Hacking WiiFlow - an open source GUI USB-Loader

[Duncan Idaho]

Works great for me with 1 partition. How many have you setup?

I have it with two partitions, one that is called wii and an other that is called GC as soon as i ordered wiiflow to switch to the Wii partition it crashed.

 

[bostonBC]

I have it with two partitions, one that is called wii and an other that is called GC as soon as i ordered wiiflow to switch to the Wii partition it crashed.

Both are FAT32?

 

[FIX94]

so I just pushed up r1074 to add id6 support for thp files and updated devkit and libogc so this wont happen again lol.

 

[ShadowOne333]

so I just pushed up r1074 to add id6 support for thp files and updated devkit and libogc so this wont happen again lol.

Where can I download r1074?

 

[FIX94]

Where can I download r1074?

http://fix94.no-ip.org/wf_revs/boot_r1074.7z

 

[Hielkenator]

Thank you!

PS, I am having trouble getting wiimednafen pce cd games to work.
Wiiflow boot into Wiimednafen plugin, wich tells me it cannot load the game.
This is when selecting a game.
On the other hand when I boot from source flow they work....
My bios files are in place I think.
The've alway worked using the standalone emu's .
Also is there any way to hide/remove the plugins that I fo not use from the source ( select ) menu? It's annoying to go through all the stuff I am not using.
I great to have options for them,but atm they are cluttering my experience.
Also some covers that are present in the Wiiflow folder do not show, for example the Quake, dokatsu, Triforce, covers.

I am coming from usb loader GX so I might have to adapt to on how I approach file handeling in Wiiflow.
Also for the cps1/2 plugins I seem to have a version I CANNOT exit, there simply no underlying menu that gives the option to exit Retroarch.
Only option is manually shut down my Wii.
also had random crashes when I had all my Wiiflow files on HDD.
Seperating things by boting Wiiflow from my sd card solved it. Is this supposed to happen?

Last one: Can Postloader and Wiiflow live together on HDD/SD.
As of now I;ve managed to get PL Configs to severly mess up when Wiiflow is also present on HDD/SD.

I'd like to note that I am using The Masterpiece packs made by abz.
Even with these packs I had to shift ALOT of files around ( for the emus ) but it still does not "feel" right.
Mainly because I keep stumbling upon these "little"problems. ( oposed to the stand alone emu's )
Spent about the whole day setting things up but Wiiflow postloader is not stable enough in my case to serve as wii menu replacement.
I love to get things in order as I love the fact everything boot from "one place".
But before I head into "getting roms to match with covers" I'd like to get Wiiflow as stable as possible ( if I can help this in a way myself that is ).
If anybody has some pointers, that would be great.

 

[Duncan Idaho]

Both are FAT32?

Both are FAT32

 

[MassiveRican]

Hielkenator I'm out and about on mobile right now so I'll give you a pointer for now and I'll touch up on some more of your issues later.

One, yes u can get WiiFlow and PL4 to be fully compatible together and play nicely, you'll just have to tweak things to get them the way you want from Abz pack. To remove icons from your source menu open the source_menu.ini in /WiiFlow/source menu/ & Remove any systems you don't use and re-number the system entries as u wish.

A much more interactive and easier way would be to use Maxternal's source menu editor. Here's the thread, check under Java Apps. This app can probably help you with several of your issues and it edits postLoader 4's plugin system as well. I haven't used it in a while but everything should be up to par I believe it's been updated to work with some of the latest changes.

 

[MassiveRican]

Spoiler

FIX94 T'sup bud I know you're super busy with Nintendon't lately and real life stuff but wanted to bring a cover breaking bug up in r1072 for plugins to your attention, whenever you can if you can check it out, it would be awesome.

Hard to explain w/o taking video but I'll do my best, I'll also post a vid up later when I have some more time. Basically when creating the cache for any plugin, the covers are completely warped and not displaying properly. When I check out the cache folder in "/wiiflow/cache/snes" in r1072 for example, it does create a cache file there but it also created several other sub-folders leading to an empty directory, I.E. /wiiflow/cache/snes/boxcovers/snes/...

