Are those games distributed as Wii titles rather than Wii U?
I'd imagine that you can't actually play anything exclusive to the Wii U virtual console.
I'm not sure how it works technically under the hood. I got Paper Mario as a ".wad" file instead of the normal .iso that you see for GC/Wii/WiiU games, and Dolphin was able to load the .wad file.
Shall I assume you didn't copy it from your Wii U console? if you downloaded it from somewhere, it probably was the original Wii version.
Ah, you are probably right, my mistake. Unfortunately I can't edit my original comment now. I was under the impression it was a Wii U file since I downloaded it from a reddit link I found that said it was a Wii U Virtual Console title. But, doing some research it was also released for the original Wii VC at some point, so it's likely that's where the file came from.
My understanding is that `wad`s are specifically for the Wii (and Google seems to back me up on that), so regardless of where they got it from the fact that it was a `wad` means they were playing the Wii version. If it was an actual Wii U version it would be some other format.
I never knew that! This project is just so well done. Always amazing to find out new features.
Actually I may have been mistaken. Paper Mario was also released for Wii Virtual Console (not exclusively Wii U) so I may have downloaded that one.
The Wii U Virtual Console games only run on the Wii U.