Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

For ROM hacking purposes, it is often convenient to extract a game into a filesystem tree, so you can quickly replace files without rebuilding the entire ISO.

Dolphin supports setting custom DVD root and Apploader, then manually starting main.dol (or whatever it's called). However, this adds two setting that must be changed per-game. In addition, main.dol probably does not show up in the ISO list (definitely not by the actual game name), and must be manually selected using the Open File dialog.

Is there an option to allow "game folders" to be treated as normal games, and listed with them (with a title prefix/suffix)? Example: "Zelda Wind Waker (extracted)" or "(extracted) Zelda Wind Waker".

You could either use "wit" folder layout, which has metadata, apploader, headers, filesystem, etc. in different subfolders. Or you could also support Dolphin's native extraction layout (flatter than WIT).

However, the file selection dialog probably does not support opening folders as files. To fix this problem, you could instead use text files with a custom extension, holding the relative/absolute path of the DVD root, etc. These files are treated as the actual game (open dialog, game list).

This is currently not possible, but I have planned to add something like this later. I don't know exactly when, but it won't be before the release of 5.0.

Another current limitation of the folder system is that it breaks game region detection, so Dolphin assumes all extracted game folders are NTSC-U, which naturally causes problems for games that aren't.

It actually assumes NTSC-J, but yes, that is a problem.

That's odd, because Dolphin started using a MemoryCardA.USA.raw and not a .JAP.raw file when I tried loading a game directory.

You're right. Dolphin sets the game ID to a Japanese one, but it seems like other parts of the Dolphin code completely ignore this because extracted directories are treated like DOLs instead of discs in some ways. That means Dolphin will use NTSC-U for GameCube games and PAL for Wii games. This is yet another thing that needs to be changed...

There's also an issue related to 8:3 file paths (or something like that). As far as I remember, Luigi's Mansion, for example, will not go past Nintendo screen when running extracted, and a log entry related to 8:3 paths is output in the log, saying they're not supported yet...

(04-14-2016, 04:13 AM)Jhonn Wrote: [ -> ]There's also an issue related to 8:3 file paths (or something like that). As far as I remember, Luigi's Mansion, for example, will not go past Nintendo screen when running extracted, and a log entry related to 8:3 paths is output in the log, saying they're not supported yet...

What is the log type of such log entries?

I don't remember now, it was a while since I tested. I'll try running Luigi's Mansion from extracted folder again to see the exact message soon, give me a few hours...

Is this stuff in the issue tracker?

In the present issue tracker, is it even possible to locate this kind of miscellaneous information?