All-in-1 Emuloader for Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Gamecube

All-in-1 Emuloader for Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Gamecube

May 21st, 2007, 00:05 Posted By: wraggster

News/release from Eke-eke:

-=[ Explanation ]=-

This is a NGC program that enables you to load & run the following emulators on your Nintendo Gamecube and Nintendo Wii :

- Genesis Plus (Sega Megadrive)
- SMS Plus (Sega Master System & Game Gear)
- FCEuGC (Nintendo Entertainment System)
- GnuboyGX (Gameboy & Gameboy Color)
- Snes9xGC (Super Nintendo)
- HugoGC (NEC Pc-Engine)
- NeoPop (SNK NeoGeo Pocket)
- Neo-CD Redux (SNK NeoGeo CD)

This is mostly designed for modchip users to be used as bootloader DOL on a Selbooting DVD but you can also simply load&run emupack.dol with the method of your choice.
See "Usage" section on how to generate emupack.dol and eventually a selbooting DVD

-=[ Features ]=-

* Nice GUI (I hope ) which let you choose the console system to play
* "All-in-1" DOL which directly includes all the supported emulators executables
* LZMA (7Zip) support for emulator package in order to reduce the final dol's size (thanks to Softdev !)
* automatic bootable DVD iso generation (batch file and all needed tools included)

-=[ Requirements ]=-
* the main program, emuloader.dol (precompiled and included)
* a 7zip archive containing the emulators dols (not included)
* Modchip and/or SoftMod
* 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) to create the emulators package
* DevkitPPC environment & last libOGC if you want to recompile the sources

-=[ Usage ]=-

Please understand that emuloader.dol is useless alone as it doesn't include any emulator executables. It's only the program that will provide the interface and will load the appropriate emulators for you.
You have to attach a 7zip archive to it, containing all the emulator dols, using Softdev's lzmaadd utility (included in /pcutils folder).
This is useful so that you can easily update the emuloader with future versions of the emulators programs.

To do this, after extracting the content of the archive somewhere on your hard disc, just follow the steps below:

Quote:
1) Using 7zip, create a emupack.7z archive with all the needed emulators (.dol) and place this archive in the same directory as emuloader.dol.

IMPORTANT:
don't modify the name of the original dols that you put inside emupack.7z too much as the program try to detect them by looking into filenames for the following strings: "genplus", "smsplus", "snes9x", "fceugc", "hugo", "neopop", "redux", "gnuboy"
do not use compressed (dollz) dols

use LZMA method for compressing, as well as the best compression level (ULTRA)

Quote:
2) Doubleclick on emupack.bat: this will create emupack.dol.

You can now directly load/run emupack.dol if you want but the best way is to create a GC-Linux bootable DVD with all your roms and emupack.dol as the bootdol. For more infos about how to create a GC-Linux bootable DVD, you may want to read this: http://www.gc-linux.org/wiki/Building_a_Bootable_Disc
However, the pcutils folder contains everything you need to create the bootable DVD image, including automatic batch files

Quote:
3) First, put all the roms you want for each systems in their respective /bootdisc subfolders. You may want to create more subdirectories as the limit is 1000 files max. per directory.
Be aware that the total size for the /bootdisc directory should not exceeded ~1.35GB.
Please refer to the related emulator's documentation for specific requirements (see /docs folder)

Quote:
4) Doubleclick on BuildISO.bat & wait for the .iso file to be generated.

Quote:
5) Burn emudisc.iso image with any DVD software (I tested it with CloneDVD) & insert the burned DVD in your console
In the menu, use D-Pad to navigate & Button-A or START to choose a console system.
Once you've started running one emulator, there is no way to come back to the menu, you have to reboot your console

-=[ Source Contents ]=-

*emuloader.c : main program (Video Init, Menu Display & Dol's extracting)
*emuloader.h : compressed (using zlib 2.3) BMP pictures for Menu Display
*memfile.*, lzmasupp.*: Softdev's sourcecode for LZMA support.
*sidestep.*, ssaram.* : Softdev's sourcecode for DOL's loading
*/lzma/ : Standard LZMA SDK 4.43 for ansi C, linked as library

-=[ PCUtils Contents]=-
*lzmaadd & lzmaex: Softdev's utilities to add/extract 7zip file to/from a dol (sourcecode included)
*mkisofs & cygwin.dll: needed to generate a ISO file
*gbi.hdr: Generic Boot Image from Cubeboot-Tools 0.3

-=[ Credits ]=-
LZMA support & DOL Loading original sourcecode - SoftDev
LZMA PC utilities - Softdev
DevkitPPC / LibOGC by Wntrmute & Shagkur
ZLIB by Jean-loup Gailly
gbi.hdr by GCLinux Team
GUI design & generic code "copypasting" by me

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