly kind (this is also why I have my Wii actually automatically boot into USB Loader GX and skip the Wii Menu altogether via Cyan's modified bootmii file).

 

[fandango]

This is 100% my logic.

That previously-mentioned friend of mine uses A-Z for his USB Loader GX (which he only uses for GameCube games), and the part I didn't mention is that it was me that actually set him up with it including setting it to A-Z (he bought his Wii used and already soft-modded, but its USB HDD has become temperamental recently so I had to re-set him up). It only made sense for me to set it to A-Z by default because I specifically added all of the GameCube games I owned on disc (upwards of 30; he meanwhile has like 9 GC discs but 5 of which I also own), and it's not like he knows exactly what games I owned so a simple A-Z makes more sense in terms of discovery and sorting through unknown games.

But since my Wii sees the vast vast majority of its game-time across only a few handful of games, it only makes sense for me to use the "sort by most played". I also use channel view partially because it's easier visually for people with sub-par eyesight which is something I need to accommodate for on my Wii setup (particularly of the more elderly kind) and also because it's logistically identical to the standard Wii menu which, again, is useful when accommodating for people of the more elderly kind (this is also why I have my Wii actually automatically boot into USB Loader GX and skip the Wii Menu altogether via Cyan's modified bootmii file).

If you want a simple setup, then why not just use an unmodified Wii with physical Wii and GC game disks?

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

If you want a simple setup, then why not just use an unmodified Wii with physical Wii and GC game disks?

Originally I did, but the main thing is that Nintendo Puzzle Collection (which I do in fact own a disc of) is a very dpad heavy GameCube game, so I originally started using Devolution as an easier way to launch and control that game (at least once classic controller support got added to Devolution) and I then moved over to Nintendont for that game once Nintendont became an option as Devolution's requirement to press the Home button to "activate" the classic controller was tripping up my 60+ year old parents (and later I found a partial translation of the game which is not something that could be ran in Devolution nor from a disc) and, when I brought up the Home button requirement issue to the dev of Devolution, he was... less-than sympathetic to put it nicely (let's just say that I would not suggest to him to consider employment at a nursing home).

Also Rush 2049 in the GameCube game compilation Midway Arcade Treasures 3 has some admittedly tolerable performance issues in 2-player 'single race' mode, but performance in 3-player 'single race' mode is really bad. Running the game through Devolution made 2-player 'single race' mode flawless and made 3-player 'single race' mode tolerable (though 4-player 'single race' still had terrible performance; I've got to wonder if 3-player 'single race' mode wouldn't also be flawless and 4-player 'single race' mode be tolerable if ran using Wii U's CPU higher clocks, but I've never done any native Wii U homebrew and I myself don't own a Wii U and for all I know maybe it's GPU-bottlenecked instead, so...)

That's what really started getting the ball rolling on using USB loaders as there was no way using Devolution's sample loader was going to fly (the on-screen text was way too small and flickery on our at-the-time 27" Trinitron CRT), so I went the recommended route by the Devolution dev of using USB Loader GX. For a while I simply had them rely on the channel forwarder located on the Wii Menu which worked fine and I already had the loader configured to use the channel view and most-played sorting order, but when I discovered Cyan's bootmii auto-launcher for USB Loader GX I realized I could go all-in and really simplify the process and just have my Wii console boot directly into USB Loader GX and contain everything in one place.



EDIT: On the subject of Wii U, if blackb0x is listening to my life story, could you clarify for me that the ability to hook into the Wii U's extra CPU grunt isn't something possible from USB Loader GX's side of things? (I'm not even sure it'd even help for Midway Arcade Treasures 3 though since it's a GameCube game and therefore would be reliant on Nintendont implementing such a function directly, no?)

 

[PacBunnyXV07]

Err, what is the point in emulating a Wiimote on a real Wii? Why not just use a real Wiimote?

Cus why not? People can play Super Mario Galaxy with a gamecube on pc but I can't do that on a wii? If its possible then why not try like the point of homebrew?

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It's not fully open source yet, but even if it was it'd be difficult to add into any other loaders since it'd require so many changes.

Maybe but it wouldn't hurt.

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

Cus why not? People can play Super Mario Galaxy with a gamecube on pc but I can't do that on a wii? If its possible then why not try like the point of homebrew?

I don't necessarily disagree, but it is worth noting that it will be considerably harder to have a universal solution if you're running on hardware that isn't more powerful than the hardware the game was originally designed for.

In other words, software like Nintendont and WiiVC injection can have universal extra functionality because the hardware they run on, Wii and Wii U, are more capable than the original hardware of a GameCube and Wii - there's more performance headroom to run extra stuff along-side the game itself.

Dolphin is a similar idea, but to an even greater degree - the hardware it runs on is so much more powerful that, rather than running additional things along-side the game itself, it's basically just straight-up recreating the GameCube or Wii in its entirety (...kind of, it's HLE rather than LLE but that's not within the scope of this discussion) which means, rather than creating an exact 1-1 replica, they can modify things and include extra features and stuff.

