[How-To] Playing Customs on Wii
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Hi and thanks so much for this thread and the work you do!
I come with a few questions. I’ve read the guide at least 5 times and have read every post in this thread hoping that someone else was as confused as me, but alas, it appears to be just me. So please bear with me if I’m asking really ignorant questions.
1) I don’t understand the part of the guide that talks about how to upgrade the RBHP parts in the sZAE generation. It seems like rather than appending the new parts like in the other folders, it has an app file that already has that done, and you just replace the files on the SD? Is that correct? If so, what are the other files in the folder for?
2) And if the above works for the sZAE generation, why is it necessary to get rid of “The Kill” (which I’ve purchased) and replace it with a spoof file? In other words, why isn’t the procedure for all RBHP upgrades to simply replace the existing files with the upgraded files, if that works for sZAE? Is there something I don’t understand here?
3) The guide never directly explains why we add songs to sZFE… is it because it’s the only one we can add custom songs to? Or can we add them to any generation? How many custom songs can we install?
4) More generally speaking, I don’t understand content generations as a whole. I have wads for sZAE-sZFE, and sZJE-sZME in my NAND, but I have only SZAE-SZEE and SZJE-SZLE folders in my data folder on my SD. Why is there a discrepancy, and where do I put customs if I don’t have an SZFE folder?
5) How does one know what number they can start their first custom .bin file at? It says 54 in the guide… is that true for any generation, or is that just the case for SZFE? Maybe my question above about whether I can install customs on any generation will answer that.
6) Since there is no more DLC being made for Rock Band by Harmonix, I assume that means there is a finite number of generations? What is the last content generation (SZ?E) and what happens if a person tries to use the next one in sequence for customs? Obviously one would need a wad file for that, but can that be created, and would the game recognize it?
Or am I speaking totally out of ignorance here? I feel like I understand so little, that I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know, you know? And I consider myself a very bright person, and had zero issues modding the heck out of my Wii, but for some reason, for me, this process feels like trying to learn a foreign language.
I probably have more questions, and inevitably the answers to the above questions will generate questions of their own, so I hope I’m not asking too much by asking for help. I’m assuming that I’m not the only one out there with these questions and that others will benefit from hearing the answers. Thank you so much, in advance, for whatever help you can give!!
Hi and thanks so much for this thread and the work you do!I come with a few questions. I’ve read the guide at least 5 times and have read every post in this thread hoping that someone else was as confused as me, but alas, it appears to be just me. So please bear with me if I’m asking really ignorant questions.
Thanks for bringing up concerns. As you know, this helps others since it can be very different per person.
1) I don’t understand the part of the guide that talks about how to upgrade the RBHP parts in the sZAE generation. It seems like rather than appending the new parts like in the other folders, it has an app file that already has that done, and you just replace the files on the SD? Is that correct? If so, what are the other files in the folder for?Because of the way DLC is loaded, any song that falls in the sZAE generation is a special case. The app file provided gives you the meta data needed for the song. In the sZAE.txt file in the root of the RBHP folder tell you how to set that up for your packdlc.bat file, though maybe the tool I wrote does that too? But regardless, the result should be a bin file for that part of the song, so when you reset your cache, only the new file is ever loaded and it will say it has harmonies on that song.
2) And if the above works for the sZAE generation, why is it necessary to get rid of “The Kill” (which I’ve purchased) and replace it with a spoof file? In other words, why isn’t the procedure for all RBHP upgrades to simply replace the existing files with the upgraded files, if that works for sZAE? Is there something I don’t understand here?The game reads the files in order. It might help to have the spoof file the very first thing it reads. Otherwise, you may move it to another place in sZAE. So like described above, sZAE files get replaced by the app files you build which are provided. For everything else, the game already read the new DTA and all you need to do is put the upgrade files somewhere.
3) The guide never directly explains why we add songs to sZFE… is it because it’s the only one we can add custom songs to? Or can we add them to any generation? How many custom songs can we install?I don’t know how to make a custom generation. Others have been able to do it, but I couldn’t. It would have been as easy as “here install this wad then put them all in there”, but what I did instead is just add more available song slots to sZFE which is only about a dozen obscure RBN songs.
4) More generally speaking, I don’t understand content generations as a whole. I have wads for sZAE-sZFE, and sZJE-sZME in my NAND, but I have only SZAE-SZEE and SZJE-SZLE folders in my data folder on my SD. Why is there a discrepancy, and where do I put customs if I don’t have an SZFE folder?Because of how DLC and related files work on the Wii, only about 250 unique songs appear per generation. In 2009 when a bunch of backlog and new songs were coming out, they’d fill up fast and new generations get created to contain them all. And a little annoying part about how the Wii stores DLC is that all songs have a very specific name path in the DTA. This means it must be in the exact location it’s been written to read from. What this means for you is that you make an sZFE folder on your SD card and all your customs must have sZFE in the path so the game knows to look for it there.
5) How does one know what number they can start their first custom .bin file at? It says 54 in the guide… is that true for any generation, or is that just the case for SZFE? Maybe my question above about whether I can install customs on any generation will answer that.Because of the songs already there. In any other case, you’ll be overwriting songs and rather than overwrite your collection, it’s easier to use slots that can’t be used.
