Emulator

The logs will probably show that it's accessing/writing to invalid memory, and thus the report wouldn't only be invalid, but the crash correct.

JosJuice wrote:

If you take an ISO that breaks in this way on Dolphin and run it on a real console, does it work?

Yes it has always work on Nintendo Wii something changed between dolphin 5.0.530 and 5.0.540 maybe the way files are read or something because even just saving the file (no changes what so ever to the level) it still crashes.

You're absolutely breaking it. You can allow invalid reads/writes by right clicking the ISO in the gamelist and going into the game properties page. From there, make sure MMU emulation is unchecked. That will make the behavior the same as the old builds.

JMC4789 wrote:

You're absolutely breaking it. You can allow invalid reads/writes by right clicking the ISO in the gamelist and going into the game properties page. From there, make sure MMU emulation is unchecked. That will make the behavior the same as the old builds.

After unchecking MMU the problem still persist

JMC4789 wrote:

That's actually interesting then. I wonder what other factors could be at play.

540 was the introduction of Dynamic BATs which solved a gamecube issue (although the wii is a overclocked gamecube). I tried reading this article https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2016/09/06/booting-the-final-gc-game/ although I couldn't find how it related to this problem. Maybe if I give you the file to replace in NSMB Wii, one that's unedited and another one that is to see how dolphin is reading the file.

Well yes, Dynamic BATs were needed to boot that game, but along with that came a rewrite to a lot of Dolphin's emulation of GC/Wii memory access, making it generally much more accurate.

Techjar wrote:

Well yes, Dynamic BATs were needed to boot that game, but along with that came a rewrite to a lot of Dolphin's emulation of GC/Wii memory access, making it generally much more accurate.

Okay so NSMBW must be having a hard time storing the edited file or loading the edited file in memory maybe? I just spitballing here because the game crashes when the game tries to load the level. If i edited the title screen it crashes immediately after showing you how to hold the controller. Or if I edit world 1-1 the game loads to the world map but wont load any of the levels.

Have you tried with both MMU enabled and disabled in the game properties?

Techjar wrote:

Have you tried with both MMU enabled and disabled in the game properties?

Yes if I turn MMU on the games fails to load the level and it just give me a black screen and the frame rate drops to zero. If I turn it off the game fails to load the level and gives a "Invalid read from 0x4407c060, PC = 0x802dcc14" error

New Development

So on dolphin 5.0.530 when you play the edited game using main.dol the game is able to run properly

But when you compile the file into iso (or wbfs) the game doesn't load the level properly even it was
working uncompiled

So after disabling "Enable Idle Skimping" and "Speed up Disc Transfer Rate" i was finally able to boot
into the level on the compiled version but a few seconds later the game would crash. So maybe dolphin has a verification checks
and when it checks the edited file, it thinks there is an error even though there is not causing a crash.
I test it on 5.0.540 and the same thing happens.

Running the game uncompiled doesn't crash dolphin which probably means that the verification check was
not implemented yet until later versions. (don't know when it was implemented)

There have been significant changes since 5.0 to how extracted games are handled, but none of those changes were made in 5.0-540. So I'm not sure why 5.0-540 would be affecting it...

JosJuice wrote:

There have been significant changes since 5.0 to how extracted games are handled, but none of those changes were made in 5.0-540. So I'm not sure why 5.0-540 would be affecting it...

Previously I thought there was a difference between 5.0-530 and 5.0-540 because the compile game was not running on 5.0-540 but after retrying on 5.0-530 the game is not running in that version either (I probably run the decompile version by accident or a settings was different from 5.0-530 and 5.0-540) so those 2 version are not the culprit. The way dolphin is reading the files is most likely causing it. Because if i turn off "Speed up Disc Transfer Rate" which slows down how dolphin reads files, the level loads but the game crashes a few seconds later. Also if i don't turn off
"Enable Idle Skimping" the game just gives a black screen while loading the level.

This issue has been solved. On editing on certain levels the level won't load unless the character starting position is moved right a few titles over. This hardcoded mechanic is what led to all this confusion and accidental blaming dolphin for everything. Please forgive my stupidity, I should of done more testing before making this a issue.

No, that's perfectly fine! I'm just glad that this was resolved and explained.