r3dux.org

It’s really easy to get this emulator up and working – but you do have to compile it yourself in linux – still, it’s only a couple of commands and you’re set. I did it on Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit and it worked like a charm…

Update (04/07/2011): Easiest way yet – simply add the PPA and get it (for Ubuntu 10.10 & 11.04 32/64 bit only) like this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:glennric/dolphin-emu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dolphin-emu

Update (Older than above): I found that you can download pre-compiled .deb files for Ubuntu 9.10 here (PPA addition required) – be careful with that sudo apt-get upgrade command in the instructions though – I don’t really think you need it and you probably don’t want to upgrade your entire linux distribution just to play an emulator… I’m confusing sudo apt-get upgrade (which upgrades currently installed packages) with sudo apt-get dist-upgrade (which updates your linux distribution if there is a newer version available) – my bad.

Either way, I’d recommend you just compile it yourself – it only takes a couple of minutes.

Update – Nov 2011: Like anything published, it ages and what might have been correct at the time of writing may no longer be the case – so with that in mind, if you’re going to build your own copy of Dolphin, you’re probably best off going to http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/wiki/Linux_Build and using the instructions there.

#Get the project dependencies
sudo apt-get install subversion scons g++ wx2.8-headers libwxbase2.8-0 libwxbase2.8-dbg libwxbase2.8-dev libwxgtk2.8-0 libwxgtk2.8-dbg libwxgtk2.8-dev libgtk2.0-dev libsdl1.2-dev nvidia-cg-toolkit libxrandr2-dbg libxrandr-dev libxext6-dbg libxext-dev libglew1.5-dev libcairo2-dbg libcairo2-dev libao2 libao-dev libbluetooth-dev libreadline5-dev
 
# Make a directory to get the source and go into it
mkdir dolphin
cd dolphin
 
# Grab the latest source code through subversion
svn checkout http://dolphin-emu.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ dolphin-emu-read-only
 
# Get to the right location to build the emulator (it needs to be the one with the SConstruct file in it)
cd dolphin-emu-read-only/stable
 
# Build it!
scons flavor=release

Issues: If you’re getting errors along the line of Looking for lib Cg… no. Plugin_VideoOGL must have cg and cggl to be build, then the fix is to install the nvidia-cg-toolkit package with:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-cg-toolkit

With all that done, it takes around five minutes to compile and build, then you can go to the Binary folder inside your source-code download location to find the executable and launch it. Once it’s up and running just go File | Open and point it at an Wii or Gamecube ISO and you’re in business!

By default you get a gamecube controller bound to the keyboard (Enter = Start button, x = A button, cursor keys up/down/left/right) and an emulated Wiimote is bound to the mouse (where the left mouse button is the A button), but you can use joysticks, real Wiimotes etc as well without too much fuss. Fantastic stuff

If you’re having any issues, just read more about linux confix/setup/dependencies here, while the main Dolphin wiki lives here.

Post last updated: 12th August 2011

So you’ve got your Wii soft-modded and you can run homebrew and stuff (you haven’t? Well, ya could..) – what next? Well, you can install a whole heap of WiiWare, Virtual Console games and applications, but the Wii can only store a couple of hundred MB of stuff on its internal memory before it’s full. When this happens it’s like your drive’s full – you’re going to have to uninstall some things to install others.

Or… you could use NAND emulation to install as much stuff as you want! Sound more like it? Let’s get it on!

Intial prep

The Wii has 512MB of flash (i.e. NAND) memory, much like a USB stick – and it uses it to store the Wii operating system, save games, channels/WiiWare/VC stuff etc. When you soft-mod your Wii you’ve (hopefully!) backed up the system memory so you can restore it to default, in case you want to. If you’ve backed up your NAND system memory using BootMii, this is all well and good, but it’s not what we’re going to be using as the basis for our NAND emulation (i.e. the backed up nand.bin file) – we’re going to strip out just what we need to get a bare-bones NAND image (really, just a set of directories) and then use that to install our stuff.

To begin with, we’ve got two options:

• We can use a SD card to store our installed apps/games/channels (or SDHC card if your firmware is > 4.0, previous version of firmware don’t support SDHC cards), or
• We can use a compatible USB hard-drive

In this guide I’m going to set things up on a SD card, if you want to use a hard drive you’ll need it partitioned to have TWO partitions (each of which needs to be assigned a drive letter – not sure how? Try this): One large partition for your Wii ISOs which you’ll want to format using something like WBFS Manager, and the other smaller partition you can leave as standard FAT32, just like you’d have on your SD card or a USB stick.

