Sunday, October 10, 2010

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.

12 comments:

  1. DeSmuME and NullDCe are going to be amazing.

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  2. I'm glad dop-mii original is making a come back.

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  3. i love the ds but i dont want to play on my computer with desmu. so i want to play them on my wii! please finish your desmu version fast!!

    i am gonning to donate as well. but before ill donate, could you tell me what kind of amount the others donated to you?

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  4. @Third Anonymous
    Thanks a lot! Please feel free to wait as long as you want for donating (like until DeSmuME is running faster for example). I've been donated to in amounts ranging from a 1 USD all the way up to $50 USD Average amount seems to be $5 USD.

    Also, we're really hoping a new release of desmume that fixes 3d speed for most games in early november. We've got 90% of it done but the last 10% is really difficult :/ (and im super busy with college lately)

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  5. I'm so excited to hear about progress being made on DesmumeWii, this is by far the most anticipated release for me.

    But when you say playable, could you give a percentage.??

    Again thanks for all your efforts on porting DesmumeWii.
    I really cant wait to play my DS games fullspeed on my TV.

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  6. As it stands 3D games are running about as fast as 2D games now as we've rewritten 3D rendering engine the same way we did for the 2D one (all in pure GX). So the castlevanias and super mario 64 and many others are at about 80-90% but can be pushed to 100% with frameskipping. Games like NSMB and metroid prime hunters are only boosted to about 60% though (max probably being 80% with frameskipping). Unfortunately not everything in our rendering engine is working yet so its possible we will see slowdown when it does. I cant say when it will be finished as its extremely difficult and we're likely to run into more problems but Im really working overtime to try and get it done and publicly released in the first week of november.

    The next (and last milestone) will be rewriting the interpreter engine (which converts DS ARM instructions to Wii PPC ones) as a dynarec engine. Coupled with are soon-to-be-done 3D renderer we truly believe that every game will be able to reach full speed.

    We will probably add a nice GUI before doing the dynarec though in order to take a break from the extremely difficult low level work.

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  7. Sounds like the Wii already runs NSMB faster than my macbook, pretty amazing how far these optimizations can go. I'm excited to find out how well Mario Kart DS and Ouendan run on this next release, I've always wanted to try playing Ouendan/EBA with a Wiimote.

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  8. Can't wait for 1st-week November then.

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  9. Hey, now that allegro is ported, does this mean we could finally see a real port of Zelda classic? This could potentially mean hours upon hours of fun since there are like a million mods for that game.

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  10. Came across your blog form the DROP MII v12 channel on a Wii 4.3U hack file.
    Having problems...
    Have been trying to install a USB loader for weeks...unsuccessfully
    On the Drop Mii I cannot seem to press A...the Wii remote goes from one solid blue light to 4 blinking
    How can I proceed?
    Help...please...you seem very knowledgeable

    bdooreck@aol.com
    Miami

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  11. Hopefully you improve the sound too.

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  12. @bdooreck
    There are so many things wrong with your comment.

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