Game:

Mario Kart Wii (2008)

Duration: 0:00

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10

This video showcases a custom Special Ghost that I manually injected into the game's save data.

The console first displays the Special Ghost icon in the Mario Kart Channel's Home Menu banner, and once inside the Mario Kart Channel, the message "Special Ghost data is available" appears in the notification button. Clicking on it takes you to the Worldwide rankings of the course the Special Ghost was played at. Special Ghosts are stored as downloaded ghosts, nothing happens when you actually beat them.

Special Ghosts were originally sent out by Nintendo, alongside a letter, via WiiConnect24 to Wiis. The premise was to send ghosts played by people who appeared in commercials from the game.
Check out this playlist for more information:    • Mario Kart Wii - Special Ghosts  

In this video, I inserted my own Special Ghost from scratch, which involved doing the following:
Store a downloaded ghost RKG in the save file with the RKG type set to 5 (special ghost).
Have a special ghost entry defined in the wc24dl.vff file. This tells the game how many special ghosts are saved, and other things such as its finish time, the course played, and its Mii data.

This all was possible thanks to a wc24dl.vff file I recently was able to obtain that included a "distmap.bin" file of the maximum size allowed (0xBC00 bytes). You can download the save file I used on the links below.
My assumption is that the game would have downloaded the current iteration of the wc24dl.vff file via WiiConnect24 (and alternatively via the "Download latest data" option in the Mario Kart Channel), and then, besides the competition data, it would have downloaded the Special Ghost list in said file. Then, the Special Ghost icon would show up in the rankings, and clicking on it would have prompted the game to connect to Nintendo WFC to download the actual ghost RKG into the save file.

Note that, in order for the game to recognise the data, it must load the wc24dl.vff file. To do so, make sure to have an active Internet connection on the Wii, parental controls disabled, read the EULA and have WiiConnefct24 enabled. If you don't want ot do any of that, you can also force the game into loading wc24dl.vff by using the following Gecko code: https: //mariokartwii.com/showthread.php?tid=2416

=== Other info ===
In the save file below, the following addresses correspond to this information:
==== wc24dl.vff ====
0x9050: Special Ghost list (More info: https ://wiki.tockdom.com/wiki/Distmap.bin#Special_Ghost_List)
0x1E10: Offset (relative to the start of distmap.bin, which in this case is offset 0x1620) to the Special Ghost list.
0x1E14: Size of the Special Ghost list.

==== rksys.dat ====
0x78000: Special Ghost RKG file
0x26AE0: Special Ghost ID List. In order to display the icon in the Home Menu, the special ghost ID found in its entry from wc24dl.vff must not already be on this list. Otherwise, it will be treated as "already received", and so the icon won't be displayed.

=== Links ===
More info on Special Ghosts: https ://tcrf.net/User:B_squo#About_Mario_Kart_Wii.27s_Special_Ghosts
rksys.dat File Format: https: //wiki.tockdom.com/wiki/Rksys.dat
distmap.bin File Format: https ://wiki.tockdom.com/wiki/Distmap.bin
You can download the save file I used on this video here (PAL): https ://drive.google.com/file/d/1MHfW8GhnkdZi8TFQ2olNzaukHVJQQCbx/view?usp=drive_link

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