Hacking USB Mass Storage Support

[ZombiePosessor]

Am I wrong in assuming that the recent development of usb mass storage support could possibly mean some kind of external hard drive ISO loader, thus no modchip required, softmod? or is that hoping for too much?

 

[BvanBart]

That will eventually be the case

What else do you need a 500 GB harddisk for??

This is easily to do with a Homebrew channel

 

[zidane_genome]

I really doubt that you'll see a softmodded Wii any time soon... the guy who's been doing the USB support said he's not going to be doing anything that would allow pirates to run rampat on the USB loader.

I support that, but it would be nice to have a softmodded Wii to do some of the stuff my softmodded xbox can do, like the xbox media center, and playing movies over my network from my network drive.

 

[Rebound]

God I hope it doesnt allow iso loading, pirates will become to mainstream. All I want is it to be used as an extension of Wiis memory

 

[Venko]

Guys, the Wii's USB ports are 1.1 or so it seems. There's no way in hell you'll be able to run ISOs off of them.

 

[Richy Freeway]

Guys, the Wii's USB ports are 1.1 or so it seems. There's no way in hell you'll be able to run ISOs off of them.

Incorrect. They are USB 2.0 but there is no homebrew driver support for anything over 1.1.

This will probably come in time.

 

[Lumstar]

USB mass storage will be critical should homebrew really take off. The internal memory just isn't large enough for things like ROM/MP3/video collections.

 

[ZeD]

but i believe Nintendo is working on a way to expand the memory of the WII

 

[TaMs]

Someone should make custom firmware for wii that supports external space via usb, which works like internal memory atm. Loads games straight from memorystick etc. and have like 100k channel places for wiiware and vc games.
BUt probably won't happen in anytime soon, if ever. I don't know what Nintendo was thinking when making wii. They should have realized that 512 mb memory isn't enough.
edit: if it's even 512.

 

[Rocco Savadgie]

Another option for storage is to use a PC.

The gamecube had a homebrew and iso loader via the network lan (Starcube/Titanic) and Svpe has already released a wifi loader for homebrew on Wii. I wonder would it be possible to code it to load isos.

Another option may be to use the usbgecko. Emukdid recently released a gamecube iso loader that pulls the data from your PC via the usb gecko.

Then there is the swap DVD drive with a hard drive Gamecube mod by Destop/Crazynation. Perhaps a similar mod could be adapted for the Wii too.

So there are a number of options, not just a usb hard drive attached to the wii. I'm sure something will be released one day.

Regards.

 

[berlinka]

Is there any word of when this awesome piece of homebrew will be released?

 

[Trolly]

Haha, I asked him about ISO-loading support, and I got the impression he hates pirates with a vengeance. Also, another thing is NTFS-support. Some Wii ISOs will be too big for the FAT32-only support that this will give us (for those who don't know, you can't have a single file bigger than about 2GB I think, possibly more), so someone would have to write some coding for that.
But, three cheers to homebrew, for making this kind of thing possible!

 

[Venko]

Trolly, I'd imagine it would be easier to write ext3/2 support instead of NTFS and they're open specifications. ext2 has a maximum file size of 2-64 TiB so there's no way you'd hit that.

And, of course, you could always split files into two parts if using FAT32.

 

[Trolly]

I've never heard of ext2, but that sounds like a good option. And as for splitting into two parts, I thought of that but then someone would have to code a fairly complex piece of software for that to work on the Wii.

 

[zidane_genome]

ext2 is Mac/Lin/Unix based File System. Fat/Fat32/NTFS/WinFS is Windows based

 

[Narin]

The PS2 has support for running homebrew and games from a USB external hard drive. Why wasn't that option more popular you say? Due to the limitations in USB, the hard drive couldn't keep up with the read speed needed to play games at full speed. Games would lag, stutter or even freeze at times because of this. Hence why people use an internal hard drive to play games on the PS2 for better performance.

So even if some breakthrough is made with supporting external, USB hard drives, it won't be the miracle people think it will be.

 

[Volkov]

wouldnt coding to the PC be the best option. everyone has ISO's on there compies and not everyone has external USB hard drive's that big...Also for people collecting all the games so far - theyre all way bigger than 1TB so far...and external hard drives I don't think are to much larger than that

 

[Prime]

wouldnt coding to the PC be the best option. everyone has ISO's on there compies and not everyone has external USB hard drive's that big...Also for people collecting all the games so far - theyre all way bigger than 1TB so far...and external hard drives I don't think are to much larger than that

not everyone ha their wii beside a computer, i don't think thats possible and not everyone has ISO's on their pc >_>

 

[Richy Freeway]

The PS2 has support for running homebrew and games from a USB external hard drive. Why wasn't that option more popular you say? Due to the limitations in USB, the hard drive couldn't keep up with the read speed needed to play games at full speed. Games would lag, stutter or even freeze at times because of this. Hence why people use an internal hard drive to play games on the PS2 for better performance.

So even if some breakthrough is made with supporting external, USB hard drives, it won't be the miracle people think it will be.

*sigh*

The PS2 only had USB1.1 interfaces, the Wii has USB 2.0.

More than enough bandwidth.

 

[ssj4android]

wouldnt coding to the PC be the best option. everyone has ISO's on there compies and not everyone has external USB hard drive's that big...Also for people collecting all the games so far - theyre all way bigger than 1TB so far...and external hard drives I don't think are to much larger than that

Not enough bandwidth, likely. Even a 100 Mbps LAN connection isn't as fast as USB 2, which maxes out at around 40 MBps (320 Mbps). Plus network transfers can never hit 100 Mbps due to overhead.
I can't seem to find the speed of the Wii's DVD drive, but 12X DVD drives can read around 15.8 MBps maximum, thus the speed of the USB interface should be no problem if we can access it in USB2 mode.
The big problem is figuring out how to load games via USB. How were games loaded from the hard drive in an Xbox? I think all file reads were done using the kernel, so that just needed to be modified (correct me if I'm wrong). How does the Wii load files from the DVD? That would have to be patched. Or we could have all of the USB loading done in the starlet (which handles DVD reads anyway), and have ISO files on the hard drive, but I'm not sure if that's even possible. It would probably be cleaner, though.