This does not happen with 4.2.1, I haven't been able to test which rev exactly broke this, if anyone has some spare time that can test intermittently between r1058 -r1072 , it would be very much appreciated, if not it's no big deal I keep most of my compiles and I'll try to go back a few revs and see where it broke.

I was setting up a friends Wii with some plugins from scratch and that's how I find out about this, the cache and covers for the Wii games were created with no problem and all games still launch and play with joy lol. So far all plugins I've tried SNES-Next, GenplusGX, VBA-Next NESTopia have this issue.

EDIT: By the way my covers are in JPEG format not PNG, that might matter.

I've narrowed down a few culprits going by the changelog to jpeg stuff

r1068 -added back some missing cover converting code for jpegs
 
r1063  -switched from libjpeg to the turbojpeg wrapper from libjpeg-turbo to simplify the whole jpeg decoding code by alot
 
r1060 -optimized THP file playback and JPG extraction alot, it should now work fine with 640x480 30fps without any crash or freeze anymore

again this is all speculation, I don't know jack when it comes to coding, but it might help narrow down the bug if anyone has some time to test and don't want to go back revs 1-by-1.

Ok it's been a hell of a long time since I said I'd up a vid for this but it's finally done. Seriously if there were 30hrs in the day I'd be so grateful so I could have more time for testing but alas here we go. You'll see covers are warped when creating cache under plugins with JPEG, I did not experience this with PNG covers for Wii. I have yet to confirm if this happens for PNG's with the plugins or not, or which rev broke the caching, but I'll edit or make another post on here when I do. When reverting to 4.2.1 (A.K.A. r1056), JPEG covers cache well.

​

 

[Hielkenator]

Ok it's been a hell of a long time since I said I'd up a vid for this but it's finally done. Seriously if there were 30hrs in the day I'd be so grateful so I could have more time for testing but alas here we go. You'll see covers are warped when creating cache under plugins with JPEG, I did not experience this with PNG covers for Wii. I have yet to confirm if this happens for PNG's with the plugins or not, or which rev broke the caching, but I'll edit or make another post on here when I do. When reverting to 4.2.1 (A.K.A. r1056), JPEG covers cache well.

​

Very, very much appreciated!
Thank you !
I'm having the same here.

 

[halen]

Massive I had already tested here. Happens only with the JPG covers. Now I am with 1052 Wiiflow.

 

[MassiveRican]

Very, very much appreciated!
Thank you !
I'm having the same here.

Your using PNG covers for plugins and the warped cover caching issue is still happening? Revert to the stable 4.2.1 release for a temp fix.

Ok, so on to more troubleshooting. Hielkenator I see you had a bit of plugins issue with RA, for the CPS1/2 issue can you see which core version is being used? 1.0.0.1/2 something like that, cuz if it's using the new RGUI, the path to exit might be different. The issue with your Wii Mednafen PCE-CD games might be simple as well. Here's my wiimednafen_pcecd.ini file for the plugin and entry in source_menu.ini. Go ahead and change the romdir and coverfolder entries according to your setup. Take note of any difference you see, usually it's a magic# difference between plugin.ini and source menu.ini. Although I do find it odd that it would launch in sourceflow and not source menu so maybe something else is going on.

displayname=WiiMednafen PCE-CD
magic=4d45454e
coverfolder=NEC/Turbo-Duo
dolfile=wiimednafen-mod3.dol
romdir=consoles/turbo-duo
filetypes=.cue
consolecoverid=
covercolor=ffffff
bannersound=PCECD.ogg
arguments={device}:/{path}/|{name}|{loader}
 
[BUTTON_22]
magic=4d45454e
title=Turbo Duo
source=plugin
image_s=PC_Engine_CDb.png
image=PC_Engine_CD.png
emuflow=8

My setup launches ok I use the same plugin for PCE-CD games cuz I can use bin/ogg, although I heard there's been an update to the RA core which now supports this, it just hasn't been released yet. Excited for that, here's to hoping they release 1.0.0.3 soon with the few bug fixes needed as well XD

 

[MassiveRican]

my bad this was an erroneous DP.