...but in the case of using a GameCube controller for Mario Galaxy via Dolphin, that alone is actually more akin to the Nintendont and WiiVC injection in that it's simply adding an additional translation layer that allows you to translate inputs from USB controllers into Wii remote "commands' just like how Nintendont can do the inverse of translating Wii remote inputs into GameCube controller "commands."

 

[omerfarooq]

hey, i am new to this site and i dont know which is the proper thread for my question. my flash drive (fat32) works perfect with the usb loader gx. and now i want to use my seagate 2tb external hardive(thegreen one). i started by formatting it to nfts defaul allocation and then from wii backup manager formatted it again to be sure. i transferred games like i usually do from the sofatware. when i start usb loader gx on my wii. it prompts with this , select a partition or format. i am stuck at this point as i dont know what to do. if i click the option select on wii it shows 4 partitions with partition 1 only readable with 2080 something gb, the rest parititons are not reabale i selected the first one and it showed no games,(tired dropping the same game directly and what not. then i though of formatting the harddrive on wii in usbloader gx. messed it up too and now it shows 127.8 gb of free space with no games.(i again copied the games and still it said no games and same 127 gb of free space (original 2tb harddrive) i am sorry , i am a bit noob when it comes to computer thing like disc parititons and all. so please if anyone can help me on this. i am currently experimenting with a single game wii sport resort whihc works perfectly through my flash drive.

Beware!! here I am !! hahah >]

Alexander, don't frighten new comers
They'll think I'm the devil

You can keep your pictures on your post, don't worry.
It's just that flashdrives have the bad habit of being problematic with homebrew compatibility. you should just use a real external HDD instead of flashdrive, and all your issues will be fixed.

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

This all reminds me - last I know, one had to use FAT32 for GameCube games. This however was like 5 years ago, so I don't suppose anybody knows if that's still the case, or if one can use NTFS nowadays? (at least assuming one isn't using Devolution for its wired Xbox 360 controller support since AFAIK Devolution was never updated to support anything other than FAT32)

messed it up too and now it shows 127.8 gb of free space.

I'm not a USB Loader GX expert so I don't think I can really help much at all with your issue, but I've enough PC hardware knowledge to say that sounds for sure like USB Loader GX reformatted the drive to FAT32.

 

[omerfarooq]

thankyou so much replying, i have no issue with drive formatted back to fat 32. i just want to run wii games on it. after the formatting it still doesn't show any games on usb loader gx, where as when connected to pc it it shows the game. i am stuck now man

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

thankyou so much replying, i have no issue with drive formatted back to fat 32. i just want to run wii games on it. after the formatting it still doesn't show any games on usb loader gx, where as when connected to pc it it shows the game. i am stuck now man

i am currently experimenting with a single game wii sport resort whihc works perfectly through my flash drive.

I can at least say that, if it works on your flash drive, then simply copying and pasting the contents of your flash drive directly as-is should then make it work on your Seagate hard drive.

My only guess is that, outside of being unlucky and your hard drive not being compatible＊, the folders and stuff are not arranged correctly on your Seagate hard drive.



＊have you tried to see if you can at least launch apps from the homebrew channel from your Seagate hard drive? You can just use something basic like WiiXplorer or the like that does not require anything other than its boot.dol file.

...though I don't remember if the homebrew channel supports NTFS - I just know it definitely supports FAT32.

 

[omerfarooq]

i formatted my hdd again with the disk partition windows utility and formatted it 32 gb, transferred the game through the software and again was prompted with the same message on usb loader gx no partition or format detected alogn with two options select / format. i am stuck but i highly appreciate your replies man, my apologies if i sound a noob which i am.

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

The only solution I can think of from there would be, assuming that you're on Windows, using disk management to straight-up delete any and all existing partitions on the Seagate hard drive and creating a new NTFS partition that takes up the entirety of the drive. I say this because formatting does enlarge shrunk partitions, and I'm concerned that, the time when USB Loader GX reformatted to FAT32, it ended up shrinking the partition size.

Sadly as a person that never upgraded past Windows 7 and instead has been using Linux Mint on any newer PC builds, I can't really give specific instructions unless you too are also on Windows 7 or happen to have access to a Linux OS with Gparted. Perhaps search on the internet for "disk management windows 10" (without quotes) or whatever version of windows you're using? Just make sure that, when deleting partitions, that you're absolutely sure that you're deleting the partitions on the external Seagate hard drive and nothing else or else you may have a bad time.

Then once it's an NTFS-formatted 2TB-capacity partition, do a direct copy and paste from your USB flash drive through Windows's normal folder view (DO NOT USE THE WII BACKUP SOFTWARE FOR THIS STEP!), making sure that the folder arrangement on your Seagate hard drive exactly matches that of your flash drive with the games not being located in any additional sub-folders or what-not.



