Devolution - Guide to USB Loading GameCube Games On Wii

What's New (Update History)

May 9th, 2013

Updated to Devolution r196 (all loader attachments).
Updated USB Loader GX to r1214
Updated WiiFlow to 4.1.2

April 18th, 2013

Added "What Wii's Are Compatible With This" section to the guide forward
Added link to game compatibility list

April 5th, 2013

Updated USB Loader GX to r1211
Updated Devolution to r188
Added details on playing multi-disc games (Part3b: Multi-Disc Games)

January 18th, 2013

Added instructions and attachments for CFG Loader & WiiFlow
Added attachment for CleanRip

January 16th, 2013

In depth rewrite resulting in a simplified process
Added spoiler sections for the Basic Loader and USB Loader GX
Added introduction to Devolution section
Basic Loader, USB Loader GX and GCMM v1.4 are now separate attachments. Download only the ones you will use

January 9th, 2013

Complete rewrite to Part 5b; now you DON'T need Dolphin!
Guide Part 5b now uses GCMM v1.4 for ripping memory cards instead of ctr-gcs
Updated attachment; USB Loader GX 3.0 r1204 and Devolution r169 are now used
Added "Coming Soon!" Spoiler, here I will list future additions I have planned but not yet implemented
Other various revisions

November 4th, 2012

Added important information to Part 4b which I had previously omitted.
Added 2nd verification process using USB Loader GX instead of the basic loader (see Part 4b)
Other various revisions in Part 3

November 3rd, 2012

Made a change to Part 4b, this section is not optional after all...sorry.
Added Part 5b, "Using An Emulated Memory Card"
Updated attachment to include ctr-gcs for ripping GC memory cards and USB Loader GX v3.0 r1203

Coming Soon!

Importing game saves to a bigger emulated memory card (16mb, the biggest there is!)

Forward:

This will be my first attempt at writing a guide so it's going to be something of a work in progress, I'll try to make it as thorough, organized and easy to understand as possible. The first thing you need to know about this guide, and it should go without saying, is that your Wii must be modded. I can't confirm whether or not this will work with hard modded systems so for this guide I will be writing with the assumption it is for softmods only, if anyone can correct me on that I will edit the guide as necessary. That said if your system is not modded yet, get that done first using the Softmod ANY Wii Guide.

What Wii's Are Compatible With This:

Currently this, and Dios Mios as well, only works on Wii's with GameCube ports on them. If you have a Wii with no GameCube ports or a Wii U you cannot play GameCube games :(
Teudj has promised to add alternative controller support to Devolution in the future but until it is implemented only Wii's that are nativly backwards compatible with GameCube will work...sorry.

About Devolution:

Devolution is a amazing program that lets you load your Nintendo GameCube backups (in complete 1:1 ISO format only) from a USB device, something previously thought by the Wii community to be impossible. Not only has teudj broken that theory of "impossible", he has added some nice additions as well. Devolution doesn't simply load your GameCube ISOs, it loads them in Wii mode. What this means is if you finish playing a game but you want to do something else with the system such as watch a movie on Netflix or browse the web with the Opera Channel, you don't have to turn the system off and back on. Just give the power button a quick tap and, depending on how you loaded Devolution, you'll be returned to the Homebrew Channel, your USB loader or the Wii menu. Due to loading the games from USB 2.0 (thanks to Nintendo's own IOS 58 :)) instead of having to read a disc Devolution also cuts down loading times in games, rather significantly in some. You'll notice games will load anywhere from 2 to 5 times as fast as they did playing from the disc. Possibly the best part about Devolution is that it is an app (boot.dol) run from your SD card. No installation is required and no risk to your system. If you decide you don't want it anymore there's no need to mess with your Wii's internal NAND, a process that can be very dangerous if you don't know what your doing. Just pop the SD card into your computer and delete the SD/apps/gc_devo folder or, if you're using one of the other popular loaders, simply navigate to Devolution's loader.bin file and delete it. That's all.

Part 1: Preparation

To get started you will need the following:

SD card (I recommend 2gb SanDisk but what ever works with your other homebrew should be fine for this as well)
Nintendo GameCube Controller
Nintendo GameCube Memory Card (optional, but recommended)
USB device with at least 2gb of free space (Must be formatted to FAT32 with 32kb Cluster size)
Retail GameCube disc(s)

Once you've made sure you have those necessities download the attachments for CleanRip and the USB loader you wish to use.

After the downloads complete extract the zips and copy the folders to your SD card as described in the supplied note.

