Usb Loader Gx Dolphin
Malene Mederios
In my fstab I have three nfs mounts declared (they refer to some NAS shares). If the NAS is not started / available, then launching Dolphin results in having a non-responsive and useless window - no matter how long I waited, Dolphin was not becoming usable, so I had to kill it (waited more than 30 min after freshly restarting the PC).
I clearly remember this not being the case up until March - April this year. Then, not having the NAS available resulted just in empty folders at the mount point - that was the normal behavior - and no delays at all.
I was sifting through the KDE bugs and I found a gem: #451876 - bloated user-places.xbel causes poor performing dolphin, file open dialogs, gvenview, krusader and other apps .
I immediately tested how that might work for me - and, surprise, I got from a very lazy/sluggish Dolphin to a speedy one.
After cleaning the user-places.xbel file, everything is fine while the nfs mounts are available, but as soon as the NAS is not available, even after a fresh start of the system, Dolphin will take its time when navigating to any local folder.
So, there are clearly two different reasons for slow Dolphin:
I wonder what in KDE has been causing it all this time, or whether it was a different system component doing it: The only obvious change is an upgrade from Kernel 6.9.0 to 6.9.2, if it was the kernel the fix happened in 6.9.1 or 6.9.2. The switch from Plasma 5 to 6 was a few weeks back but even then the issue continued until today.
In the early eighties, I, with others, walked along a Pacific beach late one afternoon on our way to an intertidal wilderness some miles south. At dusk, we saw a dark form in the sand above the tideline. We approached the form to discover it was a stranded dolphin. Her skin was dry and printed raw with the pattern of a gill net. The look in her eyes was one of total resignation.
The women in our party gathered and with enormous effort began to move her back into the surf. But, after a few moments of freedom in the water, again she stranded. Repeatedly, we swam her into deeper waters, and the final time we did this, her full weight, caught in a wave, broke the leg of one of my friends.
By this time, it was dark, and so the dolphin rested on shore while we passed the night keeping her skin wet with seawater and breathing with her. In the meantime, my friend with the broken leg was carried to the car and taken to a local hospital to have her leg set.
The sand company owner was somehow convinced by the intensity of our concern, and said yes, when I asked if he would help us move the dolphin from the shoreline to my VW bus, which we were setting up to receive her.
Returning to the dolphin, I rode in the huge shovel of the front-loader. From on high in this steel cradle, I looked down at the dying dolphin and meditating women by her side. The contrast between the roar of the machine and the silence holding the dying creature was hard to reconcile.
As I was being lowered to the sand, I was wrenched by a strong spasm of doubt. Enough of the heroism, I thought. But we did it anyway. We moved the dolphin from her sandy bed to a nearby aquarium where she died a short time later.
Later, some of us saw her moving listlessly in the dolphin tank we had brought her to. In our guts, we sensed this was not a good outcome, even though she was alive when we left. It felt off, very off. But what to do? Could we, like Basho who walked by the baby, walk past this creature dying slowly in the sand?
I think that many of us go to the wilds to discover who we really are. That is why we found ourselves on that remote beach. There we saw the unstudied growth and flow of kelp, the boiling of clouds above our heads, the pink skies of early morning, and a gray gull flying in the wind. There also was birth and death. This is not the anthropocentric world of human dominance or a world without death, but a biotic community where we share a world with all species, including dolphin and seal, and we also share a common vulnerability.
This page explains how to rip GameCube and Wii games and/or saves to be used on Dolphin. Ripping games and saves using a Wii or Wii U console will require you to have homebrew software installed. See Homebrew Channel for instructions on how to use it, and see Homebrew setup for installation instructions. The term "vWii" means a Wii U console running in Wii mode.
GameCube discs always have a size of 1.36 GiB, so the entire ISO can fit on a FAT or FAT32 drive. Simply follow the instructions on-screen and you'll be able to put the game straight from the SD card or USB drive into Dolphin.
In order to rip a Wii disc, a storage device with more than 4.38 GiB of free space is recommended for single layer, 7.93 GiB for dual layer. However, by dividing the disc into chunks, an SD card with even a single gibibyte of free space is sufficient.
