Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Super Smash Bros. Brawl, known in Japan as Dairantō Sumasshu Burazāzu Ekkusu (大乱闘スマッシュブラザーズX), often abbreviated as SSBB or simply as Brawl, is the third installment in the Super Smash Bros. series of crossover fighting games, developed by an ad hoc development team consisting of Sora, Game Arts, and staff from other developers, and published by Nintendo for the Wii video game console.

Like its predecessors, the object of Brawl is to knock an opponent off the screen. It features a greatly expanded single-player mode known as The Subspace Emissary (SSE). This mode is a plot-driven, side-scrolling beat 'em up featuring FMV cutscenes and playable characters from the game. Like all Smash games, Brawl supports multiplayer battles with up to four combatants, but it is the first game of its franchise to feature online battles, via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

Accessing "With Friends" menu Causes FPS Drop and AlphaRead Warnings
After connecting to the Nintendo WiFi Connection, when you enter into "Brawl", "Friend roster", "Team Multi-Man Brawl" or "Home-Run Contest" sub-menus the game will suddenly drop to 1-5FPS and display "Src\PixelEngine.cpp:193 W[PE]: (r16) ALPHAREAD" errors in the Log. This is due to a known slow/problematic codepath, and can be avoided by enabling "Skip EFB access from CPU". This error only appears when interacting with Nintendo WiFi Connection menus. See.

Black Background in Indicators
When a character went out of screen, an indicator will present but there is a black background in it. There are two solutions to this problem, the first one is to disable Store EFB Copies to Texture Only in the Graphics Settings, and the second one will conceal this problem by using the code below. This also stops culling off-screen characters, noticeable when moving camera back using Free Look.

No Offscreen Indicators [Phantom Wings] 4A000000 80960F48 14000000 38000000 E0000000 80008000

Classic Mode Rectangle
After winning a stage in classic mode, the game is supposed to zoom in on the character, and then partition them off into a rectangle with the game stats around them. Depending on what backend and settings are used, the rectangle either shows nothing but a green box or shows a partial view of the character. Enabling Real XFB fixes the issue, but results in low resolution and distorted graphics.

Saving Screenshots
With EFB Copies to Texture Only, taking a screenshot with the in-game tools will no longer crash the game; but all that will be saved to the album is a garbled mess. You can fix this disabling EFB Copies to Texture Only. Or you could just use Dolphin's screenshot tool instead (default F9).

Controls
Brawl is capable of using both GameCube controllers and Wii Remotes at the same time. If you have a physical controller set to emulate both a GC Pad and a Wii Remote concurrently, the game will use both inputs and the physical controller will operate two players at the same time. To fix, disable one of the emulated controllers or move one of them to a second physical controller.

Subspace Emissary Videos
Many disc images of this game are DVD5 (4.7 GB) altered versions of the original DVD9 (8.5 GB) release. In these most of the videos are removed, resulting in black screens or the same video being repeated all the time when playing the Subspace Emissary. Following these videos, the character select screen may appear; however the names represent the characters for the next level. Dolphin cannot fix this problem; the only solution is to rip a full unaltered ISO.

Saves Not Working
On rare occasions the game will create a save but be unable to read or write to it. The exact reason why this happens is unknown. The save file is now corrupted. It should be deleted and recreated:


 * Right click on the game from Dolphin game list and select "Open Wii save folder".
 * Delete the contents within the \data\ folder.
 * Restart the game. Normally it should take several seconds to create a new save file.

Masterpieces
Attempting to load a Masterpiece will freeze the emulator, showing nothing but a black screen with FPS 0, VPS 60, and Speed 100%. As of, Masterpieces will try to load but they will kick you back to the menu instantly. Attempting to use a cheatcode to disable the timer doesn't work since the masterpiece doesn't actually load. These issues have been fixed in, but may still occur with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

NES and SNES
Texture Cache Accuracy needs to be set to Safe because sometimes the game will fail to update its frames.

NES
Store EFB Copies to Texture Only needs to be turned off because a black screen will show instead of the game.

Netplay and Revisional Differences
Disc images with different revision can and will cause desync on netplay. Highlighted changes at The Cutting Room Floor.

HD Texture Pack
Super Smash Bros. HD Retexture Project forum thread

Modding
Super Smash Bros. Brawl is unusually moddable for a console game. The gecko code "File Patch Code" created by Phantom Wings can read fan-made patches from an SD card on top of Brawl's on-disc data. These patches range from simple character skins and balance adjustments to more complex modifications such as whole additional characters and extra stages more complex than the Brawl's Stage Builder allows.

Dolphin can virtualize an SD card which is necessary for Brawl mods. For tutorial of which is available at Virtual SD Card Guide.

Revision patch for Netplay
Recommended revision: Revision 1 (MD5: d18726e6dfdc8bdbdad540b561051087)

Download the xDelta patch for your revision from below. Then use xDelta patcher to patch your disc image with the patch file for either revision depending on the revision of your disc image.

Revision 2 (MD5: 52ce7160ced2505ad5e397477d0ea4fe) - MediaFire (7.2MB)