Part 2: Backing Up Your GameCube Games

Download and extract this: Attachment 4328
Put the SD card in your Wii and turn the system on. Launch the Homebrew Channel and browse through your Apps till you see CleanRip, once you find it load it up.

Read the disclaimer and press A, then select USB, select FAT (If your USB drive is not FAT32 STOP right here, format it to FAT32 with a cluster size of 32kb. Do not continue until you have done this, CleanRip can write to NTFS but your USB loaders will not load the GC games unless your USB drive is FAT32, has a 32kb cluster size and is marked as primary and active), you'll now be asked to "insert a FAT32/NTFS formatted device". Make sure you have plugged your device into slot 0 (if your system is laying down it will be the bottom port, standing up and looking from behind it will be the one on the right). Press A again and choose yes to download the redump.org files...I admit, I'm not sure what purpose they serve but they are small enough that it doesn't really matter if they are needed or not so get them anyway.

Last step, insert your GameCube game disc, press A and wait...once it's done (make absolutely sure it completes 100%) you're good to go onto the next step.

Part 3: Picking a Loader

I will say this right now, if you were hoping to be able to play bootlegged/pirated games you're on the wrong site, we do not support piracy here so do not ask where to get free games or discuss how to crack the anti-piracy Devolution uses.

Devolution works with all of the popular loaders but the process for each one is a bit different, I am most accustom to USB Loader GX so that is the one I reccomend, but for the purpose of making this guide better I knew I would have to add sections for all of them. Below are subsections for each USB loader including the basic loader, for organization I have placed them in spoilers. Click the spoiler for your favorite loader to get started.

This is by far the easiest method. If your new to Wii homebrew and just want the quick easy method, this is it.
Download and extract this: Attachment 4569

Basic Loader

Make sure all of your GameCube ISOs are stored in USB/games, this is the only way the basic loader will see them. The game ISOs can be named however you want, I recommend using the game names.

Go to the Homebrew Channel, look for the Devolution app and load it. The program will mount your memory card automatically if you have one inserted, press X on your GameCube controller to mount your USB device. You will see the title of one of your ISOs (if you have added more than one you must cycle through them by pressing up and down, the basic loader will only display 1 game at a time). Find the game you want to play, press A and wait...if you didn't insert a GameCube memory card this may take a bit longer as the program will generate an "Emulated Memory Card". When your disc drive begins blinking twice in regular intervals it means it's time to insert your disc. Make sure it is the same game as the ISO you loaded and that it is a 1:1 complete copy, if the ISO didn't come from that specific disc or the disc didn't rip properly it will not verify, it will spit the disc out and continue to blink twice in regular intervals until the correct disc is inserted. Once the correct disc is inserted you should see the drive light blink 5 times and a moment later your game ISO should load, if the game does load you may eject the disc and repeat this process to verify the rest of your GC games.

When you're running a game in Devolution the systems Power button should return you to the Homebrew Channel and Reset will function as it should ie resetting the game.

This is my preferred loader, it has the most settings and the interface makes it fairly easy to use.
Download and extract this: Attachment 4570

USB Loader GX

With USB Loader GX you can have the games stored just about anywhere as long as you tell the loader where to find them via the custom paths option in the settings menu, for my own preferences I have chosen to keep the games in USB/GameCube and have written the guide as such, however you can name the folder whatever you want it to be. I will give the full details on how to set up the custom paths for the ISOs but first thing is first.

Go to the Homebrew Channel and load USB Loader GX, click the button at the top of GXs main screen that says "Select Loader Mode", this will be the 4th button from the left, and check the box marked "GC Games". Now make sure you have r1200 or higher (the included attachment uses r1209), you can check this by clicking the settings button, going to page 4 and clicking credits. In the top left you will see your Devolution revision number (the included attachment uses r169), in the top right you will see your loaders info including loader revision, IOS revision, d2x version and Dios Mios if you have it installed. If you want all of your GC games to load with Devolution go back to the first page of the main settings, click on loader settings and scroll down to GameCube Mode. You can choose either Devolution or MIOS (Default & Customs), choose Devolution and all of your GC games will load using that now. Scroll to the bottom to turn "DEVO MemCard Emulation" on and off, this function is for those who either don't own a GameCube memory card, have had their cards battery die or just for those who are too lazy to use their cards :p

Setting the Custom Paths:

