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Journal buffer-overflowed's Journal: Wii Virtual Console Games 18

Journal by buffer-overflowed

So, I dumped my VC games to SD, plugged it into my smartphone(Windows is being wonky on the work laptop and won't mount SD(among other little quirks), I blame mucking with multiple versions of Tomcat, Active Perl, and dev crap trying to get an App working *over there* on an OS we typically don't use for it. Need to reformat it when I get back to work on monday), and dumped em.

I verified that I can do the following:
1. Copy from system memory to SD
2. delete from system memory (game vanishes from channel, leaves a blank spot)
3. copy back to system memory from SD (game reappears, works fine)
4. Goto 1, skip 4, copy to PC via hackish smartphone setup.
5. Delete from SD.
6. Copy back to SD from PC.
7. Goto 3. End.

The files are stored in private/Wii/titles/4Letter HASH. Game saves are data.bin, virtual console games are content.bin. I cleared the SD card completely, and copied over just the data for FZero. I then compared the size to a ROM of the game. It's bigger, almost like the emulator is included and it's a wii binary, which is my guess. I'd also guess that it stores your store information in system memory, to prevent just copying those .bin files over to another consoles system memory. And it's probably RSA secured as well. Dunno if it stores a hash/md5 sum to prevent you from doing what I'm sure many are thinking(buy N64 games, rip the rom out, pop in Goldeneye and/or Conker, go to town). Tada, modless VC trick. I'm sure smarter hackers than me will start tinkering here soon.

So yea, odd things about the VC.
1. Can not play games from SD.
2. The selection ain't so hot right now, I suspect more games this weekend. No gunstar heroes, no dungeon explorer, no Link to the Past yet.
3. No mechanism to tell you new games are available that I've seen(of course no new games have been added since 1am sunday, soo...).
4. Aspect ratio doesn't autoshift for you. So, since our Wii is in 16:9, all the games are in 16:9. They don't look terribly stretched, and it's just a minor annoyance though.

All told, the VC works pretty well. The emulation is spot on, I just wish there was a bigger selection. Prices are sort of high as well ($5 NES, $8 Genesis/SNES, $10 N64), but that doesn't bug me too much, I'm used to being a tad hosed for *on demand* content, and it's still early yet.

Oh, and it's frickin' impossible to find a classic controller in Boston atm. I had one preordered, but they didn't arrive in time for the midnight release, so I'm SOL.

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  • Oh, and it's frickin' impossible to find a classic controller in Boston atm

    lets see... how many universities/colleges are within spitting distance from your place? you've got bu, mit, harvard... plus the unaccounted for masses of geeks all living within a 20-block radius... of course you aren't going to find a classic controller. i'm surprised you haven't seen them being sold on the streets by shady characters asking "hey, you wanna game tonight? i gotcha controller here man"

    no no, boston would the last pla
    • You forgot BC and Berklee. And if we're going out to Harvard, we may as well include Tufts and Northeastern.

      Hehe, I had one preordered, but the store hasn't gotten their shipment in yet.
  • Looks like we'll be getting 26 VC games [nintendo.com.au] (scroll down a wee bit) to choose from - prolly the same as you'll have shortly. (I am led to believe that the Sega games are not yet all available over there?)

    BTW, did you notice we gots a new Wii icon for JEs?
    • We only have the following atm:
      Baseball, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Pinball, Soccer, Solomon's Key, The Legend of Zelda, Wario's Woods, F-Zero, SimCity, Super Mario 64, Sonic the Hedgehog, Altered Beast

      Sigh, sucks to be an early adopter. I'm guessing there's another batch coming sometime this week, or at the latest, early december.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by arb ( 452787 )
        It would be nice if the VC games were a little bit cheaper. $15 for another copy of Super Mario 64? I think I'll stick with my DS version thankyouverymuych. But I could easily justify $7.50 each for Mario Bros and Donkey Kong, though the others I'd balk at spending more than $5 to check them out...

        Sigh... 15 more sleeps - I haven't been this eager to get my hands on a new console ever.
        • Yea, it would. To be fair though, it's not much worse here than other content of it's nature. Sorta reminds me of those SNES TV things you sometimes see in hotels, or our cable co's "on-demand" feature for movies/what not.

          I ended up popping 5000 points on the console and going a little nuts with it, since I'm impatient and wanted to check out emulation on as many systems as possible.

          There's a lot of ways they could make the VC better. Timed demos would be a nice start, as would cheaper/more flexible pric

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by arb ( 452787 )
            Oh and Mario Bros is Mario Bros, not Super Mario Bros. The two-player between levels mini-game from Mario 3/what they've included on just about all the Mario Advance carts. FYI.

            Yep. That's the one I'm interested in getting. I remember playing Ye Olde Mario Bros on the C64 many, many, many years ago with a good friend and a bottle of bourbon. Much fun was had with such a dinky little game but unfortunately I lost the disk I had it on.

            I have the GameCube Zelda disc that came with WindWaker, so I got most of t
            • Link to the Past is unfortunately not on my Collector's disc(they had just rereleased it on the GBA with four swords added). I think it was the same disc across all regions... but not positive on that.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by arb ( 452787 )
                You're right - I checked this morning before I left for work. It would be great if they ended up releasing all the Zelda games through the VC - I'd definitely drop a few dollars on them. I might just look around for some of the old stuff on GBA/DS though...
    • As a total aside. Arb - add me to your friends list so I can comment in your JE's :D

      Out of that list, the newly added ones I'd be interested in are Donkey Kong Country and Golden Axe. So far, I just have Zelda.

  • BTW... (Score:1)

    by arb ( 452787 )
    How much bigger than the ROMs are the VC files?
    • Several MB. Hence why I think the emulator and ROM are packaged together.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by arb ( 452787 )
        Makes sense - that way they could sell games for pretty much any system without having to update the Wii's code. It'd be interesting to try pull one of the files apart and see how it works...
  • Despite what our EB manager was telling us, it doesn't appear that its needed by many games. I've just downloaded and started playing the original Zelda using the Wiimote. I'm going to download more later, just put $20 into the account.
    • Nah, it's not, but it's just cleaner to have 2 classic controllers than to keep using Wavebirds. :-)

      I also don't like how using a Wavebird in say Mario 64 tends to make my remote desynch, thus making me have to power it off manually.
  • and it doesn't work, let me know. If I can get the files for the same game from two Wiis, I can do a binary compare and check the difference. Id' imagine it codes your Wii Id number in there, so if I had those I could search for it. It shouldn't be too hard to hack it unless it's encrypted.

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