A disc image in split parts will need to be joined before dolphin can read it. A simple command from command prompt and terminal can do it! Use the example command for your system. Use the "cd" command to change directory to the file's location. The example command assumes CleanRip's "GAMEID.part#.iso" filename nomenclature, and creates "GAMEID.iso". The part files can be deleted after the joined file is created.
A Wii or vWii with the latest version of USB Loader GX and certain cIOS (such as d2x-cios) installed can rip Wii game discs. The Wii system may also be able to rip GameCube game discs as long as DIOS MIOS is installed. Wiis sold after late 2011 and Wii Us lack the GameCube controller and memory card ports, and can make no use of DIOS MIOS. CleanRip is recommended over USB Loader GX for not requiring any cIOS and it does not leave out any data when ripping (USB Loader GX leaves out unused data).
In order to turn a channel installed on a Wii or vWii into a WAD file that can be played in Dolphin, follow this guide. When asked if you want to fakesign the ticket or TMD, you should press B. (Most fakesigned WAD files do work in Dolphin, but they don't work better than correctly signed WAD files, and Dolphin may show warnings about them.)
Alternatively, if you do not want to use WAD files, you can copy the whole NAND memory of a console into Dolphin by following the NAND Usage Guide. This not only copies all channels that are installed on the console, but afterwards, you can also transfer channels between the console and Dolphin by using an SD card and the Wii Menu's data management screen.
Download GameCube/Wii Memory Manager (GCMM for short) and launch it through Homebrew Channel on the Wii. It's a homebrew app that can transfer save files between a real GameCube Memory Card and an SD card. It can extract an individual save as .GCI file or dump the entire contents (RAW or batch dump .GCI files) from a real memory card to the root of SD card. For the purpose of this guide you should extract what you need for Dolphin onto the SD card. Then they should be placed into \GC\ for Dolphin to use while emulating a game. It is also possible for the data that was created with Dolphin to be added back into the real GameCube Memory Card using GCMM and an SD card.
Download SaveGame Manager GX and launch it through Homebrew Channel on the Wii or vWii. It's a homebrew app that can transfer save files between the console's internal storage and an SD card. It can extract an individual save from the Wii's internal storage for Dolphin to use. Like GCMM, it is possible for save files that were created in Dolphin to be added back to the Wii by selecting the game in Dolphin to export the Wii save into a X:\private\wii\[GAMEID] format, then adding it back into the real console's NAND using SaveGame Manager GX and an SD card.
ScarCruft, also known as APT37 or Reaper, is an espionage group that has been operating since at least 2012. It primarily focuses on South Korea, but other Asian countries also have been targeted. ScarCruft seems to be interested mainly in government and military organizations, and companies in various industries linked to the interests of North Korea.
In 2021, ScarCruft conducted a watering-hole attack on a South Korean online newspaper focused on North Korea. The attack consisted of multiple components, including an Internet Explorer exploit and shellcode leading to a backdoor named BLUELIGHT, reported by Volexity and Kaspersky.
While the BLUELIGHT backdoor performs basic reconnaissance and evaluation of the compromised machine after exploitation, Dolphin is more sophisticated and manually deployed only against selected victims. Both backdoors are capable of exfiltrating files from a path specified in a command, but Dolphin also actively searches drives and automatically exfiltrates files with extensions of interest to ScarCruft.
The analysis is based on the first version of the backdoor that we found, 1.9 (based on a string found in the code) with additional information about changes in newer versions. A summarized description of the version changes can be found in the Dolphin evolution section.
The installer downloads a CAB file from OneDrive, containing a legitimate Python 2.7 interpreter. The CAB is unpacked to %APPDATA%, and depending on architecture, the interpreter ends up in one of the following directories:
Dolphin is a backdoor that collects information and executes commands issued by its operators. The backdoor is a regular Windows executable, written in C++. It communicates with Google Drive cloud storage, which is used as its C&C server.
The backdoor periodically checks and creates its own persistence by making sure that Step 1 of the loader is run every time the system is started, via a registry Run value, in the same way as in the installer:
Among regular drives, Dolphin also searches portable devices such as smartphones, using the Windows Portable Device (WPD) API. It creates directory listings and exfiltrates files. This functionality appeared to be under development in the first version we found, for several reasons:
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