WarioWare D.I.Y. — Making the Game More Awesome
It’s been over a year and a half since we made a blog post here. Wow. The reason I haven’t made any new ones is because I thought the whole RiiConnect24 community doesn’t seem to love to read much. It doesn’t matter if it’s read or not. I’m documenting our stories. And hopefully I’ll document more. If you’re reading this, please show your support by “clapping” at the end of this post.
In the past few months, great minds came together to bring the ultimate collection of WarioWare DIY content online. It started when a friend made a Discord server for WarioWare, and we were sharing .mio files. (Games, records, and comics in the game are in that format).
In late November 2018, I randomly found an AMAZING looking site that had a collection of some MIOs. “HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THIS”, I said. The site is called DoujinSoft, at https://diy.tvc-16.science/
I e-mailed the guy (his name is Difegue). I told him about an amazing collection of MIOs that were scraped by a user named bobmcjr a week before Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection was shut down. bobmcjr cared a lot about the game, and made a save file editor that could do many things. Not only you could import and export MIOS, but you could extract micrograme graphics, export records to MIDI, and extract comic graphics too.
Difegue responded, thanking me for the support. (Annoyingly, half of my emails I send these days never get a response.) He recalled seeing the collection, but never got around to importing it all. He said he’d import it.
It was a pain to import games, records and comics to your save file. The site did that for you if you gave it a DS or Wii save file (there’s 2 games), so that aided the process a bit. Either getting Wiimmfi or RiiConnect24 support with the game would be much more convenient and cool.
In mid-June, I emailed Difegue again, and mentioned we could partner up. The games weren’t imported yet because his server had some storage problems. He thought many people weren’t interested in WarioWare DIY anymore. The collection of Nintendo WFC MIOs were imported shortly after, which in total consisted of hundreds of thousands of games, records and comics.
I thought about making the games be addable using the NinSoft Store, but there would be some reverse engineering we need to do. If you use Wiimmfi on the Wii or DS, you can get the NinSoft Store exclusive games just like you could do back in the day.
For the DS, there’s a Warehouse feature, where you can store only 2 games, records and comics each. It’s kind of broken with Wiimmfi right now, most games don’t show up when one of your friends open your crates.
I had the best idea, and the easiest one too. How about we use Wii Mail with RiiConnect24! It only works on the Wii, but you can send or receive games from people you added as Wii Friends.
I got Difegue to talk to me on Discord (the most convenient way of talking) instead of using email, so we could discuss things faster.
Instead of making an API to interface with the Wii Mail server, I made Difegue a Wii Mail account so he can access the mail server directly. After some hard work, Difegue was able to make micrograme receive on the Wii! He used some scattered documentation on the Internet to figure out how it works, and made 2 blog posts:
I don’t know many websites that are built with Java, but since bobmcjr’s original save file editor uses Java, it makes sense.
So, this was pretty awesome, you could add games, records, and comics to your cart on the site. You register DoujinSoft’s Wii Number found on the site, and it would register you back. Then you enter your Wii Number to send the content to your Wii!
The next step was to do the opposite, send games, records and comics from your Wii to DoujinSoft. That went smoothly, and anything you eent gets added. It’s not like people send that much content to DoujinSoft, but it’s easier than for Difegue to manually add the content.
The person who submitted that (BowzasaurusRex) said he was just testing if it worked.
One more feature is in WarioWare DIY Showcase (that’s the name of the Wii version, by the way). It’s the Survey Box! Another Wii- exclusive feature, you check out a game, record or comic, and then rate it on a scale of 5 stars and add a comment. That gets sent over Wii Mail, of course.
A page on DoujinSoft was added to display the survey ratings. Because of the way it works, it can’t be directly linked to the game to show the scores (the survey message just sends the title of the game, which displays differently than the save file editor does). So they’re just dumped on the page. Not as useful, but it’s nice to have.
I announced this on RiiConnect24, and some people were interested. I also found a page made by a person by the name cyanu, which had a collection of microgames. It’s on Itch. I saw it had a tutorial on how to import games into the save file, and it was beautiful. It had nice graphics. I was like “how am I gonna talk to cyanu?”
A few minutes later, I found a YouTube video with a Discord invite to a server named SquishyWare, owned by someone by the name of Squishy_Pixelz. cyanu was there. Cool! Someone made a server for WarioWare DIY (unlike the other WarioWare Discord, which focuses on everything WarioWare).
I told them about what we’ve done, and they were amazed and I soon got moderator on the server (I had moderator on the WarioWare Discord server, too). What a cool server! I told everyone in RiiConnect24 about it, and some people in SquishyWare, including cyanu, installed RiiConnect24 on their Wii.
This is one of the coolest partnerships we’ve ever done with RiiConnect24, and I’m glad I got to stitch together a community. SquishyWare isn’t the official name of the server anymore, and cyanu is working on bringing some N64DD content in the server.
I want people who originally used Nintendo WFC to find their old content they might have forgotten about and maybe lost. The site is also beautiful, it uses Materialize CSS, the same framework we use for the RiiConnect24 site.
2 RiiConnect24 developers had some ideas. shutterbug2000 wanted to start contests in the NinSoft Store again, and bendevnull wanted to make a Discord bot for DoujinSoft.
By the way, you can listen to records and read comics online. I worked hard to bring the sound font used in WarioWare DIY to be used in the records played online (they’re converted to MIDI and played with a JavaScript library). At the time of this writing, there’s still a little more work I need to do with it.
Difegue also has a project to read Manga online. I don’t read manga, but you might want to check it out.
If you have a site that can be integrated with Wii Mail for RiiConnect24, please tell us! This is the first thing where Wii Mail is used by an actual service.