In order to make GX to see and load your GameCube games you'll need to set the custom paths first. Plug your USB device into your computer, open it and create a new folder on the root called GameCube. Next open the new folder you just created and inside it create a new folder for each of your ISOs. These folders must be named for each games specific game ID number in order for USB Loader GX to see the games. Example, if you have a USA (NTSC) copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, you would put the GZLE01.ISO in USB/GameCube/GZLE01. If you're unsure what your games ID numbers are you can easily find them on GameTDB.com

Now plug the USB drive and your SD card back into your Wii. Load USB Loader GX, go to settings page 2 and click "Custom Paths". Scroll down until you see "Main GameCube Path" and click on it. At the bottom of the screen you will see the following 3 buttons: "OK", "usb1:/" and "Cancel". If instead of "usb1:/" you see "sd:/" your USB is already the selected device, you only need to specify the folder, if it does say "usb1:/" click on it to select your USB device. Navigate to your GameCube folder, press A to select it, then at the bottom left of the screen click the big OK button. A pop-up will appear telling you the Path has been changed, click OK to close it. Now you must tell USB Loader GX where to find Devolution's loader.bin so it can load the games. While in Custom Paths scroll down till you see "Devolution Loader Path" and press A on it. Navigate to sd:/apps/usbloader_gx, click the OK button on the bottom left of your screen, click OK on the pop-up message telling you the path has been changed and you're done.

Verifying & Playing Your Games:

You load the GC games the same as you do with Wii games, click the game image and click start. You can also press 1 to download the cover/disc art for any games so long as they are available on GameTDB.

Find the game you want to play, click on it and click start. Your drive should begin blinking twice in regular intervals. Simply insert the disc for the game you're trying to play and wait, your drives light should blink 5 times and then a moment later the game ISO should load. You may then eject your disc, the next time you want to play the game it will start right up off USB no disc required. Repeat this process to verify all of your games.

This loader has less settings than USB Loader GX. Due to not having the option of custom paths I consider this one a little less user friendly but still a good loader with a nice GUI.
Download and extract this: Attachment 4571

CFG Loader

Before loading CFG Loader on your Wii you first need to make sure the games are in the correct path. Plug your USB device into your computer and place all of your games in USB/games/, each game must have it's own gameID folder and the ISO must be named game.iso. Example, USB/games/GZEE70/game.iso. Once you have the games in the correct location it's time to get things going on the Wii.

Go to the Homebrew Channel and load CFG Loader, you should see all of your games. Click the settings symbol at the bottom of the screen (the hammer and wrench symbol on the far right), on this menu click 'System'. At the bottom of the screen you'll see a save settings button and just above that the option "Force Devolution". Force Devolution will set all of your GC games to load using Devolution, click on it to turn it on then click save settings. You will see a screen telling you the settings have been saved and the program needs to be restarted for the new settings to take effect, press any button to continue then press Home and choose exit then re-enter the loader.

Finding Your Games:

There are 2 ways to find your GC games:

1) Scroll through all of your games till you see one of them (they'll be mixed in with your Wii games)

2) Click the yellow shield symbol at the bottom of the screen (the 3rd button from the left) and you'll see the filter menu open up. At the bottom of the screen you will see the option to view your games by the following categories: Show All, Unplayed, Wii, GameCube or Channel. Click GameCube then press B and you will now see only your GameCube games.

Click on a game you want to play, this will open a window with various game info and settings. On the bottom left is a setting that will let you change the game art that gets displayed (you can choose 2D, 3D, Disc, Full, HQ or RGB). At the column on the right you'll see several buttons. Start will obviously start the game, Cover will show you the games cover artwork, Info will show you the games ID number, disc size (should say 1.36GB), rating and various other info about the game (Note you'll first need to go to settings, updates then click 'Download Game Information' before some of this info will be displayed). Manage will allow you to mark the game as a favorite (for filtering purposes), download missing covers or all covers, manage cheats (not supported on WiiHacks, sorry, you're on your own with this feature), delete the game, and 'dump savegame' (only appears to work for dumping Wii game saves from the internal NAND). Option will give you loader settings. Here you can change the various settings related to how the loader plays the game such as language, video and widescreen among other things. You could also turn Devolution on or off, however, since you've forced Devolution on via the main settings this one will do nothing.

Verifying & Playing Your Games:

Find the game you want to play, click on it and click start. Your drive should begin blinking twice in regular intervals. Simply insert the disc for the game you're trying to play and wait, your drives light should blink 5 times and then a moment later the game ISO should load. You may then eject your disc, the next time you want to play the game it will start right up off USB no disc required. Repeat this process to verify all of your games.

