Hacking USB Loader GX

[worm28]

I am hoping to get some help.

I homebrewed my Wii a few years ago and have been using USB loader GX to load my Wii and GC games. I wanted to add WiiWare games, so I followed the directions from a video on youtube by Anton Retro. This entailed putting the WAD files on the WAD folder on my HD, dumping the NAND to EmuNAND, and then using EmuNAND Wad Manager to install the contents of the WAD folder from the USB.

I am having some problems. First, all of the channels from my Wii home screen are showing up in the WiiWare tab on USB Loader GX, not just the WiiWare games. Also, most of the WiiWare games don’t load. They just go to a black screen and I have to do a hard reset of my Wii.

What is causing these issues and how do I fix them?

Does dumping the NAND to EmuNand delete anything from the console?

If I delete the EmuNAND from my HD, will I lose game data? If so, how do I put game data back on the NAND?

I had the same problem dumping the nand with usbloader gx wiiware games would not work try to use a bootmii nand dump and extract it with showmiiwads it worked for me

 

[DA88]

I had the same problem dumping the nand with usbloader gx wiiware games would not work try to use a bootmii nand dump and extract it with showmiiwads it worked for me

Thanks for the response worm28. I will look into bootmii and showmiiwads. Do I need to delete the EmuNAND that I just made before I do a new one with bootmii?

 

[worm28]

Thanks for the response worm28. I will look into bootmii and showmiiwads. Do I need to delete the EmuNAND that I just made before I do a new one with bootmii?

Yes delete the old emunand

 

[DA88]

Yes delete the old emunand

Will all my saved game data be fine?

Also, how do I extract with showmiiwads? Can you point me to a tutorial?

Thanks for your help!

 

[XFlak]

All your saves will still be on the real nand, so don't worry about losing anything from an recently dumped and unused emunand

Showmiiwads is pretty simple to extract a nand, but even simpler is to use modmii, just drag and drop your nand.bin onto modmii.exe and choose extract

 

[Error52]

I am having some problems. First, all of the channels from my Wii home screen are showing up in the WiiWare tab on USB Loader GX, not just the WiiWare games.

So the solution here is to give stars to every game you want to show up (that option appears when you select a game) and then set it so that only games with stars show up (you can set that by selecting the star icon in the top menu on the home screen). You can also make a category to put all your Wii channels in, then hide that category.

Also, most of the WiiWare games don’t load. They just go to a black screen and I have to do a hard reset of my Wii.

EmuNAND compatibility is unfortunately a bit spotty, so that may the reason why. Though I will say, I had a black screen with an out-of-region install of Bomberman Blast (console is PAL, game was US NTSC) and I was able to fix that by selecting the "Force NTSC" option in the game settings. So do with that what you will.

Does dumping the NAND to EmuNand delete anything from the console?

Nope.

If I delete the EmuNAND from my HD, will I lose game data? If so, how do I put game data back on the NAND?

I believe you can copy saves from EmuNAND to the real NAND with Save Game Manager GX, though I haven't done it myself so I'm not sure how.

 

[DA88]

All your saves will still be on the real nand, so don't worry about losing anything from an recently dumped and unused emunand

Showmiiwads is pretty simple to extract a nand, but even simpler is to use modmii, just drag and drop your nand.bin onto modmii.exe and choose extract

XFlak, thanks for helping. I appreciate it.

I am in the process of installing bootmii and my wii is the newer kind that can only install it as an IOS, so I will probably look into priloader later. I am going to install savegame manager gx also. I could only manually back up about half of my games.

After I back up my games, I will work on figuring out how to do the NAND to EmuNAND dump with bootmii. Then I will try to do the extraction. I don't have much coding experience, so I am relying on videos, old websites, and help from people such as yourself.

Post automatically merged: Jan 15, 2024

So the solution here is to give stars to every game you want to show up (that option appears when you select a game) and then set it so that only games with stars show up (you can set that by selecting the star icon in the top menu on the home screen). You can also make a category to put all your Wii channels in, then hide that category.



EmuNAND compatibility is unfortunately a bit spotty, so that may the reason why. Though I will say, I had a black screen with an out-of-region install of Bomberman Blast (console is PAL, game was US NTSC) and I was able to fix that by selecting the "Force NTSC" option in the game settings. So do with that what you will.



