Hacking Banner Editing Tutorial

[Destian]

Can anyone tell me why the TPL Converter greatly reduces the number of colors I've used? Is there a predefined color chart?

EDIT: Nevermind, RGB565. : / Does anyone know if there is a way to edit in this mode in photoshop?

EDIT Again: I don't know much about image formats, but according to Wikipedia, RGB565 has 65,535 colors and I seem much more limited than that. Could it have to do with the way we are replacing the images (the same reason we are limited in image size?)

EDIT Again: Ok, maybe not more limited than 16-bit, but Nintendo's Disc Channel seem to have no problem with the gradient on the bottom. I don't get it.

 

[SH&E]

Nintendo are probably laughing in our faces right now with a program that does it all in one click xD
Still, great tutorial

Shame it won't come in handy for me, I don't need to edit any banners atm... Interesting however

 

[Mrkinator]

Quick Question, I see some channels (like the gamma channel) that don't use 112x32pixles.

The tutorial says you must, is there something they're doing different?

 

[AetherMaster]

I have a question about something, maybe somebody could help me.

I was editing a WAD and opened ZlphaahplA.tpl in banner_bin_out\timg by accident. It was in fact an image. It had credits on it, was set to have an alpha color and unlike the other images, it used RGB583 instead of RGB565. Is this important that I shouldn't touch it, or can I freely edit it? Thanks

 

[Josie]

I have a question about something, maybe somebody could help me.

I was editing a WAD and opened ZlphaahplA.tpl in banner_bin_out\timg by accident. It was in fact an image. It had credits on it, was set to have an alpha color and unlike the other images, it used RGB583 instead of RGB565. Is this important that I shouldn't touch it, or can I freely edit it? Thanks

I suggest you not to touch it unless you know exactly what you're doing. A small error can easily cause a bricked wii.

 

[IronMask]

Just to let people know. If you do not follow directions well..especially if you can't read and look at the translation right...then don't even attempt this!! There has been way too many people out there editing stuff and posting it on GBATemp.... test it yourself! Posting a wad that bricks someone's Wii should be automatic dismissal of membership here. People are being to careless and impatient and causing a major ripple in the world of Wii Hacking... so stop! You know who the hell you are. I haven't bricked mine..but I have seen some good members here get their shit bricked because of some careless editing.

TEST YOUR WAD YOURSELF BEFORE LINKING IT! PLAIN AND SIMPLE!

Not trying to be a dick..just be careful!

 

[WiiShizzza]

I'm with you IronMask!
Very "dangerous" if done something wrong!

 

[Harlay]

How to compress the banner.bin and icon.bin for homebrew with u8pack?
I'm use u8pack 0.08, it supports compress with lz77.
But it don't show me the icon and banner in the wii channel.
It's ok if I don't compress the banner.bin and icon.bin.

 

[Nintendog66]

I'm having a problem, I get to step 7.5 where I have to overwrite the 00000000.app file but when I try do it I get "Error: El archivo no esta firmado con MD5"(Error: The file is not signed with MD5). Can anyone help me please?

 

[djdynamite123]

shame there wasn't more of an easier method than this

Hate going through these step, so precise...

 

[Harlay]

The compressed of banner.bin and icon.bin for homebrew work fine now.
I just use the c.exe in the "Easy Banner Maker - BETA2 (PARADOX)" instead of the gbalzss.exe call by the u8pack.exe.
I think that Wii used LZ77 to compress file, but the gbalzss.exe is LZSS.

 

[ether2802]

Does anyone know how to fix the video in a .wad??? I can hear the audio but there is no video signal, unless I use the normal A/V cable that came with the Wii; with the component cables, there is no video signal only audio, Damn..!!

 

[Keeley]

Quick Question, I see some channels (like the gamma channel) that don't use 112x32pixles.

The tutorial says you must, is there something they're doing different?

yeah i was wondering bout that 2 cuz it looks my edit looks kinda gay switching to a smaller pic of it xD and i was also wondering if i can stop it from switching from a normal sized pic to a smaller size pic (like the homebrew channel)

EDIT: But the homebrew channel's kinda different cuz it was installed as thru Twilight Princess so i'll use another example the GeckoOS channel i have doesn't change pics.

 

[nanook]

This is my first GBA Temp post ;-)

I'm late to the party... I'm trying to edit a banner (opening.bnr) in an ISO. I keep getting a dark blurry picture :-(

I'm just trying to prove it works by extracting the files, then packing them back up. No editing as yet. I've managed to get the original banner to load as well as the tetris one. Both are dark and blurry. :-(

I hope you can help.

Here's payment in advance for your help...

TPLConv & U8Pack - Spanish to English conversions (All Text, I think).

If you have any suggestions with non perfect translations please PM me. I just knocked them up yesterday before I started using them. Feel free to post them in the main archive for this post.

Thanks,
Nanook

 

[nanook]

I've just discovered that the compression is causing it (I think). If the opening.bnr file size is larger than about about 500k the wii will hang (I read this in this thread and I've seen it myself).

I took the Tetris channel from the first post. Extracted the banner.bin and icon.bin. Replaced them in my opening.bnr. I compressed the banner and did not compress the icon.bin. The Banner was dark and blurry, the Icon was perfect.

Can anyone help?

Cheers,
Nanook

 

[nanook]

The compressed of banner.bin and icon.bin for homebrew work fine now.
I just use the c.exe in the "Easy Banner Maker - BETA2 (PARADOX)" instead of the gbalzss.exe call by the u8pack.exe.
I think that Wii used LZ77 to compress file, but the gbalzss.exe is LZSS.

Ha, the answer was staring me in the face. Well done to Harlay, this fixed the compression. I was able to take a disc banner and extract all the files, rebuild the whole thing (with compression) and it worked perfectly...

I wrote a simple little exe to replace gbalzss.exe all it does is display a message box displaying the commandline passed to it. This allowed me to pause the banner.bin creation from the parent program. I then used the c.exe mentioned above to do the compression manually. Pressing ok on the messagebox let the rest of the work happen (header being added etc). The resulting banner ended up 8 bytes less than the original and worked perfectly.

I may get my exe to ask if you want to call the other compressor so things can be done a bit simpler until people update their apps (if ever).

Hope this helps some people.

Cheers,
Nanook

 

[nanook]

Here's a tiny app to allow apps using gbalzss.exe to use c.exe for compression.

1. Download
2. Run it, it will tell you what to do.

gbalzss.exe to c.exe

ALSO: The users who are getting the overflow error when opening banners. It's because U8pack.exe doesn't appear to work when importing compressed banners. HowardC's U8tool9.0 works really well. Tested with this app also ;-)

Be careful when using U8pack and U8tool as U8pack doesn't export the "meta" folder, so when packing files with U8tool the internal structure is not correct.

EDIT: I meant to write U8extr.exe doesn't create the "meta" folder. U8pack doesn't do the extracting. Oops.

Cheers,
Nanook

 

[bozzer123]

Can someone update this tutorial or point me in the right direction of a tutorial about editing banners on a disc?

thanks!
ps can you tell me where to get the "c.exe" from easy banner maker beta 2 as rapidshare wont work for me

Well?

 

[OMIGHTY1]

Nope, this tutorial highly failed for me. I couldn't read a word, and all of the filenames, even at the start, were all wrong.

 

[AetherMaster]

It's not too hard to do, dude. Plus, why would you want to follow this tutorial, anyway? Just use WADder.
http://wadder.net/