Hellow... I'm creating this topic to discuss about a dilema of mine. I have a Wii with a WODE Jukebox installed since years ago, with the intention to play both Wii and GameCube games. The decision to get WODE in that time was more because of the GameCube support. But, recently, I found the Wii loaders and apps improved vastly in the last years, allowing Wii to play even GameCube games just with softmods. With this, I'm thinking if it makes sense to keep the WODE installed or not. I will point the good and bad points with both methods: WODE Jukebox The Wii Optical Drive Emulator, or WODE for short, is, as the name suggest, a device installed inside the the Wii, who tricks the console to "think" the ISO is a real disc. With this, each loaded game image for both Wii and GameCube can be loaded into the console and be recognized as a original disc. As result, Wii games plays in Wii mode, and GameCube games plays in GameCube mode, all natively with no need of loaders. This means the compatibility is 100% safe, even with Wii games who uses BCA protection (once WODE offers BCA support), excluding cases of bad rip/dump game images. The device is just "open and connect", totally solder free. Now the negative points. To start, the WODE's homepage and forum as gone... No more offical support!! The only source to find information about WODE today, like firmwares and a list of complatible softwares, is from THIS WIKI. Another problem: WODE plays every GameCube game with no fault... except the GAMES WHO USED AUDIO STREAMING are played without music. This is a problem detected some time after WODE hit the market, and it was reported by many users. The WODE team said this problem could be fixed with a firmware update, but with the sacrifice of the WODE's ripping support. Such update never comes out, since the WODE's main programmer left the team and took the source code with him. Another problem is the WODE don't have the friendliness of the community. Some examples of lacking support are loaders and apps who don't offer support for WODE, or any incentive of the community to try to create a custom firmware to try to add audio streaming support for the WODE. Nintendont Nintendont is an app for Wii, who let it plays GameCube games from SD card or HDD. This feature was possible since the GameCube support comes under Wii mode (and not in GameCube mode), opening possible features. To start, Nintendont overcomes the audio streaming problem... Other features was possible, as activate widescreen and progressive scan in games who don't have those options available in-game, the possibility to create virtual memory cards, and even offer support for different type of controllers to replace the GameCube controller, including DualShock 3 and 4. Some loaders offer Nintendont support, allowing add GameCube games to a loader who offer a friendly menu, like the USB Loader GX... The bad point is THE GAME SUPPORT IS NOT 100% (but it's very close). Some issues is present in many games, like freeze/crash... But many of the listed problems are from forcing progressive scan and widescreen in games who don't offer such support, or hardware incompatibility (like GBA support on WiiU, or e-Reader support). After point the positive and negative points of both cited methods to play GameCube games on Wii, the question is: It's wise to remove WODE from my Wii, and play NGC games on it just with Nintendont?
Are they worth much? The wii is pretty worthless, you can still buy the wii fusion clone (wasp) for like $15. But if it's worth anything, I'd just sell it
IMO, Wii have many amazing games and a lot of homebrews. Yes, it have a weak hardware, but the library is still amazing. My dilemma is just with NGC audio streaming... Nintendont have amazing features... It could be better if I could use just one method to load games... Sadly, WODE don't have any way to fix the audio streaming issue by itself... And there's any dedicated community to try to fix or overcome this issue.
It doesn't get any simpler than this, why use WODE when it is inferior? What games do you have problems with on nintendont? Even the demo disks work fine
At this point WODE is useless. You can just softmod and play both Wii games (with CFG loader, USB loader GX etc) in wbfs format which takes less space (wbfs image format, not wbfs HDD partition) and GC games with Nintendont. Just buy USB HDD, make one NTFS partition (for Wii games) and one FAT32 partition (for GC games), that's all.
Also lets not forget the ease of using virtual memory cards, I tend to use one (251 blocks) per game. This means you can use these saves in Dolphin or take them with you on a USB to a friend's house and continue where you've left off. PS WODE can still be useful if you want to mod a GC
Ok... Some considerations... I'm just taking the loader's compatibility charts for both Wii and NCG games as reference, and other things... For example, I got the Wii from a friend of mine to install some games for him. Between the games was Just Dance 2014, who don't boot using USB Loader GX 3.0, but played beautifully at WODE. That's my apprehension about dropping WODE in favor to a popular loader and face some similar situations... At this momment, I'm just taking opinions about the efficiency of today's loaders to see if worth to remove WODE from my Wii and use just the loaders hoping to see the same efficiency I got when I use WODE. Just to note, WODE recognizes the content of a NTFS HDD to load both Wii and NGC image.
Nintendont and devolution are running with the CPU in wii mode with virtual machine emulation software tricks to get gamecube games running. It sure does look perfect but as it is using a type of emulation, it may not be 100% accurate for all games. DIOS MIOS is running gamecube games with the wii in actual gamecube mode, no emulation involved, but it doesn't have streaming audio either. The developer Crediar posed a youtube video of streaming audio working in DIOS MIOS but it was never released as by this stage his other project Nintendont was open source and working with streaming audio. WODE is running with the CPU in gamecube mode with no software emulation involved. No streaming audio though. I believe the main WODE dev "The Artificer" went on to focus on the xk3y and didn't have time to look at the streaming audio issue. There is another ODE called sundriver that I believe supports streaming audio of cube games with the wii CPU running in cube mode. This would be the best non-emualtion route to 100% gamecube compatibility. You would need to also purchase the nero writer as the sundriver usually ships with an old firmware.
Nintendont works great with every games I tried it on, and even let you use the wiimote (pro controller) to play, which is great for those that like wireless and don't have a wavebird.
Yes Nintendont is really great for commercial game compatibility and it supports triforce arcade games too. For 99.999% of people Nintendont is perfect. You are running in wii mode though and emulating the gamecube mode in software. For example you can't play most homebrew gamecube software in Nintendont but you can in any solution that supports the wii's native gamecube mode like diosmios, wode, and sundriver.
I've had the WODE installed for the past couple years and aside from the lack of audio streaming my Wii would have problems shutting down. I.e. hit the power button and it would turn off then right back on more often than nought. Assumed it was outdated softmod but even after updating the problem persisted. It was the WODE. Took it out problems are gone. I'm keeping mine though to put in my GameCube. Only because I intend for my GameCube to be solely for the Game Boy player and want to auto load the Game Boy disc from an sd card.