On an SD card we can just use whatever space is available on the card, for hard drives you’re going to have to decide on how big the partition you want to use for NAND emulation is going to be (a couple of GB should do it plenty), assign the rest to the other partition for your WBFS ISOs. I’ve got a 640GB USB drive, so I’d prolly assign around 20 to 25GB for emulation so I’d have stacks of space for ROMs etc. – remember – there are no tools to resize WBFS partitions at the moment – so pick your sizes and get it right first time! =D

Okay, with that out of the way – let’s kick off with the emulation steps:

Step 1 – Get a copy of our Wii’s NAND in usable format

For this we’re going to use Simple FileSystem Dumper 0.2. Download it, create a folder for it in on your SD card under the apps folder, rename the .dol file to boot.dol and launch it through the Homebrew Channel.

Once you’ve run Simple FileSystem Dumper 0.2 you’re going to have a bunch of extra folders on the root of your SD card (or hard-drive, depending) – the new directories are these:

Make a copy of all these “blank” folders! Later on you can delete the folders off your SD card or HD and copy these “blank” folders back to effectively uninstall any installed WADs. You can prolly use WAD Manager etc. to just uninstall specific WADs, but I haven’t tried it out as yet. The folders are useful and only around 180MB in total, so it’s worth holding on to pristine copies.

Step 2 – [If neccessary] Update CIOS 38 to Revision 14

To use NAND emulation you absolutely need CIOS Revision 14 or higher. My Wii was on Revision 13b or something, so I used Waninkoko’s CIOS Updater and a net connection to get it up to Revision 14. You can find a copy like this…

Step 3 – Preparing the WADs for your emulated NAND

From what I’ve read you can install your WiiWare/Virtual Console WAD files to the emulated NAND using any of the following methods:

• By using WAD Manager 1.5 or higher.
• By using NeoGamma R6 or higher.
• Manually.

Because I formatted my USB Hard drive as a single partition in WBFS format (and I can’t be bothered to fix it up to have two partitions quite yet), and because you must have different source and destination locations at present to install WADs using NAND emulation (that is, SD to HD or HD to SD, not SD to SD or HD to HD) – I’m going to show you how to go with the manual method of installing stuff to your emulated NAND. And for this we’re going to need a little win32 application called wad2NAND.

The way it works is:

1. Download wad2nand
2. Extract the zip file
3. Create a batch file called ConvertWADs.bat in the folder you extracted wad2nand to. Put the following in the batch file:

   @echo off
   for %%x in (.\Convert\*.wad) do start /w wad2nand.exe "%%x"

   Then:

4. Create a folder called Convert inside the folder where you extracted the wad2nand zip
5. Copy a bunch of WAD files (As many as you like! Woo-hoo! Or as many as you have space on your emulated NAND location for, really!) into that Convert folder and run your ConvertWADs.bat batch file
6. Give it a minute to extract all the wads to two folders: ticket and title which will appear in the folder where you extracted wad2nand – remember these folders from earlier?

   

Update: Although the title and ticket folders hold the core content for games or apps or whatnot, I’ve read that the additional folders hold things like Miis and high-scores and things, so none of the folders are cruft or anything, and if you’re finicky about such things you’re best to hold on to them.

Step 4 – Actually install the extracted WAD files to your emulated NAND

After running wad2nand, the ticket and title folders will contain the installed version of the files to play whatever WADs you’ve converted. You now need to copy these two folders over the top of the “blank” nand folders on the root of your SD card or hard drive. Select [Yes to all] to overwrite things if there are duplicate files – just merge ‘em all together. Almost there!

Step 5 – Launch the NAND emulation installed WADs

To do this, I’m going to use an application called Triiforce beta 7. Grab it and launch from the Homebrew Channel, then select your source (SD / HD / Wherever you’ve installed the extracted WADs).

Updated Note: TriiForce beta 7 is now available, at the time of writing TriiForce beta 5 was the latest version available, so that’s what you’ll see in the below screenshots.

By selecting the second from top option in TriiForce (showing a WAD version of Backup Launcher in the screenshot above) you can press left and right on the D-Pad of the Wiimote to select which WAD to run, and then just select the Start option above to launch it!

All done! Unlimited installs FTW!