Sunday, March 28, 2010

We have video emulation on DeSmuME Wii now

We were very very very very very very very very very very close to this for the longest time. Scanff of WiiRadio and Bash the Castle fame found the problem. We now have video emulation from NDS ROMs on our port of DeSmuME to the Wii. At this point we've only tested some of the most basic homebrew ROMs available. More information and prolly pictures or a video soon.

Btw, yes, Im back from vacation now (I will be back on IRC later today). It was truly great. Coming back and seeing the progress made on porting DeSmuME to the Wii while I was gone is simply breath taking. I'm thrilled to be able to start working on it again =)

Update: In comments, profetylen claims that the sound emulation intentionally disabled in the SVN works when enabled. I can not confirm this at the moment.

Update 2: Apparently, some people reporting on this story fail at using the emulator and are saying things causing a lot of uneducated comments along the lines of "dis is fake it no worky!!!!!!12". To reiterate, most ROMs are NOT going to work right now. However, quite a few already do. Here is a picture of the DS homebrew ROM FileNinja running on DeSmuME Wii:
FileNinja Running on Wii

16 comments:

  1. Wow I didn't expect to see progress so fast.
    Keep up the good work! ^^

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  2. Glad to hear your vacation went well. I was just as shocked as you were when scanff announced he'd fixed the video. Major progress there. I've tested 3 homebrews and 1 commercial game, and 2 of the homebrew games ran with (almost) no problems. The commercial rom was running, but had a ton of graphical glitches and crashed the program after getting to the "press start" screen. Regardless, this is major progress. Thumbs up to you guys!

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  3. What commercial ROM did you try? Sounds like it might be useful for debugging.

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  4. The smallest sized game I could find. An indie game called "LOL"(#2361). My guess is that it might have crashed because of an attempt to load wifi, but it still loaded fine up to that point aside from the graphics being a mess.

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  5. @TehSepp: What? Hadn't the DS homebrew graphical glitches (colors really messed up)?

    BTW we've got sound too (Pretty good sound. I couln't differ it from the sound the PC version of DeSmuME). Its just disabled on the svn. (Change it in main().)

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  6. @Profetylen: The homebrews are a little messed up with the colors, but other than that running fine. I've tried the two listed on the svn ("FileNinja" and "SpaceInvaders") and an ms-paint clone called "Colors". The first two run so-so with a few graphical errors and slow fps. The later won't boot at all.

    As for commercial roms... "LOL" has the above mentioned issue, and I've just tried another game called "Sudokudo" (#1072) which is having issues with the backup memory commands and stalling when auto-detect kicks in.

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  7. Forgot to mention, those are the only commercial roms I own that I believe are small enough to be loaded at the moment... However, I am trying to *cough*download*cough* get more to test with.

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  8. Profetylen: I fixed a lot of graphical errors just by compiling with updated libs =)

    TehSeph: Thanks. BTW, have you tried conmpilling with devkitPPC release 21?

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  9. No, I'm still on 19. I wasn't aware there was an update. I'll update now. Also, which libs did you update to fix the graphical errors?

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  10. SDL. I was on a terribly outdated version. I fixed a handful but not all of them for me.

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  11. A bit off-topic...

    http://www.wii-info.fr/news.htm

    Scroll about 1/3 down the page. It's amazing that news get out fast even without promotion.

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  12. LOL wow. Wonder what will happen when I post a small video later today on youtube (need to find moar roms that work -- and also need to do minor emulator clean up).

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  13. I think the video may be necessary since some people can't figure out how to get it to work despite how its really not hard at all :/

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  14. Arikado,

    I just tried the Zelda Twilight Princess demo which boots fine. I think it would be fitting to create a video using this game don't you think :)

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  15. Hello, I've been working with DSemume code on PC some time ago and just saw your project that picked my interest.

    I had something to ask though: you know that in this state, even if you manage to make video/sound working on Wii, this is NEVER going to run any commercial game fast enough (2D or 3D), right ? You would need to drop off the slow & lazy SDL engine and recode everything for the Wii graphic/sound hardware and use dynamic recompilation for CPU emulation (or use the Wii ARM cpu if it is possible ?), pretty much like the ones that ported Mupen64 to the Wii did (but even with that, i still doubt the Wii is powerful enough to run DSemume, just look at the specs required on PC), not mentionning handling big NDS roms will soon become problematic due to limited RAM.

    Please note that I do not want to discourage you (I find this great that developpers get their hand on emulator porting) but I think this had to be said.

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  16. Yes, we're in the process of removing all SDL from the project, we realized this very early on. However, even with SDL, we can run all homebrew games tried so far at full speed (because the devkitARM SDK small and perfect)

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