If your games do not have cover art and you want them to, press 1, go to the updates tab and click on Download All Covers. Depending on how many games you have this could take a while so be patient. Once it completes press any button to continue. You may also download game info by pressing 1, choosing Updates and clicking 'Download Game Information'.

Of the 3 "full featured" loaders this one has the least amount of settings, a good loader in its own right, but it could be more user friendly.
Download and extract this: Attachment 4572

WiiFlow

Before loading WiiFlow on your Wii you first need to make sure the games are in the correct path. Plug your USB device into your computer and place all your games in USB/games/, each game must have it's own gameID folder and the ISO must be named game.iso. Example, USB/games/GZEE70/game.iso. Once you have the games in the correct location it's time to get things going on the Wii.

Go to the Homebrew Channel and launch WiiFlow. You may be greeted with a screen stating it could not find any games, offering you the option to install a game or choose a different partition. Choose Select Partition to view the settings menu, the 3rd option down will say "Game Partition" and should have your SD card selected. Click the arrow just to the right of that and it will change to USB1. Click back and it should now display all of your Wii games, pressing the B button on your Wii remote will bring up the Select Source menu. There are 5 choices, the first will display your Wii games and the second shows your GC games. Click the second option to see all your GC games then click on the game you want to play to open the games loader menu. You will see a close up of the game case on the left and in the upper right corner you'll see the games banner image (similar in appearance to Virtual Console games). Clicking on the banner will increase the size to your full TV screen (press A on the banner again to go back to the loader menu). While pointing at the TV you'll see 4 symbols just below the banner, from top left to bottom right they are; mark as favorite, parental controls, game settings and delete game. Below that are the buttons Play and Back, but before you can play you need to do a couple more things first. Unlike with USB Loader GX and CFG Loader, WiiFlow doesn't have a global setting for Devolution so you need to enable it on a game by game basis. While still viewing the games loader screen click on the game settings symbol (the little gears) and you'll be shown settings for your game. From here you can download cover art, change the video mode or language and choose which GameCube loader to use. Change it from default to Devolution then continue to page 3 (page 2s settings are best left alone as they won't cause any issues). On page 3 you can enable or disable several settings but the only one that effects Devolution is "Devolution Memcard Emulator". Turning this on will result in Devolution generating a memcard.bin file (in the location USB/apps/gc_devo) upon loading a game. This setting should mainly be used if your actual GC memory card is lost or damaged but you can also use it just for the sake of convenience as well.

Verifying & Playing Your Games:

Now that you have the settings worked out it's time to load a game. Find the game you want to play, click on it and click start. Your drive should begin blinking twice in regular intervals. Simply insert the disc for the game you're trying to play and wait, your drives light should blink 5 times and then a moment later the game ISO should load. You may then eject your disc, the next time you want to play the game it will start right up off USB no disc required. Repeat this process to verify all your games.

No matter which USB loader you've chosen to use the next time you view the contents of your USB drive you will see an apps folder and inside that a gc_devo folder containing 1 .dvv file for each disc you verified, do NOT do anything with these. The sad fact is they cannot be transferred, copied or altered in any way, doing so will corrupt the file(s) requiring you to re-verify the disc(s). If Delvolution did not detect a memory card you will also see a memcard.bin file, this is your emulated memory card and the only file in USB/apps/gc_devo that can be freely copied/moved without risk of corrruption.

Part 3b: Multi-Disc Games:

**This section is a work in progress and may require some editing. If it doesn't work for you please detail what the problem is so I may look into it and revise this section as needed.**

This section applies to all the above loaders, no matter which one you chose to use this method should work for all of them. If you have a game that uses more than one disc all you need to do is rip disc 2 using CleanRip (just as you did with the first disc), rename this second disc ISO to disc2.iso and place it in the same folder as the first disc. That's all...when you verify the first disc the second one will automatically be verified as well. In order to play this second disc you must first load disc 1 and progress to a point when the game prompts you to insert disc 2. When you see the prompt to insert disc 2 simply press eject and Devolution should load the disc2.iso.

Part 4: Using An Emulated Memory Card:

If you have a real GameCube memory card and it works you are free to skip this step. Emulated memory card is only really needed if your memory card is lost or damaged, however, if you choose to use Emulated Memory purely for convenience that is fine as well. This section will teach you how to import all of your saves from your real GC memory card onto an emulated memory card for use with Devolution. If you did not insert a memory card the first time you loaded a game, Devolution will have generated a EmuMemory Card for you. This means if you had no usable GC memory card to begin with you are done, those who do have one and want to extract their saves from it keep reading.

