Apparently in the last several years, it has become possible to play Gamecube game backups on a Wii using a Classic Controller via Nintendont, instead of having to buy and connect a Gamecube controller.
I tried doing this and found that Nintendont (and USB Loader GX's GC support for that metter) really doesn't like my USB HDD partitioning scheme, with homebrew on the first partition and games on the second.
I should probably backup everything to my NAS and then smash the partitions together.
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Okay, partitions are backed up to the NAS as .7z archives. The homebrew + emu NAND archive is ~10GB, and the disc backups archive is ~200GB.
I'm reading that the Wii likes a FAT32 partition with 32KB cluster size, and that modern Windows won't format large FAT32 partitions. The USB HDD is 500GB, so I've booted an OpenSUSE VM and mapped the USB HDD into it.
Tried GParted first, but it set a 64KB cluster size. Now I'm trying mkdosfs on the command line, with a bad sector test.
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I should mention I probably could've just had GParted delete the 32GB partition and then resize the big partition to fill the disk, but it's better this way: I'll get a clean file allocation table, and will be able to selectively bring stuff back over to avoid some cruft.
I should probably also find a defragmenter that can move large files to the end of the disk, so that they don't get fragmented by homebrew files. It's been a while since I've used one of those!
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Had to abort because the bad block check was going to take probably multiple days lol.
Annoyingly, 7-zip on Windows seems to extract stuff to a temp folder on my system drive, and then tells the OS to copy it to the destination. Maybe I should've done this part in Windows too, but I didn't want to wrestle with getting to where 7-zip could access a Samba share in that environment.
I'm moving disc backups over in chunks of 10 to avoid filling up my system drive :p
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Everything is restored. Did a bit of pruning, and added some nice songs to use as USB Loader GX background music.
Now that I've got everything in place, I've started a full defrag in Defraggler. I enabled the option to move large files to the end of the drive - default threshold is something like 250MB which seems fine.
Defrag seems to be going pretty slowly...might be an overnight operation.
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Defrag completed. Updated an alternate launcher that I use as a backup (Wiiflow) and tweaked USB Loader GX's config files, since this is easier to do from a PC.
Wii booted fine and found both my Wii games and Wind Waker (my GameCube test game). Had to reset ULGX's Nintendont path even though I'd already checked it from the PC - now I'm paranoid that it's getting config from the SD card or something.
Anyway, Wind Waker works, and supports my Classic Controller Pro.
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Loading up the Wii HDD with more GameCube games. Turns out there's a confusing forest of different disc image formats out there.
RVZ is apparently the best one for emulation, because it is highly compressed while being optimized for on-the-fly decompression - but it's not supported by the Nintendont GC loader on the Wii.
The only compressed format supported by Nintendont appears to be CISO, which is somewhere between raw ISO and RVZ. I'm having to use two tools to convert RVZ->ISO->CISO.
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Tried batching my .ciso files onto the USB HDD using GameCube Backup Manager, and it went off the rails creating a bunch of garbage files/directories and then freezing up. I couldn't even kill the GCBM process in Windows - I had to just yank the USB cable.
Deleted the garbage and ran a CHKDSK - no issues detected. Now I'm loading the games one at a time, and they seem to be transferring fine?
I may convert the 2 ISO games to CISO and then do another defrag to move it all to the end of the HDD.
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Did a quick defragment, as it's going to be another overnight operation - plus I realized I hadn't tested CISOs yet.
Looks like they work, except the Wii channel banner animations are all generic - I thought Wind Waker in ISO mode had a game-specific banner? I'll have to switch that one back as a test. Will be annoying if I have to un-convert them all.
Wasted time trying to get rumble working, then remembered I had disabled it because my rechargeable batteries are too weak at the moment lol
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I also noticed in Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes that the buttons on the Classic Controller Pro seemed wildly off from what the in-game directions suggested. It looks like you can hit the Minus button in Nintendont to swap controller layouts, so I'll have to play with that.
Also, the MP3s I loaded on as random background music for USB Loader GX have wildly different volume levels, so I'll have to use a normalizer - looks like MP3Gain is a FOSS solution, so I'll try that.
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Made sure rumble is enabled everywhere, and still not getting wiimote rumbles in Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. Oh well. If I were serious about it I'd buy a GameCube blueretro, plug it into the Wii's GC ports, and use my 8bitdo Pro 2.
Reverting Wind Waker from CISO to ISO did get me a less generic Wii channel banner in USB Loader GX - but then I noticed ULGX can download custom banners that are even better, so I may as well stick with CISO for the space savings.
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Rumble worked a bit in a couple other games - I think my rechargeable AA batteries are just getting too old to drive rumble motors for more than a couple hours after a charge.
Meanwhile, it turns out GameCube games are displaying in 16:9, and there seems to be nothing I can do about it. My TV won't let me force 4:3 while in game mode.
