Virtual Console

From WiiLi

racace

1 Information
2 Internal game names
3 Encryption
4 See Also

[edit] Information

The virtual console (VC) is a platform to play retro games on your Nintendo Wii. For more information about the VC visit the VC page of wikipedia.

A little warning, as of this point not much is known so most of the text here will be speculation.

[edit] Internal game names

The folders in which the Virtual Console files (content.bin) are saved have systematic, four-character names. The first character tells us what system the ROM belongs to.

F : NES
J : SNES
M : Genesis/Mega Drive
N : N64
P : TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine
R : Wii

The second and third char is the game identifier. For non-Wii games, it is incremented from AA to AZ, then A0 to A9, BA to BZ and so on; for Wii games, it is often an abbreviation of the game name (e.g. "SP" for Wii Sports, "ZD" for Zelda).

The last character is the regioncode.

E : USA
J : Japan
P : Europe (and other PAL regions)

Let's take F-Zero as an example. The folder for F-Zero (USA) is named JACE. The 'J' tells us it's a SNES game, followed by 'AC' which tells us this is probably the third game released for the SNES and the 'E' tells us it's a USA release.

Funny thing is that when you change the folder name to something else like FAKE (for The legend of Zelda) the Nintendo Wii doesn't reconize the game channel anymore. So it somehow checks the games content.bin with the foldername. If you look in the content.bin you can also find the foldername in (what is probably) the meta data (which isn't encrypted).

[edit] Encryption

The virtual console games are encrypted, presumably to prevent people exchanging VC games. The way it looks right now is as follows:

Your Wii contacts the content server and checks your Wii points. If you have enough Wii points it downloads a small tmd (Title Meta Data?) file which has some metadata about the virtual console title. After that the rest of the content gets downloaded. For VC games, this is 7 other files. Most of these files are then joined together to create the channel file, content.bin. The other files that aren't joined together are most likely shared between different VC games. For VC games, content files 00000002, 00000003, 00000004, and 00000006 are exactly the same size for every VC game, but only 00000002, 00000003, and 00000004 seems to be shared. The Wii takes the other 4 files and creates content.bin. Each of the 4 files is 0x2000-byte aligned in the file.