Download and extract this: Attachment 4322

Plug your GameCube memory card into slot A and load GCMM v1.4 from the Homebrew Channel. You will be asked to choose either SD or USB (I chose SD but it's up to you if you want to use USB instead). Use A (for SD) or B (for USB) to make your choice and you will now see a screen detailing which buttons preform what functions. In order for Devolution to read the memory card you need a raw dump, so press B & - (minus) at the same time. Now select the slot your memory card is plugged into by pressing A and wait for the program to work its magic. Once it completes Press A and then Home to exit to the Homebrew Channel. Plug your SD card into your computer, navigate to the "MCBACKUP" folder on the root of the card and look inside for a file named something like "1019b_2013_01Jan_09_14-37-17.raw". In order for Devolution to read this file properly you must rename & convert it first, don't worry though it's incredibly easy to do. All you need to do is navigate to your memory card raw on your SD card or USB drive and rename it to memcard.bin, be sure that the file extension changes from .raw to .bin so Devolution will be able to read it. Note: Make sure you remove the GameCube memory card from your Wii before continuing, you only needed it plugged in to rip your save data. Leaving the memory card inserted while trying to use emulated memory may possibly result in corruption.

Now take your newly generated memcard.bin file and copy it over to USB/apps/gc_devo as that is the only place it can be read from. Now safely eject your USB device, plug it and your SD card back into your Wii, launch your preferred USB loader and choose a game you have a save for. If you're using the basic loader it should recognize the memcard.bin file automatically when you load a game, if you are using one of the other 3 loaders you will need to enable Devolution's Emulated Memory via the settings menu.

Enabling Devolution's Emulated Memory:

USB Loader GX: Go to main settings page 1, click Loader Settings and scroll down till you see "DEVO MemCard Emulation". Click on it to turn it on.
CFG Loader: Find the game you want to use emulated memory on, click on it, click the Options tab and turn on "NMM" (must be enabled on a game by game basis)
WiiFlow: Find the game you want to use emulated memory on, click on it, go to settings page 3 and turn on "Devolution Memcard Emulator" (must be enabled on a game by game basis)

When you start your game it should load your save that was on your memory card. It is important to note that this ripped memcard.bin will equal to the size of the card it was ripped from, so if your physical card had only 251 blocks that is what this one will have as well.

Part 5: Troubleshooting & Tips:

Q: My game isn't displaying correctly, what's wrong?!

A: Strangly this happened to me, for some reason the colors were reversed, the sound was buggy and the frame rate was choppy and slow. Go into the games indvidual settings and force the video mode to your system region.

Q: Do I have to use the supplied Loader? I don't want to overwrite mine/mine is a higher revision than this guides...

A: No problem, just copy the loader.bin from the attachment and place it in the proper directory.

USB Loader GX: SD/apps/usbloader_gx
CFG Loader: SD/usb-loader
WiiFlow: SD/Wiiflow

Part 6: Outro & Special Thanks:

There you have it, you now can play all of your GameCube games from USB. No more worrying about those tiny discs getting scratched and smudged. I hope this guide provided clear helpful information, if you need any help or find anything about this guide that's not clear (typos, punctuation issues, whatever) or if you have any suggestions to make it better please let me know in the comments. Don't forget to click the "thanks" button if this guide helped you :)

Game Compatibility List:

There is currently a community maintained list of games that do and don't work and if they have any issues. After consulting other staff, I've decided I will link the game compatibility list from Devolution's home page here. Feel free to edit your own game results into the compatibility list, this will help to let others know if their favorite games work and how well they work.

Devolution Game Compatibility List

Broke 10,000 views! Thanks everyone for making this guide successful, as a token of my thanks here's a new thread which I hope you'll find compliments this one nicely and will dress up the appearance of your GameCube games in your loader menu :)

>Click Here<

Special thanks to:
Tueidj (Author of Devolution)
Mauifrog & CJizzle (Authors of "Softmod ANY Wii" Guide)
Emu_kidid (Author of CleanRip)
Jax (Helping make sure I don't violate the rules here :p)
Jax & cwjakesteel (For giving the idea to make this guide)
DacoTaco (Author of Ctr-Gcs-DacoTaco Edition)
Suloku (Author of GCMM)
Nintendo Maniac 64 (For providing very helpful info)
USB Loader GX team (Author of USB Loader GX)
CFG Loader team (Author of CFG Loader)
WiiFlow team (Author of WiiFlow)