As I just wrote, support for real patches on 3DS was supposedly added in the recently released SDK 2.40.
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Nintendo releases fix for Zelda Skyward Sword bug via channel patch
- Thread starter Wario64
- Start date
Even better then.
If you have homebrew installed, I'm sure someone, somewhere will make exactly what you are looking for.
Real Patches as in "there is a bug in our cartridge based game, please update to fix" ala PS3/360?
If yes that was unexpected
I guess it means Cartridge games at least check the SD card for patch data as part of the boot process and when found the patches can override the game data as intended. Whether or not they actually check Nintendo's server for patches automatically or if you have to download them manually from the eshop is another, as of yet unanswered question.
I think their major problem with the Wii is the multiple IOSes and their fear of breaking compatibility. Hopefully they fixed that with the 3DS and onwards.
btw
Wasn't there a customIOS that run the translation files for Project Zero 4 from the SD card and the Wii patched them on the fly in the RAM or something along those lines?
The way Nintendo does things, I'd assume the system downloads patches via SpotPass as they become available, even if the game isn't inserted. Would make sense on a portable device, and the system knows which games you have, so it would know which patches to download.
Other than the nature of what is downloaded, that's approximately how I patched Doom back in the day. It's... it's a *start*.
Well that would seem like the best way to do things but would that work for games without native spotpass integration? As far as I'm aware, games have to be manually enabled for spotpass.
Why would the games need SpotPass support for patches? That's all OS level stuff.
Ninja Kn1ght
Member
Good of Nintendo to fix this. Obviously, the Wii's design was lacking in this area but installing a channel isn't a big deal.
Because the game would need to be registered into the system's Spotpass list before it'll look for Spotpass content for the game. As of now, I've yet to see a game that registered itself automatically, so I'm not sure that a game would automatically register itself for Spotpass patching.
Couldn't the same thing be said of the original 360 and wifi?
Replacing the shitty Sonic music in Brawl is worth it.
Playing an Earthbound ROM on a SNES emulator? Couldn't you just do that on a PC? Playing it on the Wii doesn't suddenly make it legal.
I thought it was the Streetpass list you have to manually add to.
hahahaha
It's both I'm pretty sure.
And Mario Kart 7.
MK7's problems aren't related to saves.
Hot Coldman
Banned
I for one find this hilariously awesome.
Holy Order Sol
Member
What's the problem with MK7?
Exploitable shortcut on one of the courses. The Wario Stadium 64 of our time.
Nuclear Muffin
Banned
Pretty ridiculous (and hilarious!) that they need to resort to these kinds of measures, but at least they're doing something about it.
TheCongressman1
Member
Yep. A lot of people are acting as if it's a great inconvenience or some ridiculous solution. It's not as nice as other systems, but this is a great work around for what they have to work with. It's a hell of a lot better than a mail order patch, that's for sure. Takes a couple of minutes and bam, no more glitch forever. Does it really matter that you did it through a channel as long as it gets fixed?
Obviously I'm not saying Nintendo is justified in leaving out an option for patching. Next time, for goodness sake think forward, Ninty.
Starwolf_UK
Member
Team Ninja probably didn't want to work on the game for free and Nintendo are too important to dump some unencrypted saves, look at them in a hex editor and determine which offsets are bad and make a program which checks the save to determine if you at the event and affected and then fiddles the checksum (the bit I suck at) and then grab someone for a 15-hour lunch break to make the channel.
Did anyone send thier SD card in as I want to now know if it was just the save downloaded off gamefaqs (or likewise) rather than your save, patched.
Yep. Its the same principles as I said above. It took them about 2 weeks after finding the exact cause so I guess that was lots of testing (then agian it took them 3 months to test if checking a horses name caused a buffer overflow which nuked saves if found to be true would nuke normal saves). I wonder if they got trapped in their own lot checking process too.
They can't. Channel won't have permission to be written to a directory (copying to/from SD card doesn't have directory writing permission) and also SD card stores no ticket data. Ticket data being required for channel to run.
If Nintendo had money to drain (they don't) they could put it on a disc I guess but they're not going to do that for the 70% of people who never took their Wii online.
Likewise the comments of "I will decree homebrew nonesense (finding a straw man to back my argument of its more hassle than worth) becuase I see no point in having my entire Wii library with less load times in a small package*" bother me
But yeah thats just me. You're happy using the lastest official firmware. I'm happy using the one from 2 years ago. Doesn't make either of us right.*-Or more precisely. Single player Super Smash Bros is no longer loading screens for 25% my "gameplay" (to put that into perspective even Sonic 2006, known for its hoffiic loading was only 10% of the infamous Let's Play).
They can but it won't fix the save (so this tool is still needed) as basically in a bugged save you've restarted a completed event except you've beaten all the objectives so you can't set the flag to completed again. Since you can only do one of the events at a time you can't start any of the others. Its why when setting event flags you should be extremely careful. It was just one careless line of dialogue needing a trivial fix (and if statement) and as amazing as Super Mario Club are a handful of people can't find the same number of bugs a million will.I don't even have this game yet I want to play Xenoblade first
So can't they fix the next printings of the disc versions?
