The saga of the multiple attempts to play my old Wii games with gamecube remotes again

by **Dragon Arbock** Tue Jul 14, 2015 12:33 pm

Because I figure some of you might get a kick out of my misfortune, here's a story for you all;

'So, as some may be aware, my wii broke some time back- well, by broke, I mean it
technically plays things fine, but at the consequence of the discs it runs getitng
a nasty ring etched into the top of the disc, thus ruining them (so it's become a
glorified coaster and gba emulator, but that's besides the point).

Now, the Wii U can play Wii games, which is fine and good, but there are some Wii
games that I would never get a good experience out of playing if not given the
ability to do so with a Gamecube remote, as opposed to forced, flawed motion
controls. So.. when I heard the Wii U GC controller adapter was a thing, I just
about rejoiced.

But of course it took nearly a year for me to get my hands on one, as I hadn't
thought to get the bundle for SSB4 Wii U (as I didn't need another GC controller).
However, when I finally did.. I discovered Nintendo is capable of being even
stupider than I could have imagined, as the adapter can not be read by any other
game other than SSB4. BUT, hackers have already figured out how to use it on a GC
emulator for that can run on Wii U, and it can be used on PC. Go figure.

So, back to the drawing board. My brother likes to brawl hack, and for convience
sake, he ripped our SSBB disc, and got dolphin emulator for his pc. It runs well
enough, and with the GC adapter.. so that got me thinking- and so I made him rip
NiGHTS Journey of Dreams for me.

Now, having the rom, and getting dolphin emulator to run it pretty darn smoothly
on my new laptop provided I close out of all other applications, I thought to run
it through the hdmi cables so it would display on the tv, and, that if I ran it
through the capture card, I could record the footage too without having a recorder
running on my computer and causing lag.

So.. the first part of that idea worked fine, but for some reason when I checked
the usb it was recording to.. the files were not there. At this point I was
confused, and could not understand why that was. Giving up for the moment, I was
forced to trying out screen recorders.

None were particularly great, with the camtasia recorder being noticeably the worst
of all for causing lag. Only when I'm at my wit's end does my brother mention
that he had to switch the mode of the usb to rip the game, and he didn't switch it
back so it could save other files like normal again.. At this point I wasn't sure
whether to smack myself, or be happy my initial assumption about recording was
right, and would still probably work now that the usb has been switched back.

So, at this point I have him rip Sonic Riders Zero Gravity for me too, since I
wanted him to do that earlier, and he may as well do that before he switched the
usb. So, he does that, I set up dolphin and the capture card again, and I start
testing NiGHTS again. It works fine as before, and I actually had footage on the
usb now, so all seems good. At this point my sister comes in, so I configure
another controller, and I decide to test 2-player, knowing that it probably won't
work that greatly, but it's worth a shot.

NiGHTs's 2-player is a little laggy, which was to be expected, though overall not
bad. I did get an error about the GPU being too fast, which apparently means the
video and audio was getting a little desynced- not that big of a deal, as all you
have to do is dismiss the pop up box and it goes back to being fine. Next,
however, we tried SRZG.

Zero Gravity looked like it would run fine, it really did. 2 player was laggy as
expected (though it only went down to 80% at the worst.) What was really
offputting is that it just crashed. So I went to 1 player. I played one race in 1
-player- it lagged a bit at the start before I thought to also shut down skype to
save as much as I could. I was able to play Aquatic Capital. Then I went to
Meteortech Premises.

It crashed. So I tried again, got 2/3rds through the race, and it crashed again.
So I tried to do the story. It crashed 3 more times on the first lap of the first
level. at this point I gave up after having messed with several of the emulation
settings to no avail. I can not fathom what is wrong.

So, at this point I have two more things to try- download different builds of
dolphin to see if they will be more tolerant of SRZG, or, two, learn how to
properly burn a copy disc and launch it with a homebrew app for my wii, because
who cares if it chews up a copy. (The second solution would also be beneficial for
the sake of playing two player at a more conducive framerate.)'

So for now, the saga continues.

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30