Is there a way to launch the OLD version of the Wii Shop Channel and hear the song?

[dolphindumper]

I realize this is a strange question so please bare with me.

I don’t know if this has been documented anywhere (I searched and looked everywhere) but it appeared that when Nintendo shut down the Eshop service, they also did something to update it that changed the way the music is played. Even if you go to launch it on real hardware, you can still hear the music (that’s about all you can do now) but it’s totally lacking reverb. So it sounds nothing like it used to. Or am I mis-remembering and it never had reverb? All the recordings I can find of the track online had reverb. So, I guess my first question is which is right in the first place? If it’s the reverb version, how can we get it running again?

[JosJuice]

When I launch the Wii Shop Channel in Dolphin, it sounds like I'm used to it sounding. I haven't heard anything about this missing reverb before.

[dolphindumper]

(06-11-2020, 06:13 AM)JosJuice Wrote: When I launch the Wii Shop Channel in Dolphin, it sounds like I'm used to it sounding. I haven't heard anything about this missing reverb before.

Just to clarify, you’re hearing it with reverb? Or without?

I went to some older YouTube videos to check how the music used to sound back in the day, and just like I remembered, there was actually reverb on the song. Even in more recent videos people recorded just prior to the shutdown.

[mbc07]

Not an ideal solution but you could try to extract the actual sound file from the Wii Shop Channel WAD, then use VGM Stream to convert it to a suitable format and add the reverb effect manually...

[dolphindumper]

(06-11-2020, 09:28 AM)mbc07 Wrote: Not an ideal solution but you could try to extract the actual sound file from the Wii Shop Channel WAD, then use VGM Stream to convert it to a suitable format and add the reverb effect manually...

Thank you for the suggestion, I have done this and tried to closely match the original reverb, and for any other purpose it would have been serviceable… but I am conducting a project to rip hardware-accurate versions of all the Wii system/channel music (using Dolphin LLE interpreter and the DSP rom dumped from my console) and this one track has been a pain. So it’ll be a shame if it can’t be captured. It seems this song is effectively “lost” as it can’t be played anymore as it originally sounded, and no truly high quality recordings exist.


Nintendo did officially release the song on the “Touch Generations” CD but I suspect they recorded it for that CD similarly to the method you mention, applying out of the box compression and other effects. It’s also pretty compressed. I honestly can’t say if their reverb is accurate to the original without doing an A/B comparison, but as it stands there is no capture of how this actually would have been generated by the Wii. Just approximations.

[AnyOldName3]

Do you have any Wii games with an older Shop Channel build in their update partition?

[JosJuice]

(06-11-2020, 10:53 PM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: Do you have any Wii games with an older Shop Channel build in their update partition?

Nintendo didn't update the actual Wii Shop Channel title when shutting down services, so I don't see how that would make a difference.

[AnyOldName3]

Okay. Are there any captures of network traffic of the shop channel made by projects like Wiimmfi?