This is just some info I've collected regarding booting games without a disc drive or any disc drive replacement on the Wii. I think this will be helpful, if not necessary, in moving forward with Wii portabilizing, as the smallest cuts have chopped off the disc drive connector.
The method I have experimented with that I think works is UNEEK + DI. This is basically a mode on the Wii that uses an emulated NAND to emulate even the disc drive. The NAND is stored on a USB device and you can modify it from a PC using ShowMiiWads.
There are a couple of ways to create an emuNAND. One of them is to build a new NAND using ModMii and going through the steps for UNEEK + DI installation (you can also use SNEEK + DI, which stores the NAND on an SD card, but I can't get that one to work). The other way is to dump your own NAND from WiiFlow, which is no different other than the fact that it will be a clone of your own, not a new one. Either way, you should install UNEEK + DI to both your SD card and your USB device using the ModMii installation.
With a NAND on your USB device and UNEEK + DI installed, you can boot emuNAND using any of the NEEK2O "channel WADs" found here: https://code.google.com/archive/p/custom-di/downloads. Install the WAD to your sysNAND, and that will become your method of booting emuNAND. Alternatively, you can download "nswitch2.2" from that page and use it as a normal homebrew app to do the same thing. That homebrew app can be installed in Priiloader in order to boot emuNAND as soon as your console starts.
On emuNAND, WiiFlow is supposed to work for booting Wii and GC games, but I can't get that to work. I use PostLoader instead. If you installed UNEEK + DI with ModMii, it should have put a PostLoader forwarder channel WAD on your SD card. Install that to your emuNAND using ShowMiiWads (on your computer) and you will then be able to use it from the emuNAND system menu. PostLoader also boots homebrew applications, which is good because it seems that the homebrew channel does not work in emuNAND.
In PostLoader, Wii games work very well. They boot up immediately without a disc drive. However, GameCube games do not. Dios Mios does work well using PostLoader, but that still requires a disc drive. Nintendont works in normal system NAND without a disc drive because it doesn't even make calls to the disc drive, but oddly enough, Nintendont doesn't work in emuNAND. That is an obstacle for booting GameCube games that I have not yet figured out.
The info in here is kind of discombobulated and I did not save very many links, so I know that's not helpful, but I hope to research more and compile a list of helpful links and downloads for the future. If anyone would like to try it out and get GameCube games to work, I can provide some more specifics on what I did. Also, thank you to Shank, who presented all of these ideas to me and started all of this.
The method I have experimented with that I think works is UNEEK + DI. This is basically a mode on the Wii that uses an emulated NAND to emulate even the disc drive. The NAND is stored on a USB device and you can modify it from a PC using ShowMiiWads.
There are a couple of ways to create an emuNAND. One of them is to build a new NAND using ModMii and going through the steps for UNEEK + DI installation (you can also use SNEEK + DI, which stores the NAND on an SD card, but I can't get that one to work). The other way is to dump your own NAND from WiiFlow, which is no different other than the fact that it will be a clone of your own, not a new one. Either way, you should install UNEEK + DI to both your SD card and your USB device using the ModMii installation.
With a NAND on your USB device and UNEEK + DI installed, you can boot emuNAND using any of the NEEK2O "channel WADs" found here: https://code.google.com/archive/p/custom-di/downloads. Install the WAD to your sysNAND, and that will become your method of booting emuNAND. Alternatively, you can download "nswitch2.2" from that page and use it as a normal homebrew app to do the same thing. That homebrew app can be installed in Priiloader in order to boot emuNAND as soon as your console starts.
On emuNAND, WiiFlow is supposed to work for booting Wii and GC games, but I can't get that to work. I use PostLoader instead. If you installed UNEEK + DI with ModMii, it should have put a PostLoader forwarder channel WAD on your SD card. Install that to your emuNAND using ShowMiiWads (on your computer) and you will then be able to use it from the emuNAND system menu. PostLoader also boots homebrew applications, which is good because it seems that the homebrew channel does not work in emuNAND.
In PostLoader, Wii games work very well. They boot up immediately without a disc drive. However, GameCube games do not. Dios Mios does work well using PostLoader, but that still requires a disc drive. Nintendont works in normal system NAND without a disc drive because it doesn't even make calls to the disc drive, but oddly enough, Nintendont doesn't work in emuNAND. That is an obstacle for booting GameCube games that I have not yet figured out.
The info in here is kind of discombobulated and I did not save very many links, so I know that's not helpful, but I hope to research more and compile a list of helpful links and downloads for the future. If anyone would like to try it out and get GameCube games to work, I can provide some more specifics on what I did. Also, thank you to Shank, who presented all of these ideas to me and started all of this.
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