EDIT: Oh and protip, since 2TB is quite a lot of storage and NTFS can handle files larger than 4GB, there's not really any need to use any special Wii backup software if you already have the games in uncompressed ISO format or the like - at that point the only thing you really would need to know is the folder name (which is the game's "name") and ISO file name (which is the "game ID"), both of which you can actually find out via the Dolphin emulator by right-clicking a given game and selecting "properties" and then going to the the "info" tab, something kind of like the following:

USB:／wbfs／[title]／[game id].iso

For example, with the game Puyo Puyo!! 20th Anniversary, Dolphin lists its name as "PUYO PUYO!! (Disc 1, Revision 0)" and we only care about the stuff before the parenthesis, and Dolphin lists the game ID as "SAUJ8P (000100005341554a)" and again we only care about the stuff before the paraenthesis.

So in the end, we'd want the ISO arranged on our hard drive in the following manner (replace 'W' with whatever drive letter):

• W:／wbfs／PUYO PUYO!!／SAUJ9P.iso

And to clarify, you can use either .iso or .wbfs as-is with USB Loader GX without the need to rename the file extension of either.


If anyone cares, the same logic works for GameCube games as well except that, rather than wbfs, they should be in a folder called "games", and the iso itself should simply be named "game.iso" (if the game has a second disc then the second disc should be named "disc2.iso"). The folder where the ISO itself is stored should still be named after the game "name" however.

 

[fandango]

I believe that Nintendont only supports FAT32, not NTFS drives. ULGX supports both for Wii games.

 

[ca032769]

i formatted my hdd again with the disk partition windows utility and formatted it 32 gb, transferred the game through the software and again was prompted with the same message on usb loader gx no partition or format detected alogn with two options select / format. i am stuck but i highly appreciate your replies man, my apologies if i sound a noob which i am.

Try looking through the link below in my signature for information that might help you properly format the drive. Seeing it is 2TB it should be really easy, you can ignore most everything else because it was meant to be instructions for larger 5TB to 10TB drives.

A couple things that might help when reading through it would be:

A) See Step 1 - Make sure there are no hidden or unallocated parts to the drive and if so merge them into the main partition so there is only one.
B) See Step 2a - Make sure the drive is partitioned as MBR and not GPT. if it is you'll need to change it to MBR.
C) See Step 4a - Make sure the drive is formatted to FAT32 with 32k clusters

Link: http://gbatemp.net/threads/usb-loader-gx.149922/page-1129#post-6662953

I suspect that step B is probably the real problem for you. Details on what programs to use and steps to follow to do the above is in that linked thread posting.

Also, please report back if you were able to get it working and what the issue ended up being. If nothing works I recommend you get a WD drive because Seagate's didn't always work way back in the day.

EDIT 1: Went ahead and added the link to my post, steps to look at above for you & then reordered the steps in the order they should be followed.

Edit 2: Yes some day I'll make a simple version of the instructions dedicated to just 5TB drives only. This is because all US Wii & GameCube's will fit on a 5TB, anything larger is not needed.

 

[PacBunnyXV07]

I don't necessarily disagree, but it is worth noting that it will be considerably harder to have a universal solution if you're running on hardware that isn't more powerful than the hardware the game was originally designed for.

In other words, software like Nintendont and WiiVC injection can have universal extra functionality because the hardware they run on, Wii and Wii U, are more capable than the original hardware of a GameCube and Wii - there's more performance headroom to run extra stuff along-side the game itself.

Dolphin is a similar idea, but to an even greater degree - the hardware it runs on is so much more powerful that, rather than running additional things along-side the game itself, it's basically just straight-up recreating the GameCube or Wii in its entirety (...kind of, it's HLE rather than LLE but that's not within the scope of this discussion) which means, rather than creating an exact 1-1 replica, they can modify things and include extra features and stuff.

...but in the case of using a GameCube controller for Mario Galaxy via Dolphin, that alone is actually more akin to the Nintendont and WiiVC injection in that it's simply adding an additional translation layer that allows you to translate inputs from USB controllers into Wii remote "commands' just like how Nintendont can do the inverse of translating Wii remote inputs into GameCube controller "commands."

But even then, always find it weird that you can use a classic controller in nintendont but not in a wii game like Super Mario Galaxy. Rvloader is capable of doing that.

 

[trogdon]

I was just made aware of the recently implemented update to fix the deflicker filter added in software by most Wii games. Honestly, I am stunned by how much clearer the output is. With the RVL-101 fix, forced 480p, and deflicker, this is far better than I thought a Wii could ever look. Hoping to eventually try it with an mCable too on a large TV, but for a small screen this is incredible.

Thank you so much to all the people that made this possible!

 

[godreborn]

I was just made aware of the recently implemented update to fix the deflicker filter added in software by most Wii games. Honestly, I am stunned by how much clearer the output is. With the RVL-101 fix, forced 480p, and deflicker, this is far better than I thought a Wii could ever look. Hoping to eventually try it with an mCable too on a large TV, but for a small screen this is incredible.

Thank you so much to all the people that made this possible!

where is the deflicker option? I updated usb loader gx to the newest version by @blackb0x . I haven't looked in the settings as of yet, but I recently disconnected my wii u from the framemeister. wii u games seem to look fine, but the vwii looks way worse, almost as if the colors are dead. and, this does work on the vwii, right?

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nm, I found it. I turned it off, and the picture looks many times better (about how it looked with the framemeister). btw, what exactly does "auto" do? does it disable or enable deflicker for games or for certain games?