6) Since there is no more DLC being made for Rock Band by Harmonix, I assume that means there is a finite number of generations? What is the last content generation (SZ?E) and what happens if a person tries to use the next one in sequence for customs? Obviously one would need a wad file for that, but can that be created, and would the game recognize it?DLC ends at sZME with American Pie. Just like sZFE, you could add on more to the end of that generation, but it’s not as small as sZFE so you’d fill up your slots faster. But when I try to create my own WAD file for anything else, it gets rejected. I don’t get it.
Or am I speaking totally out of ignorance here? I feel like I understand so little, that I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know, you know? And I consider myself a very bright person, and had zero issues modding the heck out of my Wii, but for some reason, for me, this process feels like trying to learn a foreign language.I probably have more questions, and inevitably the answers to the above questions will generate questions of their own, so I hope I’m not asking too much by asking for help. I’m assuming that I’m not the only one out there with these questions and that others will benefit from hearing the answers. Thank you so much, in advance, for whatever help you can give!!
I hope that helps.
Thanks a ton for the fast response! I have a final tomorrow and then I’m going to really pore over your response and do my best to understand it, so hopefully in a few days I’ll be back with followup questions. Your willingness to help out is so very appreciated!
Hi again! So, my first question is of a technical nature. I want to understand how the system works, moreso than just wanting to get it to work.
In that pursuit, I don’t understand the role of the content wads in the NAND. From my understanding, there’s a wad in the NAND that tells your system which tracks you have purchased. But when we’re adding additional tracks to a given generation folder, we aren’t modifying the NAND to say that that additional data is “okay”? And yet it works. Functionally, how is that possible? What exactly is the wad file doing? If, for example, I were to install a custom song into a .bin slot that is normally occupied by a DLC that I know I’ll never want, what would happen?
The WADs you find online are modified in a way that the ticket file inside flags every bit referring to all content that “generation” can hold. This means it will try to read all content as “purchased” even if that content is a custom song added to sZFE. It’s like permissions. It’s either allowed or not allowed to read a given file on your SD card.
Oh that’s interesting, so, if a person has legitimate DLC, and doesn’t want to get unlock-all wads from the internet, but does want to add a few customs of songs that aren’t available as DLC, then this technique can’t be used?
There is a WAD for each generation. Just get the sZFE WAD. I believe that generation just had a few RBN songs, but a bunch of open slots that we can use for customs without overriding anything.
If you have any qualms about the “honesty” of this step, the bits for the RBN songs can be disabled. It makes no difference to customs though and it’s assumed that if you’ve made it this far, you might already have this.
It’s not that, really… it’s that the guide doesn’t mention that one has to have those custom wads or where to get them, and I’m wondering if that might have been the cause of some folks’ problems. I’m actually curious myself where to get them, as the only ones I’ve ever seen are incomplete. Out of curiosity, since I like the nuts-and-bolts stuff, how would you go about enabling or disabling the bits for a particular track anyhow?
Yeah, it’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to get in, but also have that ethically gray stuff about it too. Someone in this thread has already linked it. All you need for this is sZFE and sZAE for RBHP.
If you’d like to see where the ticket bit flags are, you don’t even need to un-WAD the file. If you open it in a hex editor and go to 0xc60, the preceding FF values say which content is allowed to be owned. 1 byte manages the permissions of 8 songs – 1 for each bit. You could zero out the first, about, 4 bytes. But then, you have to make sure content 26 is allowed to exist as well as 34.
Now, what song stands for what bit? That involves more work, but since I have all the DLC then I can probably match the content numbers to actual songs, but it’s a bit involved.
Thanks again for the info, I must have missed that in the thread, will re-read. I like all this technical wizardry stuff, will probably be back around to chat next week! Cheers!
So for my problem with my SD card, I send messages to StackOverflow and we found a solution :
I installed the wads in this video (
for NTSC /
for PAL ) this alllowed me to have all the DLC in the store.
In addition I installed d2x ( click here ) to install a cios with base 56 rev 21 on slot 248. I launched the game with this ios and everything was solved !
A big thanks to StackOverflow !
This breakthrough also helps narrow down my cIOS options and DLC wad stuff considerably. Now I just have to choose a most compatible (and affordable) hard drive. Kixero, if you use an external hard drive for running the game, what do you have, and if possible, is it on this list (http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/USB_Devices_Compatibility_List)? I’m trying to weigh cost vs. compatibility, and I guess, am trying to determine success rates of hard drive users in this topic.
In fact, I’ll open this question up to every/anybody. Which hard drives have yielded to best results for you all, and which ones should I avoid like the plague, assuming that there have been bad choices along the way to getting the one that works for each of you for this purpose?
I don’t know if there even could be a bad choice presently. If you have a disc though, you can still do this with Neogamma.
I guess I was really intrigued by possible faster load times, because admittedly, the loading screens in Rock Band 3 are a real drag (especially the Music Store). According to the USB compatibility list I posted a few posts ago, some hard drives play nicer than others with cIOSes, and some require more than just the d2x cIOS to do so.
Speaking of Neogamma, should that get an update to the main tutorial as an alternative to hard drive? I could do both methods once getting a hard drive (‘cuz it’ll be handy to have in any case), and report my findings on Neogamma as an addendum to the main tutorial, if you like.
And I just realized, will installing older sZ*E wads enable downloads of songs that are now listed as currently unavailable? Some of the things I have purchased have left the store, but I can still re-download them because they are indeed purchased. If this holds true, I might still have a chance to download Metallica for the 80’s metal guitar achievement (even though I’ve gotten the achievement already).
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