When reverse engineering Wii games it is very important to know the file formats that were commonly used in game development.
Many of the asset formats in this document are from the NintendoWare for Revolution toolset 1.
ISO files are a standard format for distributing the contents of a physical disc as a single file. If you want to back up your Wii game discs this is one of the formats you may want to use.
ISO Images can be used in most Gamecube emulators such as Dolphin.
Not to be confused with Doom WAD, WAD files for the wii are applications that can be installed to the Wii’s NAND.
The best way to see the contents of a WAD file is to use the .Net tool called ShowMiiWads.
First you need to use wii.cs tools called WadMii.exe (you can run this in wine on MacOSX or Linux) and point it at the .wad file and give it an extract location.
This will generate a bunch of .app files, you will notice each of these .app files has the file header of “55 AA 38 2D” or U.8-.
When you have extracted a WAD you will get a bunch of .APP files, these are archives which can be extracted with tools such as ARCTool or U8Mii.
You can use a GUI tool such as U8Mii.exe or a command line interface such as ARCTool.
You can download Wiimms SZS Tools here: https://szs.wiimm.de/download.html
Here is an example of extracting a U8 archive:
wszst x ./lineattack/00000002.app
This tool can also be used to manipulate a lot of other file formats, such as TPL and BRRES.
U8Mii is a windows executable that has a GUI for opening App files, on windows you should be able to double click it but on Linux or Mac you will need to use WINE like so:
wine U8Mii.exe
You can download ARCTool here: http://wiibrew.org/wiki/ARCTool
here is an example of extracting an app from the Line Attack game:
python ARCTool.py ./lineattack/00000002.app
There are two main executable file formats for the Nintendo Wii:
File formats for 2D assets include:
The following formats are used for particle effects:
3D assets for the Nintendo Wii come in three different types of formats, the plain text XML version, the raw version and the binary version. They normally have the same name but the binary version has a B at the start of the name.
The R letter at the start (or after the B) refers to the Wii codename known as Revolution.
The Binary file formats for 3D assets include:
The raw file formats for 3D assets include:
The Source XML file formats for 3D assets include:
The binary audio formats for Wii are:
