From my experimentation and other posts it appears that Gecko OS on a non-US Wii will boot Rock Band, but the USB peripherals (guitar, drums) do not work. They do not get allocated a controller ID.
This post here -
http://www.tipidpc.com/viewitem.php?iid=2100253
Shows somebody who has gone through the pain already -
[INDENT]The Game has a Built-In Updater which
installs HID USB drivers for the Wireless Guitar and the Wired Drum Set.
Without running the Update, the Guitar and the Drum Set wont be detected
in the game at all! The update cannot be installed on a Japanese Wii since
it will result to bricking the Wii console (reported by someone in the
Chinese Wii Forum). The update can only be installed on U.S. Version
Wiis with firmware 3.1 or above.[/INDENT]
From what I know from only about two hours worth of research so far, I see three possible ways to get Rock Band to work on a non-US Wii:
[LIST=1]
- Update Gecko OS to either allow HID USB controllers - there are three possible ways to do this:
- hack the driver that is included in Rock Band and include it in Gecko OS (against the Gecko OS philosophy?)
- reverse engineer the driver and create a new one from scratch (ouch!)
- recognise the attempted patch and transform it to one that will work on the Wii's firmware
- wait until the PAL Rock Band is released, take the patch from this version and apply it when the US Rock Band attempts to patch (I am using the Australian Wii not Japanese)
- Use Menu Loader (http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Menu_Loader) to Boot the Wii with a US IOS version and region free patch that will allow the Rock Band patch to be applied successfully at run time
- Use Starfall (http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_apps/Starfall) to change your Wii into a US Wii for good, then load all of your non-US games using region free (instead of the other way around) ... is this what Starfall does? It's a bit confusing to me.
Starfall will only work with System Menu v290 or v289 and I'm past that already so it's no use to me.
I wonder if the Menu Loader theory would work??
Update to my post ... Yep! Menu Loader works great.
I used Menu Loader to select "Region Free Mode for Discs" (I also selected IOS 30 but I don't think that matters), ran it up (it reboots to the system menu), and lo and behold when you run Rock Band as per normal (from the game channel which will now run it) you get drums and guitar! W00t! Watch out Australia, the US Rock Band has landed on your unmodified Wii! Well my one anyway.