Hacking WiiFlow - an open source GUI USB-Loader

[pBullet]

Lol, couldn't you just type it? (or use spoilers)

But seriously now, you should try beta r1055 or higher, or try the RC1 posted earlier by FIX94.
R1055 has some mem changes which might help.

I guess I could. I reverted back to my previous revision after RC1 would keep WiiFlow hanging on the loading screen.

 

[Etheboss]

Please read my edit too..

 

[mightymuffy]

k np,
just post a screenie for the codedump, this might be a memory bug of some sort.
Maybe Fix can take a look

EDIT: SOLVED! God I feel like a right cretin.... looks like it was my fault, I had Diagnostics, a CPS1/2 core only setting, set to Enabled on both cores - Loaded up Wiiflow, ran a SNES game, then changed Cores, disabled Diagnostics & restarted.... sorted!

 

[bostonBC]

I am thinking of making a change to my Categories config. As you know I've broken down the games using the GameTDB data into categories and filling in the missing pieces. I added the ESRB ratings a while back and am now busy gathering up non-NTSC games. Since I am US-centric (sorry) I am thinking of adding 1 more category like 'Non-NTSC' or perhaps more fitting 'Non-English' for the Japanese, French and German releases. Or would you prefer several like 'English', 'German', 'Japanese' etc.?

Any input would be greatly appreciated!

 

[MassiveRican]

I am thinking of making a change to my Categories config. As you know I've broken down the games using the GameTDB data into categories and filling in the missing pieces. I added the ESRB ratings a while back and am now busy gathering up non-NTSC games. Since I am US-centric (sorry) I am thinking of adding 1 more category like 'Non-NTSC' or perhaps more fitting 'Non-English' for the Japanese, French and German releases. Or would you prefer several like 'English', 'German', 'Japanese' etc.?

Any input would be greatly appreciated!

I'd be fine with none English since I have a lot of NTSC-J games which would be nice, but I say let's see what the input is from others in regards to that. BTW have you included a hidden category in your categories.ini by default? Or does it still need to be added?

 

[Th3-Blu3BoMb3r]

Ok, i am out of ideas here, does somebody else maybe has some more advise?
Only thing i can think of now is building it up slowly again, starting with reinstalling your cIOS.

ok so which cios's do u recomend other than d2x cause i was under the impression that you need d2x for wiiflow

 

[mamule]

Soon a new year... so here's a new theme.

I hope you like Monsterhiigh, my daughter's theme

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xtr5u7kszf01mxr/Monsterhiigh_r1-r1045+.7z

As usual, your reports are welcome to improve it.

 

[nibb]

Just Awesome, Thanks a lot for this theme mamule

Love it

 

[spacepimp]

I am thinking of making a change to my Categories config. As you know I've broken down the games using the GameTDB data into categories and filling in the missing pieces. I added the ESRB ratings a while back and am now busy gathering up non-NTSC games. Since I am US-centric (sorry) I am thinking of adding 1 more category like 'Non-NTSC' or perhaps more fitting 'Non-English' for the Japanese, French and German releases. Or would you prefer several like 'English', 'German', 'Japanese' etc.?

Any input would be greatly appreciated!

Just to complicate things, there's English PAL too!
If it's practical to do the all the languages and regions - I suppose that'd be the ideal solution. If that's a big ask, you could ask for help, maybe even organised by language and region? - tell me where I can find out what I need to do (or just tell me ) and I'll try and help out with the PAL English titles.
...Also I wanted to say thanks for doing this.

EDIT:
It's occurred to me that the last time I had a look at cfgloader, a lot of this work had already been done - it was a while ago, and I'm not posting from home so can't check - would it be possible to collate the data from there?

 

[bostonBC]

Just to complicate things, there's English PAL too!
If it's practical to do the all the languages and regions - I suppose that'd be the ideal solution. If that's a big ask, you could ask for help, maybe even organised by language and region? - tell me where I can find out what I need to do (or just tell me ) and I'll try and help out with the PAL English titles.
...Also I wanted to say thanks for doing this.

EDIT:
It's occurred to me that the last time I had a look at cfgloader, a lot of this work had already been done - it was a while ago, and I'm not posting from home so can't check - would it be possible to collate the data from there?

CFG uses the XML from GameTDB which has many incorrect and incomplete entries. The ideal situation would be if we had nice clean XML and the parsing was done in WiiFlow itself. But I've gone through and fixed what was wrong and added the missing data in the file I've been working with. Plus with the categories we have we can customize it as much as we would like.

I've been on a collecting binge and now have 1480 titles in my collection on a 4TB drive. Have another 70 or so to categorize and will then post the updated config file. Then will look at adding something for the non-US games.

edit: I almost forgot that for the non-US games I have setup the equivalent ESRB ratings from the CERO and other rating systems. You could probably automate that if you had good XML and I did automate the initial XML extraction but because many of the entries in the GameTDB are wrong it required a lot of manual clean up.

 

[bostonBC]

Is anyone else having trouble loading games with 4.2.1 RC1 aka r1056? WiiFlow will load ok but when you try and run a game it never displays the progress bar and just black screens. I've tried it on my 2 and 4TB systems with the same result - with the file that Fix94 posted and my own compilation.

