NOTE: This article was originally written in OneNote and was not altered before being uploaded here. Please excuse formatting errors.
Unsurprisingly, this is more easily said than done. To do this, you need to modify the Disc Channel’s BRLYT file (“Binary Revolution Layout” file), which is contained in the diskBann.ash file, which can be found at
| 00000001/layout/common/diskBann.ash |
and the BRLYT file is stored inside that at
| diskBann/arc/blyt/ |
Once you’re there and can write to the file, it’s just a matter of changing a 00 to a 01.
1. Obtaining the Necessary Files
The first thing I needed to do is get the Wii System Menu files (in this case I downloaded System Menu 2.0U), using a tool like NUS Downloader to get them right from Nintendo’s servers. I chose to not pack the WAD, and to keep only the decrypted contents. The only file I really needed from this download was 00000001.app, but I kept the rest so that I could pack the WAD later.
2. Extracting
Now that I had the file I needed, I had to open it. I ended up using Sharpii’s U8 extraction tool to extract 00000001.app into the directory 00000001. Once I had it extracted, I poked around to see if I could find what I needed to find. Fortunately, that was one of the easiest things I had to do. Once I located the diskBann.ash file that I needed to get into, I had to figure out how to get into it. Eventually I found a tool called Easy CSM, and used its command-line ASH extraction tool to extract diskBann.ash into diskBann.ash.arc (so just an ARC file). I then struggled to figure out what I had to do with that ARC file. I tried using ECSM, but it just crashed, probably because I didn’t understand how it wanted me to set it up. I eventually discovered that the U8 extraction tool that from Sharpii is compatible with ARC files. What luck! Once I understood that, I was able to extract it and look through its files to find what I was looking for.
Once I had the BRLYT file in my sights, I finally felt like things were going to work! …until I realized that, like before, I had no idea how to get into this file. I managed to find a guide on banner creation for the Wii, and it has a guide on how to convert a BRLYT file into an XMLYT file (using a tool called Benzin), which I could just open in Notepad. (Pretty sure an XMLYT file is just an XML file - it certainly looks like one.) Once I had it in an acceptable format, I just had to scroll through, find the flag I needed to change, change it, and get out of there.
3. Recompressing
I thought the hard part was over. It wasn’t. Now that I had changed what I needed, I needed to stick it all back together so I could use it. Luckily, Benzin could change XMLYT files back into BRLYT files, so that was easy enough. But then I had to figure out how to compress the diskBann folder back into an ASH file. I didn’t have anything that could do that. I was able to compress it into a file that said it was an ASH file using Sharpii, but it was the exact same size as the ARC (which was much larger than the ASH), so it seems to have just created a renamed ARC file. I decided that was probably good enough, since I knew some other files were also just renamed ARC files. The next step, compressing everything back into 00000001.app, wasn’t terrible once I figured out how the command worked. And this is where I hit the roadblock that stopped me. I needed to pack everything into a WAD so that I could actually use it. And the command failed every time.
So this is where things end for now. I have experimented more since this, and made more progress, so expect a follow up article at some point.