Hacking VC and Wiiware missing banners.

[portugeek]

I recently added a few Wiiware and VC games to my emuNAND. I use USBLoaderGX to access these games and noticed that these "new" games fail to display any banner's. I can't find any option to download banners specifically for VC and Wiiware titles, but it's weird because my previously installed VC and Wiiware titles have .bnr files stored in USBLoaderGX's "cache_bnr" folder.

I tried a bunch of different things hoping to prompt the download of these missing .bnr files but I've yet to be successful. I renamed the "cache_bnr" folder and tried again, this time it found .bnr files for all of my Menu Channels, Wii Games, and GC games, but the VC titles and Wiiware games have no banner.

The fact that my "OLD_cache_bnr" folder has .bnr files for all of my previously installed VC and Wiiware games means that there has to be a way to get these files, I just don't know how.

Also, when I boot directly into emuNAND, these games show up with animated banners, so I assume they're packed within the .wad itself. Is there a simple way to extract these banners? Or perhaps, a way to tell USBLoaderGX to locate and load these preinstalled banners?

 

[Fishaman P]

opening.bnr is in the root of every Wii game, I believe WADs included. Missing banners could be because the WADs were improperly made, but more likely are just hitting a bug in USB Loader GX since even purging the cache didn't help.

 

[portugeek]

I don't believe USBLoaderGX is accessing the banner's directly from the games themselves. If it's supposed to be, then it's definitely not doing it. I would assume, based on the fact that the folder is called "cache_bnr", that USBLoaderGX is extracting (or copying) these .bnr files from the games themselves and placing duplicates in the "cache_bnr" folder as soon as it scans the list of available games.

I feel you're probably right about it being a bug since the newly created "cache_bnr" folder repopulated with .bnr files for every title EXCEPT for the VC and Wiiware titles.

UPDATE: So it's definitely a bug in USBLoaderGX. I was able to gather all the missing VC and Wiiware .bnr files using WiiFlow. After that I just moved all the .bnr files I wanted over to USBLoaderGX's "cache_bnr" folder.

At least there's some kind of workaround. But it seems that if USBLoaderGX is finding the Opening.bnr for other games/channels that it should also detect those of VC and Wiiware games. Maybe they'll fix it soon.

 

[GreyWolf]

It's a bug that occurs when your NAND folder isn't in the root directory.

"/nand/" will scan
"/nands/my_nandfiles/" will not

 

[portugeek]

It's a bug that occurs when your NAND folder isn't in the root directory.

"/nand/" will scan
"/nands/my_nandfiles/" will not

Welp.. there you go. Seems like a weirdly specific bug though. You'd think USBLGX would just be capable of scanning whichever folder you're pointing to.

 

[GreyWolf]

Welp.. there you go. Seems like a weirdly specific bug though. You'd think USBLGX would just be capable of scanning whichever folder you're pointing to.

There is no OS to handle filesystem paths so that all has to be written from scratch. I haven't figured out why it's not scanning subfolders. It's hard to debug unexpected behavior without a USB Gecko. :/

 

[Mouseboy007]

It's a bug that occurs when your NAND folder isn't in the root directory.

"/nand/" will scan
"/nands/my_nandfiles/" will not

You Hero GreyWolf! I've spent hours scratching my head and trawling forums to find this gem of advice! Thank you so much.
I signed up to gbatemp specifically to pass on my gratitude.