concerns about Gamecube emu with Wii USB Loader GX

[donssword]

So, I finally broke down and tried out USB Loader GX on my Wii last week, and subsequently became obsessed with digitizing my Wii game collection. My Wii is now like the Steam Box of Wiis--I want to play a game, I just play it--my lazy butt remains on the couch, not having to try and find that gamecase on the shelf that was in the wrong place because the kids didn't put them back in alpha order, or because I hid the game away as either too valuable, or too mature (damn you House of the Dead Overkill!). I keep digging thru my piles of old hard drives to find the one drive that is just a bit larger, and just a bit faster than the others, buy new drive cases on Amazon, copy the Gigs of data over, plug it in, blah, blah, blah.

I also digitized a portion of my GameCube games (no son, you may not touch my "Doshin the Giant" disc), and I'm running into a couple of issues, that make me feel like maybe I should just dump my GC files to save space and digitize the rest of my Wii games instead. I have tried DIOS MIOS (blech), and I'm messing with Nintendont (better), and already installed Devolution (next).

My issues/feelings:

• My Gamecube save files are not consistently found. I have a honking big GC mem card, and I know they are unstable and they really don't load consistently. I looked at doing memory card emulation, but the file formats for saves don't appear to be standard .gci files, so dumping my saves files on the HD presents challenges.
  
  
• I may very well hate the "turning off" process for Gamecube games via USB Loader GX when I want to play something else. It just seems to be a harsh/hard shut down. No elegance, just a huge "clunk" of an off. I know this is just the Gamecube way, and it works and feel fine on old 'cubes, but it really makes me uncomfortable on the Wii--it feels more abrupt than if I just did old school MIOS GC emulation from the normal Wii system launcher. I don't know, maybe I'm just thinking too hard.

Does anyone else have any experience with any of this? Did the way the Gamecube games were handled eventually kill your Wii? Am I just being silly?

[Kidpanda]

I never tried the GC emu, just kept my GC hooked up.

[donssword]

I never tried the GC emu, just kept my GC hooked up.

Yeah--I don't have the fancy video hook-up edition of the Gamecube, so I prefer to run the GC on my Wii to get the ever so slight almost HD effect

[LentFilms]

Use Nintendont (it is the best), don't bother with DIOS-MIOS and Devolution (they are outdated at this point).
https://github.com/FIX94/Nintendont

You can use GCMM to dump your Memory card for use in Nintendont's virtual memory card format, if you wish too (Nintendont supports real cards too). Though you should probably brake up your saves across smaller VMCs, just for better compatibility.
https://github.com/suloku/gcmm

On Nintendont, you can Reset/Power off games by pressing the button combo (R + Z + Start)(R + Z + B + D-Pad Down).

Did the way the Gamecube games were handled eventually kill your Wii? Am I just being silly?

Your just being silly. There is no way USB Loading GC games can damage your Wii.
Also, Nintendont (and all USB GC tools on Wii) is not an emulator. It simply redirects drive access calls to the HDD. AKA, your running the games on real hardware (the Wii is built on GC hardware) but with a different storage method.

[donssword]

Use Nintendont (it is the best), don't bother with DIOS-MIOS and Devolution (they are outdated at this point).

Thanks for the detailed info and impressions. I appreciate your going the extra distance in your answers.

I still run into occasional issues with my drive not being seen after closing out a gaming session, but other than that things seem to have settled down (I fix that with a soft restart).

I'm going to pull out Devolution just to have a cleaner set-up, and I'm going to stick with physical GC Memory cards--less fiddly file management. I'm already using GCMM to back-up my saves to my HD. I'm using Wavebirds, so I am not sure if my reset/power-off is working correctly, but I'll check.

[chuckster]

So wait, you can dump GC games and run them from USB Loader GX? I thought that was only Wii games! Man, I'm behind the times.

[LentFilms]

So wait, you can dump GC games and run them from USB Loader GX? I thought that was only Wii games! Man, I'm behind the times.

This has been a thing since 2012...
https://github.com/FIX94/Nintendont
You can also run Triforce arcade games on it also.

[Ziggy]

^ USB Loader GX will just work more or less as a front end for a GCN loader (like Nintendont). It can't, by itself, load GCN games.

I may very well hate the "turning off" process for Gamecube games via USB Loader GX when I want to play something else. It just seems to be a harsh/hard shut down. No elegance, just a huge "clunk" of an off. I know this is just the Gamecube way, and it works and feel fine on old 'cubes, but it really makes me uncomfortable on the Wii--it feels more abrupt than if I just did old school MIOS GC emulation from the normal Wii system launcher. I don't know, maybe I'm just thinking too hard.

The thing I don't like about it is, I don't think it probably shuts down the hard drive. When you power off a PC (correctly) one thing that happens is the hard drive "parking" itself. The platters stop and the actuator arm is moved all the way to the side and locked. I remember my A+ teacher telling us a sudden loss of power for a HDD is like a car moving at speed then throwing it into park. Apparently this is bad enough for mechanical HDDs that it is one of the SMART values.

[LentFilms]

The thing I don't like about it is, I don't think it probably shuts down the hard drive. When you power off a PC (correctly) one thing that happens is the hard drive "parking" itself. The platters stop and the actuator arm is moved all the way to the side and locked.

I know modern external drives will auto park the needle as soon as it senses power going down (or completely off) using residual power in the drive.
You should be fine, unless your using an older HDD (perhaps an old laptop drive converted to external, that might have issues auto shutting down).

[Ziggy]

I know modern external drives will auto park the needle as soon as it senses power going down (or completely off) using residual power in the drive.
You should be fine, unless your using an older HDD (perhaps an old laptop drive converted to external, that might have issues auto shutting down).

That's good to know. I was unaware that modern external HDDs can do this. I use a modern USB powered drive for my Wii, so I feel a little better about this now.

But yeah, worth knowing about for those that are using older drives that they threw in an external enclosure. I might be neurotic about such things, but I want my hardware to last as long as possible.