I’m finally getting around to modded my Wii after recently getting an external hard drive. I have quite a large game collection, so it’s taking me quite a while to get them all ready to transfer to the hard drive. I’m not sure what options I have for sorting the games in the loader yet. For reference, initially I prefer USB Loader GX, but I haven’t used either of them enough to commit to it.

Specifically, I’m wondering how I can get the games to display in the order I want. For example, I want Skyward Sword to display alphabetically in the L section. If I understand correctly, WiiTDB’s titles.txt file would sort it under “T” for “The Legend of Zelda.” I assume the solution to this is to simply create an entry in custom-titles.txt that overrides that entry and name it something like “Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword” instead.

Here I want to get into the nitty gritty details that I really wanted to ask about. First, is there a 1:1 link between the game title shown in the loader and the sort order or is there a way to separate the two? For example, let’s take the Skylanders games that I want to display in the following order:

Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure
Skylanders: Giants
Skylanders: Swap Force
Skylanders: Trap Team
Skylanders: SuperCharger Racing

They are sorted alphabetically as follows:

Skylanders: Giants
Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure
Skylanders: SuperCharger Racing
Skylanders: Swap Force
Skylanders: Trap Team

Normally I would handle this by just adding a number before the colon, e.g. “Skylanders 1: Spyro’s Adventure”. Is there a way to make this an invisible sort title so that the game still shows up as “Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure” or will the loading screen show the exact title I enter? For example, could I change the folder name to change the sort order while using custom-titles.txt to set the display name? I assume that whatever I enter in the text file is used for both display and sorting and the folder name is irrelevant aside from the required game ID, but is this correct?

Second, let’s say I change my mind about a title after I’ve already created my .wbfs file and organized my collection. I go in and change my custom-titles.txt file. As far as I know, that title has no effect on the .wbfs file at all, assuming I don’t check any of the boxes in the Wii Backup Manager that would change the header. However, the title is used in the folder name. Do I need to update the folder name to the new title so the loader can recognize it correctly? Or is it enough that the game ID still matches?