Instead of the Wii System Menu just appearing frozen, they saw the Freeloader logo popup during the freeze, which made it much more apparent that it succeeded! Datel's instructions only mention flashing bars during success, so we still need to verify this on a console with a vulnerable System Menu to see if this is indeed the correct behavior.īy default Dolphin's Global User Directory is placed in the user's boot drive, specifically in the place each operating system recommends applications put their files. While we demonstrated that the Wii Menu would freeze during the exploit in the video above, one of our testers running the same build of Dolphin with the same settings had a different behavior during that freeze. On the Wii side of things, any of the games that froze with the wrong language configured in Dolphin also freeze with Freeloader, such as Tales of Graces.Īll of those oddities we can explain and make sense, however there is one thing we ran into that is currently a mystery. Freeloader also has no way of handling text for other region's games when they require the BIOS provided typeface. When Dolphin first added MIOS support, games that required MIOS patches failed to boot and the same thing happens with Freeloader. Interestingly, Freeloader itself struggles with a lot of issues that Dolphin has tackled in the past regarding various regional behaviors.
WHAT DOES XENIA EMULATOR PROGRESS REPORT SAY TRIAL
Through trial and error, one of our testers discovered that you needed to put in a valid in-region disc after Freeloader is rejected, eject that, then insert your import. However, Wii games did not work with this method and left us puzzled. Insert the Freeloader disc, wait for the Wii to freeze while watching the disc channel, and once the Wii rejected the disc, simply swap in an import disc and it'll boot up as per normal. GameCube imports were the simpler of the two cases to test. While it took us quite a while to figure out exactly what it wanted us to do, we were able to test and verify that it worked in Dolphin.
For our purposes, we tested 3.2U (NTSC) and 3.1E (PAL) which were known to work with Freeloader for Wii. Part of the problem was having a system menu version vulnerable to its exploit, as Nintendo patched out everything they used by the time 4.x System Menu revisions hit the scene. Now that it wasn't crashing, the main challenge became testing Freeloaders exploits in Dolphin. On this particular day, we're talking about the Wii release of Datel's Freeloader, a handy bit of hackery that allowed Wii owners to launch games from other regions.įreeloader was a bit of a pain to record. Over the lifetime of the two consoles, they released a ton of applications, games, and even a GBA emulator. When it comes to unlicensed GameCube and Wii software, it's hard to think of any other name than Datel. Jumping straight from unreleased prototypes to unlicensed releases, we once again welcome an old friend. Notable Changes ¶ 5.0-11129 - Don't Crash When Running Wii Freeloader by JosJuice ¶ With that bit of interesting news out of the way, let's get back to our regularly scheduled Progress Report. Still, we're happy that Dolphin was chosen as a platform to test out this unique prototype and the game worked without needing modification. If you do run it, you get to see an incredibly early preview of the game with many non-existent textures, placeholder graphics, and incomplete collision detection. While it emulates just fine in the latest development builds, it does not run in Dolphin 5.0, due to broken support for unencrypted Wii discs.
Spider-Man 4 on the other hand, never saw release and this was just about everyone's first look at the game. Those that have looked into it have found a plethora of minor differences and glitches between this build and the one Japan would see a few weeks later.
Wind Waker's prerelease demo is very close to the retail product and fully playable beginning to end without the imposed timer. We can't say for sure that the Spider-Man 3 film doomed the Spider-Man 4 game, but, well, it probably did.Įach of these games give a very specific look into their development.