Handful of Updates

I know my last blog post got a few people interested in the specifics of what I've been up to lately so hopefully this post will answer all of those questions and more. I have some very exciting stuff to talk about :)

First on the list: I've finally gotten around to giving the main branch of DOP-Mii a true update so it should be working with all of the latest Nintendo updates. Also new: I've rewritten the boot2 install code with the help of lukegb to clear up a small controversy and updated the USB Storage code so that it is compatible with the new libogc 1.8.4. I haven't made an official release yet because I haven't put the new USB code through it's paces yet and because there are a few small changes and additions I still want to make but we are once again making progress. Sorry for the delay in getting around to it, I had handed off development duties to Lunatik and lukegb but they've both been very busy lately so it took some time for me to get back into development of it. Hopefully we should have a new official release of DOP-Mii by the end of the week.

Now onto DeSmuME Wii: Yes we are still working on it even though the SVN hasn't been very active lately. I've been working with Dancingninja to help him rewrite our 3D Renderer in pure GX (Wii video hardware calls). Even though it's not working completely yet, the speeds I am seeing now make Super Mario 64 DS and the Castlevanias more than playable. Hopefully they will remain at these speeds as the renderer is completed. Thank you very much for patience regarding this project. I would like it to have at least one major release by the time November hits.

Now onto nulldce: Nulldce is a version of the Nulldc dreamcast emulator designed to run on low power systems. About a year ago drkIIRaziel got it running on the Wii but never did anything with it beyond an initial port. A few chance IRC conversations about a week ago landed me the source code to it and I have been working very hard on it and have already made some progress. Some very well known emulator developers for Wii have recently signed on to work on it too. The project is progressing very nicely. Work now is being done towards getting it emulate accurately (getting all the colors right for example) and building a dynarec core.

Saving the best for last onto RealityBoy Wii: I promised back in August that I would get this running on the Wii eventually and as of today I'm closer than ever to finally fulfilling that promise. RealityBoy is written in ALLEGRO, a popular cross platform game programming library somewhat similar to SDL. Before developing Wii homebrew I was an ALLEGRO game programmer so I figured porting RealityBoy wouldn't be too hard. It's a painstaking, slow process but one that I've found to be rather enjoyable overall. I've done so much work toward this port that I decided I might as well just port ALLEGRO to Wii. I never considered actually 'putting my money where my mouth is' so to speak until just recently a gentleman named DarkNation was looking to port ALLEGRO to Wii so he could port his ALLEGRO based game to Wii. To make a long story short, we've each plugged in about 50 hours on the project and have some fruit to show from our labor: http://code.google.com/p/allegro-wii/ . There's a still a lot to do but the port is extremely functional. I believe it to be both my most difficult and my most important work yet. Anyone who can help out should get in touch immediately.

Lastly, before closing this post, I've gotten a few extremely generous donations this week and I wanted to say thank you. You all really help me out a lot more than you know and it truly means a great deal to me. I will be coding overtime for you all.