Nintendont has an option to force a width of 640 pixels, but USB Loader GX doesn't support it when I launch GC games from there. 640 also still seems a bit wide.
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@HunterZ gamecube games were all over the place with HDTV aspect ratio / resolution - the cable was expensive (had a chip in it!) and often you had to do things like hold B on bootup to force progressive mode. not surprising that it'd be wrong half the time on your setup :)
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@greg I noticed that every GC game I've tried has a different bespoke prompt on startup asking whether I want to enable progressive versus interlaced mode - which I'm pretty sure is a separate thing from widescreen mode? I've heard that some GC games supported widescreen, but I don't think I've encountered any yet.
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Reverted Wind Waker to a CISO, even though it's about the same size as the original file. This is because it was an "nkit.iso", which is apparently yet another scrubbed-ISO format.
Now I'm going in circles with Defraggler, as it keeps running off the rails while trying to defrag the USB HDD. I looked at other free defraggers, but none have the "move files to the end" feature that I want to use to get large backups out of the way of homebrew apps/data.
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Defraggler ran all day in the background, just trying to get the biggest games defragmented lol.
I finally had to move the operation to a Windows 10 machine that I use as a 24/7 game server, since I have to shut my laptop down until tomorrow evening.
This old 5400RPM 500GB Seagate USB HDD is very slow at move operations - Windows clocks it as averaging 5-7MB/s read and write.
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Defraggler eventually reached a point where it said it couldn't defragment a few remaining game backups. This appears to be due to the fact that folder entries are scattered all over the disk (probably just before where the game backups originally got copied onto the drive), and I guess Defraggler can't move them?
I tried UltraDefrag and super-sketchy SmartDefrag, but they fared no better.
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I then found UltimateDefrag, which looks like it's from the 1990s, but is even fancier than Defraggler in that it lets you define high and low priority items, which get moved closer to the start and end of of the drive, respectively.
It's been running all day, but seems to be making progress. Fingers crossed.
I'm also not sure the large files are getting moved all the way to the end yet?
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I think I'm headed towards the same problem of stuff ending up fragmented because directories aren't getting moved.
Did some research, and it seems what Windows' defrag API just doesn't support moving fat32 directory entries, and virtually all defragmenters use that API.
There's an old partition manager software that may be able to consolidate directory entries, or I can try a FreeDOS defrag utility in a VM. What a pain!
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Couldn't get the mythical Paragon partition manager version that can supposedly move FAT32 directory entries working in Windows 10. Trying to mount the USB HDD in FreeDOS running in VirtualBox was also a no-go for some reason.
I'm moving all the files to my NAS and will create the full directory tree without files before moving back, in hopes it will result in directory data staying near the beginning of the disk.
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I'm honestly more than a little tempted to try my hand at a Linux utility that performs reads and writes on an unmounted FAT32 drive's block device in order to move all directory data to the start of the disk - moving non-directory files out of the way as needed. This would then allow a Windows defragmenter to have the entire rest of the drive as its playground.
I would probably try on a dd image file first, since I could mount those to see if they're mangled.
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@HunterZ You might study what you can steal conceptually from Kessels' highly customizable MyDefrag (Windows) - some of its various canned defrag "stacks" definitely have unmovable file consolidation (when the file system is quiescent) as a goal. Spinning rust is assumed, so it tries to push MFT and other directory metadata towards the "inner edge" (front) of the drive.
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@tychotithonus MFT is an NTFS thing, but I don't have the luxury of using that for a Wii disk.
It's actually a lost MyDefrag webpage where I finally got confirmation that Windows' defrag API - used by basically all Windows defragmenters including MyDefrag - refuses to move directories themselves on FAT32.
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@HunterZ Wow, TIL!
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Moving all files to the NAS resulted in 4 files failing - I guess some bad sectors have been exposed on the 500GB USB HDD. This means I'll have to reacquire the affected disc images, and probably reconnect the drive to a Linux VM to recreate the FAT32 partition (hopefully the drive will have internally blocked out the physical sectors) before recreating the directory structure and then moving everything back.
Maybe I should just buy a 500GB USB stick lol.
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Doh, I've been at this too long: forgot that I had archived the entire drive before embarking on this journey, in case this exact kind of corruption thing popped up - but I didn't remember until I had reacquired the 4 corrupted games via other means.
In any case, I'm transferring them to the drive and then into my temporary pile of stuff that was moved off long enough to do a reformat and directory creation - then finally all get moved back together.
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Used find in bash to generate a list of just the directories in the pile of moved-off files, then prepared the drive, then converted the list from line-separated to null-separated, and finally fed it back into xargs in order to recreate the empty directory tree.
The null separation was needed because some of the directories have spaces in them.
Funny thing: Because there are ~3000 directories, and the FAT32 cluster size is 32KB, the directory entries alone take up almost 100MB. Awful waste!
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