I would love to use it, but I'm concerned how much hardware hacking would have to be done to make it feasible. I'll admit that I don't know much at all about the Wii hardware, but it seems to me that it probably wouldn't be easy to just hook at Wii disc reader to a computer, since the communication protocol used on the Wii may not be easily compatible with PC.
It would still be super cool to be able to just pop in a disc and play it off that, or make dumping more reliable and faster on PC by using a Wii disk drive. I wonder though, there's really nothing stopping a user from writing a dump to a CD/DVD and playing off that, is there?
(02-28-2018, 07:22 AM)addestroyer Wrote: [ -> ]I wonder though, there's really nothing stopping a user from writing a dump to a CD/DVD and playing off that, is there?
Nope, that should work fine afaik
(02-28-2018, 07:22 AM)addestroyer Wrote: [ -> ]I wonder though, there's really nothing stopping a user from writing a dump to a CD/DVD and playing off that, is there?
Last time I heard from someone who tried that, it was a bit slow. But other than that, it works fine.
If you burn a previous dumped ISO to a DVD±R/RW disc then use File => Boot from DVD backup in Dolphin, the game will work fine, however, Dolphin will be a stuttery mess when data is being streamed from the disc because AFAICT the code responsible for this "feature" hasn't been touched for ages. It currently uses hard-coded values for things like disc seek time that doesn't match the actual seek time from your DVD drive, which generally takes longer. When this happens, Dolphin will stall the emulation until the drive is ready to stream the data, which in turn will produce stutters.
Another particular issue is that different from the GC/Wii disc drive, PC DVD drives will stop spinning after a period of inactivity and Dolphin currently doesn't do anything to prevent that. If the game needs to read something while the DVD drive isn't spinning, you'll get a freeze of around 3 to 5 seconds, which is the time it generally takes for the drive to start spinning the disc again and read the requested data.
TL;DR you can boot DVD backups in Dolphin but the overall experience is generally poor...