Zoids Battle Legends on a pal wii questions

[ShadoWolfozo]

Alright first off, I have an unmodded pal wii system and so live in australia.

Now i recently bought Z:BL (NTSC) for gamecube, a memory card, two controllers and another pal gamecube game to test out this trick of disc swapping so the wii reads the pal disc's region and then swap the disc for thr ntsc onw and it plays it like a normal disc.

Now this hasnt worked for me, it wont recognize the Zoids game no matter how fast I swap the discs, ive even followed video tutorials and it wont work with zoids so my only non-modding alternative is freeloader. So here's my questions:

Will the wii play Zoids: Battle Legends for gamecube with freeloader?

Do i get the wii freeloader or gamecube freeloader?

Where's the cheapest place to buy freeloader for a pal wii system?

Have any of you done this and got it to work for this particular game?

[Sn!p3r]

dont you have homebrew channel? i use that all the time with ZFMC which is the only game and if you decide to get a free loader u have to get the gamecube one i got my copy 4years ago in playasia,.....hope this helps~



PS: the disc swaping only worked when the wii first came out then with the update nintendo blocked it

[KAndrw]

Living in Australia, you have the advantage of the legal ruling several years ago that modding a console to make it region-free is completely legal (because region-locked games infringe upon your consumer rights - go Australia!)

Given that, my advice would be to softmod (or have somebody softmod) your Wii, so that you can play games from whatever region you like.

(I keep meaning to pick up a Wii, but for now I'm still perfectly happy with my US/Jp Gamecube. Though Mario Kart Wii is tempting...)

[ShadoWolfozo]

Thanks sniper, I will try that

EDIT: just tried, I don't have homebrew channel and also checked my wii's version.
4.2E, will that interfere with freeloader? I've heard that anything after 3.3 will not allow freeloader to work. True or false?

I'll have to get freeloader then....

Has anyone actually played Zoids: Battle Legends on a pal wii system, unmodded with version over 3.3 wii with a freeloader disc? I do not want to continue wasting my money if it wont work.

@kandrew: ah, thats the thing - I don't want to mod it in anyway because it'll remove the warrantee if something goes wrong and we want a replacement.

But agreed, the fact modding in aussie is now legal is great - my PS1 and original Xbox was modded to play backup games and save to harddrive but my dad doesnt want to mod the new xboxs or wii so yeh.

[Sn!p3r]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispekU1HiYY - try this

once you have hombrew channel tell me because you have to download a program threw the internet from your wii
you will need a SDCARD

[ShadoWolfozo]

1 problem
my wii doesn't connect to internet because we are on a low bandwith plan so we can't afford to have the wii hooked up.

I'm thinking on buying a Gamecube and freeloader because GC had some other PS1 and PS2 games I always liked that I didn't get/lost so yeh.

Only problem now is cost....

thanks for the help anyway guys

[KAndrw]

I bought a Wii a few days ago, because I discovered that Gamecube compatibility has been dropped from the system's specs - so I was running out of time to buy the model that filled my needs!

It was system version 4.3E (latest), and was a piece of cake to install the homebrew channel on. Since such things are a grey area in the US, and Proboards is a US thing, I won't go into details. Suffice to say that they're out there, and anybody who gets stuck is welcome to PM me.

The reason I needed the homebrew channel was because all of my Gamecube games are NTSC (and rad, and in need of being played regularly, for ever), including two Japanese games - VS3 and Full Metal Crash. There are homebrew apps to launch games from any region, as well as utilities to disable region checking when launching a game.

The US games I have work perfectly (now that I've disabled region checking), but the Japanese ones suffer from the same problem that people encountered using freeloaders on the Gamecube - garbled system text. The Pal (and US) systems simply don't have Japanese fonts installed, and some games use system fonts rather than game fonts.

Full Metal Crash is generally fine, since only the load/save interface uses the system fonts (all in-game stuff uses Renderware's font libraries). If you know that the Japanese word for 'yes' has two characters and the word for 'no' has three, you can get through it fairly easily. I need to use NeoGamma to launch FMC - booting it normally (with region checking disabled) results in a black screen.

VS3 does not work properly when booted with NeoGamma, but seems to be fine when launched from the Gamecube channel (again, with region checking disabled). Almost all of the Japanese text in the game uses system fonts, so is garbled nonsense. If you didn't understand Japanese anyway, this is no major loss, and almost all menu items are in English anyway.

There are homebrew utilities to change the region of the console, which could presumably be used to make it think it's a Japanese model and thus enable system fonts - but those utilities have a dodgy reputation. Personally, I'm not prepared to try them, at least not until they've been better tested. For now, FMC works perfectly for my purposes, and I haven't finished Battle Legends so I'm happy to forgoe VS3.

For anybody planning to get a Wii so they can play the Zoids Gamecube games, now is probably a good time to do so. New, boxed consoles that are backwards compatible are only going to get more rare from this point out.

Unrelated note - there is only one FMC FAQ/walkthrough on the internet, and it's mine! I'm internet famous! But only to people who like Zoids import gaming on old consoles.

[Sn!p3r]

glad you got it working ;D yes FMC run flawless on the Wii but Vs3 kinda sucky on mine for some reason i cant hear the characters talk only the zoids and other noises but every time i finish a zoid battle it quits by it self and reboots the wii, which is wierd