Hello,
today I wanted to test the game wiibreak; I could not find it in the game section:
https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Wiibreaker
It is a zip file to download.
dolphin, AFAIK, does not look into zip archives, so I had to extract it.
Personally I would prefer to have one file per game,
Can dolphin look into some archive types? In that case, I would convert the zip archive to that other type.
Is it otherwise possible to create an iso out of it? Just like dolphin can convert between iso and other different formats.
Best
Dolphin currently only supports these types of games in the same format as you would use on a real console: Extracted files.
Converting to an ISO file doesn't make sense from a technical perspective.
Making Dolphin be able to load zip files or some other archive format for these types of games is... Well, technically possible, but it would be a lot of work. And there are lots of complicated questions, such as: What if the game tries to edit its files, for instance to save your settings or save your progress? Should Dolphin edit the insides of the zip folder then?
Any system I know of does *not* make changes to the zip archive; changes are saved outside of it.
Which is a great reason for storing everything in a zip file: being able to undo all changes.
Having said that, I hoped that converting to is/rvz would have been possible; in that case, no change to dolphin would have been necessary.
Why doesn't it make sense from a technical perspective?
(10-24-2023, 06:16 PM)fran Wrote: [ -> ]Any system I know of does *not* make changes to the zip archive; changes are saved outside of it.
Which is a great reason for storing everything in a zip file: being able to undo all changes.
Hmm, so when a file is modified, a copy of the file gets stored outside of the zip folder, or something along those lines...? I do suppose that makes sense. It's not how it works on a real console, but it can have a convenience factor, and it's technically feasible to implement. But that other "a lot of work" that I mentioned still stands.
If you're comparing Dolphin's handling of this to how it's handled in emulators running cartridge-based games or disc-based games from zip files, please keep in mind that that's a very different situation. Saving data separately there is a no-brainer, since the data is saved separately on the original system.
(10-24-2023, 06:16 PM)fran Wrote: [ -> ]Having said that, I hoped that converting to is/rvz would have been possible; in that case, no change to dolphin would have been necessary.
Why doesn't it make sense from a technical perspective?
ISO files (and compressed versions of them, such as RVZ files) represent the data stream of an optical disc, and have no means of representing a structure of multiple files like you need for Wii homebrew. (Well, it isn't impossible to create an ISO that contains homebrew software, using the GC/Wii file system, but then you have to start messing with lots of other things like having an apploader, changing the way data is loaded by the binary, and changing the way data is saved by the binary, so I think it's something that more or less would have to be done manually for each piece of software rather than something that could be done in an automated fashion.)
Somehow missed the reply, thank you for your explanation.
Either way, the game does not seem to work, I wonder if it ever worked on dolphin.