I want to be able to pause a game and still use the free camera, which means the emulation needs to be running the whole time. The best way I can think of to do this would be to somehow make the Wii Home menu invisible, which would mean you could effectively pause and fly around all Wii games. I've tried doing it by simply injecting blank textures in place of the usual ones, but that ended up making the whole game disappear (!).
Any ideas?
The way the home menu works is by taking a screenshot of the game in progress and then drawing the menu on top. The screenshot is just a 2D texture so you won't be able to use free look with it.
It works fine for me in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The home menu is actually implemented by each game, so it doesn't have to work the same.
And people have been changing the home menu texture successfully for this game, my guess is the new texture creates an issue (bad resolution/file size) that the game can't handle well. (Game "disappearing" is a bit vague, is it black screen, only on the home menu or the rest of game also?)
I've never seen an instance of it drawing a 2D texture as the backdrop - the free look has always worked, just with the Home menu sat on top.
When I say the game goes black when you remove the textures, I'm not sure if it's something to do with the alpha of the texture used to darken the game in the background. Rather than make the texture disappear, it's as though the texture turns to black, concealing everything.
It depends on the game; some are rendered to the XFB and stop rendering in game at all. Others it just is transparent as far as I can tell. I never really explored it beyond noticing that games games required XFB for the pause backdrop not to be black.