Using a real Wii as a disc drive to play Wii software in Dolphin?

[childishbeat]

Is it possible to use real Wii Optical Discs inside a real Wii with Dolphin instead of a Wii Optical Disc image? If so, how can that be done? If not, or even if the process could be made easier for the end-user to do, I hope such a feature will eventually be implemented into Dolphin.

[JosJuice]

In real time? Nobody has attempted to implement that as far as I know. You would most likely run into problems with the Wii not being able to send data over the network as fast as the game wants to access it (up to about 8.5 MiB/s for Wii games).

[AnyOldName3]

It would be fun (and probably totally mad, so it'll never happen) if we could passthrough a real Wii disk drive bought as a spare part like we can a real Wii Bluetooth adapter. Eventually, we could have 100% accurate Dolphin by replacing every component of the emulator with spare parts for a Wii.

[MayImilae]

Is it possible to use real Wii Optical Discs inside a real Wii with Dolphin instead of a Wii Optical Disc image? If so, how can that be done? If not, or even if the process could be made easier for the end-user to do, I hope such a feature will eventually be implemented into Dolphin.

I think the biggest issue would be the latency involved with seek commands. A 100mbps nic on the USB 2.0 IOS should be able to dump at the required rate, and network Wii dumping is already a thing! But when playing a game, the game is constantly sending seek commands to the drive to tell it where and what to read, and you'd need an interface that would let you forward those to the host console. And since the Wii is expecting it to be an extremely short and direct trip, you'd need to do it very quickly. It would have to be at extremely low latency to avoid slow loads or stuttering in loading intensive games like the prime series, and may be impossible to do fast enough. Like, eeeverything involved would be fighting against you! From the nic and its USB adapter, the computer's processing and ethernet packet sizes, the software the wii would be running to do the interface, to even the length of the ethernet wire. If you have a fast drive (Wii DVD drives have variations in their seek times) you'd have some wiggle room, but there's no telling what drive you have or its condition until you test it.

It would probably be more reliable to extract the Wii disc drive and find some way to connect it directly to the computer and use passthrough from there, akin to what we do with the Wii bluetooth, but that's far from simple.

Eventually, we could have 100% accurate Dolphin by replacing every component of the emulator with spare parts for a Wii.

Ummmm, what? Are you talking about having a Wii motherboard frankensteined to a PC? At that point Dolphin isn't involved and it's just a console mod.

[Craftyawesome]

Ummmm, what? Are you talking about having a Wii motherboard frankensteined to a PC? At that point Dolphin isn't involved and it's just a console mod.

Emulating only the controllers and GPU would be pretty cool, but there would be very few practical use cases outside of something that abuses starlet or cpu caches (if such a mod is even practical at all)

[AnyOldName3]

Eventually, we could have 100% accurate Dolphin by replacing every component of the emulator with spare parts for a Wii.

Ummmm, what? Are you talking about having a Wii motherboard frankensteined to a PC? At that point Dolphin isn't involved and it's just a console mod.

I was thinking along the lines of literally putting a whole Wii inside a PC case and writing Dolphin on the side in marker pen, but you've got the gist of the joke.

[Helios]

It wouldn't really be possible.

Even if the Wii's disc drive followed the SATA spec and it was possible to just pass the commands back and forth (essentially write a driver for all supported OSes, yikes), you would still need to figure out how to connect the thing to your PC.

So your only reasonable option is remotely over the NIC. And as others have explained, thats not feasible.

[childishbeat]

I think the biggest issue would be the latency involved with seek commands. A 100mbps nic on the USB 2.0 IOS should be able to dump at the required rate, and network Wii dumping is already a thing! But when playing a game, the game is constantly sending seek commands to the drive to tell it where and what to read, and you'd need an interface that would let you forward those to the host console. And since the Wii is expecting it to be an extremely short and direct trip, you'd need to do it very quickly. It would have to be at extremely low latency to avoid slow loads or stuttering in loading intensive games like the prime series, and may be impossible to do fast enough. Like, eeeverything involved would be fighting against you! From the nic and its USB adapter, the computer's processing and ethernet packet sizes, the software the wii would be running to do the interface, to even the length of the ethernet wire. If you have a fast drive (Wii DVD drives have variations in their seek times) you'd have some wiggle room, but there's no telling what drive you have or its condition until you test it.

It would probably be more reliable to extract the Wii disc drive and find some way to connect it directly to the computer and use passthrough from there, akin to what we do with the Wii bluetooth, but that's far from simple.


Ummmm, what? Are you talking about having a Wii motherboard frankensteined to a PC? At that point Dolphin isn't involved and it's just a console mod.

I was talking about streaming Wii Optical Discs remotely.

[Malkierian]

I was talking about streaming Wii Optical Discs remotely.

In all honesty, even if it was possible, I'm not sure why you would want to.  Loading them from a hard drive is so much faster than the original Wii disc drive.

[Helios]

Yeah I don't really get it. At first thought I was like "I guess for people who can't dump their games because they don't have a W--..... but they do, because they have the disc drive"

So yeah I don't get it.