 

[mastershoes]

I have yet to confirm if this happens for PNG's with the plugins or not, or which rev broke the caching, but I'll edit or make another post on here when I do. When reverting to 4.2.1 (A.K.A. r1056), JPEG covers cache well.

If it helps, I've cache'd a few hundred covers (.png) through plugins using r1072, and haven't had one issue yet homie.

 

[MassiveRican]

If it helps, I've cache'd a few hundred covers (.png) through plugins using r1072, and haven't had one issue yet homie.

Thanks then it seems to be just a JPEG cover caching issue. I have decided not to use JPEG anymore due to slight quality loss anyway and I have plenty of space now with my 2TB drive, but I've spent a lot of time setting the covers up that I do have so I didn't want to have to do it all over again. Converting them back to PNG I don't think will work to recover quality loss, I'm not sure.

All your latest updates I've kept PNG, just haven't had time to boot up WiiFlow to cache them yet. Other than the unsupported cover sets that is

 

[WiiFreasko]

I downloaded many cover packs from mastershoes's thread and converted all to jpg and resized to 512x340 which saved a lot of sd card space (80% reduction in size with maybe a tiny unnoticeable loss in quality) caching was fast and memory burden improved with the ability to load 4-5 times more covers in wiiflow.
Many times I use a coverflow with many rows and move slowly in one direction as the cache is building, it needs patience but once done there is no need to do this again.
when wiiflow is stuck during caching you might need to check \wiiflow\cache folder for 0kb sized files and delete them, else wiiflow might codedump on startup
cache files are the same since the very old wiiflow 2.x so if they are not corrupt there is no need to remove them when making a clean install.
Freasko

 

[MassiveRican]

I downloaded many cover packs from mastershoes's thread and converted all to jpg and resized to 512x340 which saved a lot of sd card space (80% reduction in size with maybe a tiny unnoticeable loss in quality) caching was fast and memory burden improved with the ability to load 4-5 times more covers in wiiflow.
Many times I use a coverflow with many rows and move slowly in one direction as the cache is building, it needs patience but once done there is no need to do this again.
when wiiflow is stuck during caching you might need to check \wiiflow\cache folder for 0kb sized files and delete them, else wiiflow might codedump on startup
cache files are the same since the very old wiiflow 2.x so if they are not corrupt there is no need to remove them when making a clean install.
Freasko

After caching covers for a while I'll just hold B and hit home 2x to restart WiiFlow which recovers any memory used up. Then back to uninterrupted cover caching with no freeze issues. I do however notice the quality loss, when you spend as much time looking at covers as let's say MS or TOW420 trust me we've talked about those things that are lost on the conversion.

If your tight on space it's definitely worth it to convert to jpeg without a doubt, but if you have the space I'd stick to PNG and after caching turn on cover_use_hq=yes in wiiflow.ini and prepare for beauty

 

[bostonBC]

so I just pushed up r1074 to add id6 support for thp files and updated devkit and libogc so this wont happen again lol.

Hi fix94--- having trouble compiling it...

videopatch.c
c:/Users/Bob/Documents/WiiFlow_Source/open-wiiflow-mod-read-only/resources/wiiflow_game_booter/source/videopatch.c:161:3: error: 'TVMpal480Prog' undeclared here (not in a function)
make[2]: *** [videopatch.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [build] Error 2
"make": *** [all] Error 2

 

[WiiFreasko]

Hi fix94--- having trouble compiling it...

videopatch.c
c:/Users/Bob/Documents/WiiFlow_Source/open-wiiflow-mod-read-only/resources/wiiflow_game_booter/source/videopatch.c:161:3: error: 'TVMpal480Prog' undeclared here (not in a function)
make[2]: *** [videopatch.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [build] Error 2
"make": *** [all] Error 2

use the standard libogc that comes with devkit installer, the latest ofc

 

[kimotori]

I miss abz (attendance) and his masterpiece pack :° ne c' est pa ?