Easiest, risk-free way to mod a Wii U?

YoshiFlutterJump

YoshiFlutterJump

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YoshiFlutterJump
So a couple weeks ago, I modded my Wii, and I'm looking to do the same to my Wii U. I know that I could easily mod the virtual Wii Menu in the same way I did to my Wii, but the Wii U menu is another story. I'm seeing that modding the Wii U menu requires a DS VC game (which I don't have) and could result in console bricking (which I really don't want to do). Any other, non-risky way to hack the Wii U menu? Any help is appreciated.
 
Long John Spaghetti said:
To not to
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:roll:



I'm not sure exactly what you're asking in this topic. Initially, it sounds like you just want to load mods on the Wii U via the topic title but you stated in your post you want to mod the Wii U menu? And additionally, your response to the above post means you simply want to load mods on your Wii U?

The easiest, risk free way to mod a Wii U is to load loadiine.ovh through your Wii U's internet browser. This method installs a temporary patch on the Wii U, so therefore, the patch gets removed every time you shut off the console (however, you're required to access the loadiine menu every single time you want to boot the game). Depending on your version, however, (which you haven't clarified) I don't know if features such as SD Caffiine are available. 5.5.2 is the best version to load mods, and I still currently use it to do so.

Here are several tutorials for running mods on Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.

Homebrew on 5.5.2

How to do the 5.5.2 exploit to run mods

[TUTORIAL] Installing Offline Smash Wii U Mods

How to Dump Super Smash Bros for Wii U

Sonic Brawler's tutorial thread

In addition, GameBanana has an entire section filled with tutorials on this sort of thing on how to get mods to Smash for Wii U. Most of us use SmashExplorer, which requires a game dump.

According to what I read on this Reddit thread the exploit should still work on 5.5.3 systems which I assume you have but I haven't tried it out myself as I haven't updated to 5.5.3.
 
There's actually a few things I want from a modded Wii U. I really just want to load Smash mods, yes. I said "Wii U menu" to refer to the Wii U Mode as opposed to the virtual Wii Mode, and I'm not trying to mod the system menu itself.

Anyway, thanks for the tutorial links and when I have a moment I'll see if it works! And yes, I do have 5.5.3, but hopefully that won't have much of an impact on the process.

EDIT: I am now able to run Homebrew Launcher and I got some apps for it, but I'm not gonna dump Smash Wii U right now because it's going to take way too much space on my hard drive, so I'll worry about that later. But thanks for your help!
 
No problem, glad to help. If you need any further assistance, don't be afraid to ask.
 
Yeah, the annoying thing about Smash Wii U modding is that it requires a full dump of the game to work, but it's worth the effort. Hope you have a lot of fun modding, if you need help with Smash Explorer, let us know.

On a somewhat related note, while Smash Ultimate modding is very doable, it's still cumbersome and the tools aren't quite developed. You'll have to wait a little until you can easily mod, but exploits for Switches work best if you got a Switch before summer of 2018 (permanent hardware exploit).
 
Mario Party X said:
Yeah, the annoying thing about Smash Wii U modding is that it requires a full dump of the game to work, but it's worth the effort. Hope you have a lot of fun modding, if you need help with Smash Explorer, let us know.

On a somewhat related note, while Smash Ultimate modding is very doable, it's still cumbersome and the tools aren't quite developed. You'll have to wait a little until you can easily mod, but exploits for Switches work best if you got a Switch before summer of 2018 (permanent hardware exploit).
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I did get my Switch for Christmas 2017, so it is one of the older moddable Switches, but I think I'll hold off on that for a while and enjoy my newly modded Wii and Wii U. I've enjoyed using homebrew on my Wii, and it seems to be even more interesting on Wii U so far.
 
I found that I have a lot more space on my hard drive than I thought, so that's good. Question is, in terms of dumping Smash, is there an alternative way to do it? There's Wudump, yes, but I don't have any 20GB external storage devices (both my SD card and USB flash drive are 4GB). There's also ddd, but I'd rather not leave my Wii U unusable for that long or consume that much internet...not to mention that stupid UAC is preventing me from lifting the firewall to get it to work. Any way to, like, dump it directly to my PC without going through my Wii U?
 
You can use UWizard to dump the game.

https://gamebanana.com/tuts/12350

(I have the keys required for the program to dump effectively but I can't publicly post it here. You can either follow the steps in the thread for acquiring the key or ask me for it. Or Google it.)
 