Nope.



I believe you can copy saves from EmuNAND to the real NAND with Save Game Manager GX, though I haven't done it myself so I'm not sure how.

Error 52, thanks for your responses. Thanks for the work-around with the stars. I decided to delete the EmuNAND that I just made since the WiiWare games were not working anyway. I am installing bootmii and savegame manager gx, and then I will do a NAND dump with bootmii followed by a WAD extraction to try and get the WiiWare games working. Thanks for the NTSC tip, I will try that if I have more black screens from the WiiWare games.

 

[Kirby6417]

If anybody can get WiiWare games working on EmuNAND without using NEEK, let me know!

I can get almost all WiiWare games to work on EmuNAND, but I need NEEK for almost all of them. I vaguely recall some maybe working without NEEK but then crashing when I tried to save (Adventure Island: The Beginning was one such game, I think). As a result, I felt safer booting them all via NEEK instead of baiting out save data problems in the future. But there's a part of me that still prefers non-NEEK booting since it's faster.

(If you need help setting up NEEK, I cannot remember how I did it. It was a few years ago.)

 

[DA88]

All your saves will still be on the real nand, so don't worry about losing anything from an recently dumped and unused emunand

Showmiiwads is pretty simple to extract a nand, but even simpler is to use modmii, just drag and drop your nand.bin onto modmii.exe and choose extract

I have a couple more questions. I installed bootmii and during the first start up, it ran a block verification. How do I do a NAND to EmuNAND dump with bootmii? I thought that happened as part of the verification, but when I checked my hardrive there was no nand or nands folder.

Also, I currently have the WiiWare wads in the WAD folder on my hardrive. Do I need to remove these from the hardrive or from the nand so they can be extracted with modmii? I have modmii installed, but I don't currently have a nand.bin (or at least I don't think I do).

There were a few files in my WAD folder before I put the WiiWare games in there. Does that cause problems?

Post automatically merged: Jan 18, 2024

Ok, I found the nand.bin file. It was on the SD card (duh!). When I drag it onto modmii, I get an error message: "Windows cannot find 'temp.bat'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.

How do I resolve this error?

 

[XFlak]

Try a fresh modmii install, make sure it's a simple installation so avoid folders with weird symbols and stuff, just in case

If u keep getting the same error we can troubleshoot together so that if there's a change needed I can bugfix it for the next update.

Alternatively you can use showmiiwads to extract the nand, it's under the options or tools menu. Further, u can use showmiiwads to install WADs to an emunand, doesn't matter where they're saved. Change showmiiwads' view to showmiinand, point it to your emunand, then drag and drop wads onto the window, then whenever you're ready click the button at the bottom (should say install or something like that)

 

[DA88]

Try a fresh modmii install, make sure it's a simple installation so avoid folders with weird symbols and stuff, just in case

If u keep getting the same error we can troubleshoot together so that if there's a change needed I can bugfix it for the next update.

Alternatively you can use showmiiwads to extract the nand, it's under the options or tools menu. Further, u can use showmiiwads to install WADs to an emunand, doesn't matter where they're saved. Change showmiiwads' view to showmiinand, point it to your emunand, then drag and drop wads onto the window, then whenever you're ready click the button at the bottom (should say install or something like that)

Thanks again XFlak. I reinstalled modmii in a simpler location, and the nand.bin extraction worked. I now have an EmuNAND named /nand/ on the directory of my SD card.

Can I use modmii to extract the wad files to the EmuNAND?

 

[XFlak]

Thanks again XFlak. I reinstalled modmii in a simpler location, and the nand.bin extraction worked. I now have an EmuNAND named /nand/ on the directory of my SD card.

Can I use modmii to extract the wad files to the EmuNAND?

U can but TBH showmiiwads works better for this. Modmii can add wads but not remove them, showmiiwads/showmiinand can do both.

Using modmii just use modmii's emunand modifier feature, or drag and drop your nand folder onto modmii.exe to launch directly into it

 

[leejaclane]

This is probably silly and it's not my business, but I haven't seen @blackb0x on here lately and I'm starting to get a little bit worried. I'm not really concerned about the lack of news on an update to this app at this point, but if anybody knows if everything is alright or not (without getting into personal details that aren't my business, of course), I'd appreciate it if anyone could ease my worried mind.