I deleted the wiiflow.ini and let it recreate it but had the exact same results - all games blackscreen without a progress bar. I'm running v10 56/249, 57/250 on one Wii and v10.1 56/249, 57/250 on the other and they do the same thing. If I go back to r1054 it works perfectly.

 

[AbdallahTerro]

in 1055+ Fix started using a new memory manager, we still know it has problems and the memory leak is still there.
Hopefully Fix has a plan to use the memory more efficiently in a way similar to what he did in 1048 with the images and loaders.
but this will take time to finish..
I personally like 1054 too but I managed to cope with 1056.
I was thinking of adding a 1054 standalone dol to Masterpack download folder until a more solid build emerges

 

[Etheboss]

CFG uses the XML from GameTDB which has many incorrect and incomplete entries. The ideal situation would be if we had nice clean XML and the parsing was done in WiiFlow itself. But I've gone through and fixed what was wrong and added the missing data in the file I've been working with. Plus with the categories we have we can customize it as much as we would like.

It would be even better if you changed it on the source, then everyone can benefit from it..
If you can't access it yourself after making an account, you can contact Lustar about it, he is the owner of GameTDB, on this forum he is know as zorglub07.

 

[spacepimp]

^ this! How could you get your categories.ini data into the GameTDB xml format?

 

[bostonBC]

It would be even better if you changed it on the source, then everyone can benefit from it..
If you can't access it yourself after making an account, you can contact Lustar about it, he is the owner of GameTDB, on this forum he is know as zorglub07.

Agreed, that would be ideal. When I extracted everything from the XML a long time ago I found a bunch of things missing that I filled in but only on the Wii. What I did was hid all the categories with something in it and then I could see the ones with missing data. Unfortunately I didn't try and fix the source then. Since then we've had a categories format change and I've been updating category info manually on the Wii as I find new games. To push it back and update GameTDB would be a long term project. Maybe this summer I can get to it.

 

[bostonBC]

^ this! How could you get your categories.ini data into the GameTDB xml format?

That would be tough since I don't think I could get access to write the XML directly. The underlying data is probably in a small database and extracted into XML. It will probably be easier to do like I did originally and extract the XML and see what is missing and then manually update the GameTDB entries.

 

[spacepimp]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that the gametdb xml hasn't been maintained for a while - so if access to the xml is the issue, rather than the formatting - wiiflow could point to another host - perhaps the wiiflow wiki or abz' masterpack. fledge68 would this be amenable to you?
If alternate xml hosting is an option, Wiimpathy has spoken about including the metadata for many of the console games - if those data sets could be rendered into the gametdb xml format...
I don't know what the solution is, but we should bang heads to get this working and I'm happy to help.
EDIT: I might have misread your first post! I'm a bit unclear about the differences in the formatting - would it be possible to batch process the categories ini into an xml, or is it something that needs to be done by hand?
EDIT #2:
I gather from a PM that alternate hosting is unlikely to happen because lustar might get upset. No disrespect, am I wrong about it not being updated?

How about having wiiflow refer to an external ini for the database url, so that users can choose an alternate if they wish. Abz, sound like an idea for the masterpack?
By extension, this might be a way to auto download from mastershoes cover collection. Or even other artwork and content. Just riffing, like

EDIT#3: Thinking on this - drakorex did a lot of work on a similar idea - I was hoping you might have something to add?

 

[Wiimpathy]

I'm afraid there aren't any ideal and universal solution for roms data unfortunately. There are several naming conventions, and furthermore one may have renamed the games.
Second option would be crc and I thought it'd be the best detection. But, I realized roms crc may have also changed. So we can't rely on that either.
It's a shame because there are already databases available and it shouldn't be too hard to reformat them. In fact, I made some scripts to generate genres in categories.ini for most systems. Sadly, I couldn't share this since it relies on roms names and with custom categories.

 

[bostonBC]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that the gametdb xml hasn't been maintained for a while - so if access to the xml is the issue, rather than the formatting - wiiflow could point to another host - perhaps the wiiflow wiki or abz' masterpack. fledge68 would this be amenable to you?
If alternate xml hosting is an option, Wiimpathy has spoken about including the metadata for many of the console games - if those data sets could be rendered into the gametdb xml format...
I don't know what the solution is, but we should bang heads to get this working and I'm happy to help.
EDIT: I might have misread your first post! I'm a bit unclear about the differences in the formatting - would it be possible to batch process the categories ini into an xml, or is it something that needs to be done by hand?
EDIT #2:
I gather from a PM that alternate hosting is unlikely to happen because lustar might get upset. No disrespect, am I wrong about it not being updated?

How about having wiiflow refer to an external ini for the database url, so that users can choose an alternate if they wish. Abz, sound like an idea for the masterpack?
By extension, this might be a way to auto download from mastershoes cover collection. Or even other artwork and content. Just riffing, like

EDIT#3: Thinking on this - drakorex did a lot of work on a similar idea - I was hoping you might have something to add?

I think the best option will be to just add the missing info into GameTDB and then other utilities like Configurable USB Loader etc that use the XML will be able to benefit from it.

 

[mamule]

I think the best option will be to just add the missing info into GameTDB and then other utilities like Configurable USB Loader etc that use the XML will be able to benefit from it.

hard work, but the best in my opinion.
all gametdb account can edit these settings (with or without owner check)