I tried it, it was going fine until I tried to run uwizard.exe. It failed to launch, and then shortly afterward my antivirus gave me a notification that the file had been deleted as malware. I can't override the antivirus, nor can I attempt to run the program as administrator, because of that stupid UAC. My dad won't be home for several days and he's the sole admin of the PC, so that's a problem.

I know it's not likely, but does there happen to be a way to dump the game without high-capacity storage devices, without a network-based app like ddd, and without stuff like antivirus and UAC getting in the way?
 
Aside from outright pirating a ROM of the game, I don't think there's a method that suits within your limitations. I do have the game dumped but it's at a very meaty 14 GB so chances of me sharing the dump with you is very low.
 
Oh well. I guess all I can hope for is to find some way to dump the game to my SD card and transfer it to my PC, bit by bit. Or maybe I'll be lucky enough to find a 16GB SD card lying around my house. Thanks, anyway.
 
Okay, so good news. I did manage to acquire a dump of the game. Question is, the Smash Explorer tutorial that I was linked to earlier assumes I have the 1.1.6 patch. I have the 1.1.7 patch. What number do I put in the game version box in Smash Explorer for the 1.1.7 patch?

EDIT: Never mind, with a quick Google search I found that the version code is 304. Time to get modding!
 
Couldn't find a better place to post this, so I thought I might post here again.

I downloaded the digital Wii U eShop version of NSMBWii to replace my defunct physical copy. As I have an American Wii U and the digital version was never released in America, I grabbed the European version instead. With custom firmware, it works perfectly. But the issues I'm having right now relate to my save data. I was...pretty far on my American save and I didn't want to start over, so I downloaded SaveGame Manager GX on Homebrew to my standard Wii to extract it, after which I did a bit of hex editing to swap the region to Europe.

However, no matter how hard I try, I can't install the save back into my Wii U. The reason for that? It seems that SaveGame Manager GX, contrary to what many websites say, is incompatible with vWii, and I can't find any vWii builds of it, nor can I find any alternate programs that work with vWii. When I try to run the app, it just gives me some "facelib database is missing" error. I do not know what on earth that means and Google was no help. I even tried a download on some random German site that claimed to be vWii compatible, only to get the same download error. There seemingly was a vWii build at one point, but the official link on SourceForge is broken. I never had any of these errors when using the app on my actual Wii.

So I have three options: (a) find some way to get SaveGame Manager GX working on vWii, (b) somehow trick my actual Wii into thinking that I played the European version as opposed to the American one, so I can install my save data to that and transfer it from there, or (c) find a way to turn my extracted gamesave into the official data.bin format. I'm not sure how to do any of that.
 
Ah don't think I can help you there as I haven't done this myself at all as I hadn't gotten a problem with this. If SaveGame Manager GX is incompatible with vWii, then it probably wouldn't work period. Your actual Wii could technically work with region-free content provided you have homebrew installed in there as that gets rid of region lock.
 
Could you just, uh, grab a rip of the New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the American version?
 
LeftyGreenMario said:
Could you just, uh, grab a rip of the New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the American version?
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I'm trying to convert NTSC to PAL, not the other way around.

I need to find some way to get my old save, now region-edited to PAL, on my Wii U. Since Savegame Manager GX doesn't work on Wii U, I have to find some way to get it onto my Wii first in official format, then transfer it to my Wii U.

I may have a solution, but I ran into... other problems. I grabbed a European rip of the game and stuck it onto a USB drive, but when I try to get it to run on USB Loader GX, it gives me an error message saying something like "USB Drive not initialized". I don't know what that means, nor do I have any idea how to solve it. My USB drive is formatted to WBFS.

Also, just wondering...if I run a game on USB Loader GX, does the game save directly to the Wii, or at least in the official data.bin format?
 
Yeah but I figure that if you're trying to replace a defunct American copy with a digital download of the game, wouldn't getting the American ISO simplify the process rather than going through conversions?
 
LeftyGreenMario said:
Yeah but I figure that if you're trying to replace a defunct American copy with a digital download of the game, wouldn't getting the American ISO simplify the process rather than going through conversions?
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Well there is that, but I've been having issues with USB Loader GX (not to mention I'd rather have the game on the system memory than on my measly 4GB flash drive), and I wanted the convenience of having the game on the Wii U Menu. Since NSMBWii was never released on the American eShop, I thought it would be easy to just grab the European version and switch the save region. Spoiler alert: it wasn't. If I can find a way to install my region-edited save data then I'll continue with my current route, but otherwise I can probably find a way to get USB Loader GX working consistently.
 
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