My imagination can run a little wild sometimes, so I worry about people. It's not my business but a simple answer about blackb0x being alive would be enough to ease my worried mind.

 

[XFlak]

He shared some info about 1 month ago in the ModMii discord, but has since gone quiet. At the time he said he was MIA due to internet issues, then he had covid (recovered), then some family stuff I won't go into which is what I imagine is taking up his time these days. He also said that d2x v11 beta2 should be ready soon for Wii and vWii, and that a public beta version of GX should be ready soon too (at the time we were expecting something around new years for both). More details in the ModMii discord, but this is the gist. He said all this publicly in the ModMii discord, otherwise I wouldn't be sharing his business.

@blackb0x I hope you're doing OK, and that your fam is staying strong during this tough time.

 

[leejaclane]

Wow, I'm sorry to hear that about getting covid and whatever else is going on, I hope he doesn't have any long-term health issues from it.

 

[mahboi]

I'm trying to dump my Wii's NAND to back it up before running cIOS installer so USB Loader will work, but Dump Mii NAND seems to freeze after writing:
Will dump NAND to sd:/nand.bin NAND dump process started. Do NOT remove the SD card. ‒ blocks dumped: 4096 / 4096. Writing footer. . . Done. Writing file /keys.bin. . . Done.

I tried it once before with a dodgy SD card that I thought may have been slightly too small with all the ROMs I had on it. That's because when I gave up on waiting, a couple of hours after it initially took several minutes to get stuck at this same point, and hard-reset my Wii with the power button, that SD Card was corrupted.
However, this problem has just occurred again after I tried it with a brand new card with plenty of room. I had read that Dump Mii NAND is supposed to restart the console itself once it has finished, but this does not seem to be saying that it's doing anything after supposedly dumping all blocks.

What should I do in this case? Hard reset and check the card again?
What could be going wrong and how can I troubleshoot it?

 

[XFlak]

Use bootmii

 

[mahboi]

Use bootmii

I'll give it a go. My fears may have been unwarranted though.
After hard-resetting and removing this new SD card, data is intact and I now have a nand.bin file 528MiB long and a keys.bin file 1KiB long. Does that sound correct?

 

[Kirby6417]

Anybody else have problems detecting HDD using rev 1281 on Wii?

I updated from 1271 but then it began failing to detect HDD when booting USBLGX. It detected it about 1/5 boots.

I went back to 1271 and that fixed my problem.

Maybe the issue was that it was mounting it too slowly? I mean, when it failed to detect, the USBLGX loading screen was very laggy (it does a countdown when looking for the HDD and the countdown was just frozen for most of its duration).

For reference, my “HDD” is a micro SD card into a USB adapter. I’ve used this countless times on countless Wiis without issue.

The only noteworthy changes on this Wii from my usual Wiis are:
-I used d2x-v11-beta1 instead of v8-final
-I swapped where I installed bases 56 & 57, so USBLGX was using a different one by default
-I’m using the latest version of Priiloader which (I believe) no longer mounts the USB drive on booting.

But none of this accounts for the fact that rev 1271 boots fine in the same circumstances.

If I find an answer to my own problem so that I can use rev 1281, I’ll report it here.

 

[grandosegood]

Anybody else have problems detecting HDD using rev 1281 on Wii?

I updated from 1271 but then it began failing to detect HDD when booting USBLGX. It detected it about 1/5 boots.

I went back to 1271 and that fixed my problem.

Maybe the issue was that it was mounting it too slowly? I mean, when it failed to detect, the USBLGX loading screen was very laggy (it does a countdown when looking for the HDD and the countdown was just frozen for most of its duration).

For reference, my “HDD” is a micro SD card into a USB adapter. I’ve used this countless times on countless Wiis without issue.

The only noteworthy changes on this Wii from my usual Wiis are:
-I used d2x-v11-beta1 instead of v8-final
-I swapped where I installed bases 56 & 57, so USBLGX was using a different one by default
-I’m using the latest version of Priiloader which (I believe) no longer mounts the USB drive on booting.

But none of this accounts for the fact that rev 1271 boots fine in the same circumstances.

If I find an answer to my own problem so that I can use rev 1281, I’ll report it here.

can you try with the default bases as indicated in the guide? Generally, I'd recommend an external hard drive or SSD.