Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello there !

Just wondering how would a wad not be signed by Nintendo.

A proper dump of a wii shop game without any modification is still signed, right ?
In what circumstances does it loose its signature ? Barely any modification ? For exemple, injecting another rom or patch it to make it region free ?

A lot of the older dumpers wiped out the keys.

I see.
I was hoping to use this to distinguish original wads from modded ones but it seems not.
I did a lot of modding back in the day, and now I find out that some of them have odd behaviours like NTSC games running at 50Hz and so. So I wanted to find a fast and easy way to delete only modded ones.

edit : okey... something's funny is going on with my real Wii (european one). NTSC N64 games run at 50Hz while they run correctly at 60Hz on Dolphin. This time I'm sure it's an original wad.
All I did is patching system menu for region free channels with priiloader, and all my IOS titles are up to date. Maybe I missed something like changing my Wii's region...

edit 2 : Seems like my assumption that "just install NTSC VC games on a PAL Wii, apply region-free channels and it should work" was wrong. I need to patch them.

If you patch your PAL wii menu to be region free, then it doesn't refuse to boot NTSC games anymore. But since the PAL menu is not supposed to run NTSC titles, there's no functionality to switch to NTSC video mode. For some games it might work "properly", if you enable PAL60 in the wii menu. Others still won't work with that.

There might be some patch for the system menu that launches NTSC titles with NTSC video mode, but for me that would be too much of a hassle. Also, there's a possibility that progressive video mode works fine, theoretically it should be identical for PAL and NTSC wiis, but i have never tested it.

Personally, i'd just use Triiforce or something similar, select the right video mode and just play.

As to your signed vs unsigned questions:
There are 2 different kinds of properly signed channels/things: Things that are signed to run just on your wii, and things that are signed to run on any wii. Now, the signing is broken in a wad, when you change the actual data. The sign-checking calculates a hash of the actual data, applies the wii's common key from your wii and compares the result with the signature in the meta data.* I'm not sure what metadata you can change, without having to change the signature. It might be that a properly patched region doesn't require a different signature. Even if that was possible, i bet that 99.99% of patchers just fake sign wads when they touch them in any way, you'd have to try it manually with a hexeditor. You can test if that works, by using a normal(old) wad manager, one that doesn't use any exploits, to install the title, and select an original, unpatched IOS from a system menu above 3.2.

One fun thing about signatures:
The signatures are only checked on install. If you edit the files directly on nand, the wii doesn't care. (this has some implications which i'm not going to explain...)

* If you want to know why you can't calculate the right signature, read up on puplic-private-key-encryption:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
All wiis know the wii's common key, and nintendo uses the wii's private key to create the signatures for basically everything. As far as i know, nobody in the wii scene knows the wii's private key.

Thank you so much for all this information.
Even with my Wii setted to 480p, it doesn't help for NTSC N64 VC, still booting at interlaced 50Hz.

Yes, Triiforce was the software I was looking for, thanks. I couldn't remember its exact name, and search engines gave me Quadforce results for my "triforce wii" search, lame. :/

Edit : So, I absolutely need to build a US emulated NAND in order to launch NTSC-U channels ? Or can it patch channels on the fly ?