Eradicating the disease isn't the same as a vaccination is what I'm saying (horray for useless analogies that make less sense).
The fear was missguided though. My understanding is I'm using USB loader, I play each game using the exact same IOS which is a modification of a recent official IOS. They all work. Even when it was using an older one it was a handful that didn't work.
Though that said I do remember hearing on the emulated NAND side of things Wiiware tended not to work properly.
Well, there's also the fact that the system only has 256MB of user-available data. :/
My point is that the Wii was a system created without any foresight. It was made to be an immediate success and bring immediate profit. I really think that there's something about either the system or NWFC that makes patching difficult to implement.
So, what I'm arguing is that this is the only way that this could have been done at this point in time. The lack of a patching system was likely something set in stone from the beginning. If it had to be done on a per-game basis, I honestly don't see many publishers willing to spend money on something that they might not even need. I mean, everyone's getting on them about having to make a channel for one patch that'll only be used once. Why wouldn't Nintendo think the same way about something they might not need at all?
... Or, at least I hope that's the case. I can imagine Miyamoto yelling, "THIS IS WHY YOU BUG TEST AND GET IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME!"
That said, they probably should have made this channel a general patching app.
Starwolf_UK
Member
Also its having the include one in thier system design messing up the looks. Nintendo likes small compant systems crammed to the brim (gotta save on plastic, ventelation? where we going we don't need ventelaiton *GPU melts*) and having to include scuh things would make it wide like a blu-ray player (most of which is empty space but needs to be that width to fit all the output ports on the back).
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
360 did patches in less than half that for the first three years. You can't test it now because the NXE requires a storage device and all new Xboxes come with at least 4GB of storage space, but before that it downloaded both the firmware updates and game patches into a tiny amount of non user-available embedded storage.
Patches were limited to 5MB or less until around 2010 (which was never an issue except for games like Burnout Paradise that added significant content for free), and the system automatically only cached the most recent 5 in order to limit the total size.
Patching as a general process is not difficult.
A patch is essential a series of filenames, each with a series of memory offsets, each with a new value. A general purpose patch application layer is simply an OS level interrupt running at the file read level that says:
When I read a byte or more of a file into memory, read it into memory, then read the patch table looking for entries that correspond to the same byte. If there are some, overwrite what I just read into memory. Provided they are not able to allocate any memory to hold the patch, they can do it ad hoc on file reads like I just described. Provided they were willing to actually make their system API more efficient, they could load the entire thing into memory in advance of playing the game and read it from memory. This would be done at the iOS level.
Microsoft's entire OS ran in 16 megabytes of RAM for the longest time. That includes voicechat, friends, messages, achievements, presence data, always-on notifications, the guide itself, custom soundtracks, etc. Sony's still uses significantly more than that but I understand they reduced their footprint by >75%. I have no idea how much RAM system libraries / IOS take. I can tell you that hackers have added significant functionality at the IOS level (universal USB read/write support, for example), which tells us three things:
1) It is relatively simple to add new functionality to IOS
2) However much RAM Nintendo allocates for IOS (which is entirely loaded into RAM on game boot), they don't use 100% of it, because functions have been added without causing memory-related crash issues.
3) Nintendo's read/write system calls are sufficiently asynchronous that slower or faster than expected read/writes do not gum up the works and it would be possible to add an additional flash memory file-read into IO routines without tanking system performance.
The NWFC thing might be prohibitive simply because it's impossible to do anything on the Wii online without having to wait forever for it to establish a connection, but again everyone knew this well before 2006 so if Nintendo didn't, or didn't see the value, that's their failure, not a "hindsight is 20/20" moment.
TheChewyWaffles
Member
Are you saying the 360 no longer has a patch count limit across all games? At the beginning of its life you were limited in how many different games you could patch before prior ones were expunged due to space constraints. That was and is terrible.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
I thought about it some more and my somewhat lengthy technical indulgence in that last post was unnecessary. The Fatal Frame 4 translation wrote a cIOS that has patching functionality in it. It's available as a general purpose on-the-fly disc patcher for all games. There, the homebrew community has already done it.
And it streams patches over the internet.
So, yeah, "too hard"? Nope.
Just recently they started saving patches to storage and lifted the 5MB per patch limit. I'm not going to waste my time booting six games in a row to check, but I'm reasonably certain the problem is resolved.
And it streams patches over the internet.
So, yeah, "too hard"? Nope.
Just recently they started saving patches to storage and lifted the 5MB per patch limit. I'm not going to waste my time booting six games in a row to check, but I'm reasonably certain the problem is resolved.
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
They removed Animality.
TheChewyWaffles
Member
Wow nice. Finally.
[slightly OT maybe]
Knowing about Riivolution (I was able to play FF4 thanks to it, too!) I've been thinking about this for a while: IIRC Donkey Kong Country Returns has been patched to remove waggle to roll, or something like that.
Do you think it would be technically possible to "patch" ZeldaSS in order to use IR pointer functionality instead of gyro?