Hacking Question about Wii U Emulation

neobrain

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You heard it here folks. It's unreasonable to assume that you'll be able to play a Wii U emulator any time soon. (For those who don't know, neobrain is a contributor to dolphin)

Apparently I wasn't being entirely clear: I wasn't ruling out Wii U emulation entirely, but just Wii U emulation as being part of Dolphin.
 
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TecXero

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Someone said it requires 3.0GHz to perfectly emulate snes?
I'm sorry to say WRONG! I perfectly emulate snes on my DSTWO
And even with the internal CPU inside the DSTWO conbined with the DSI CPU, I really doubt it gives 3.0GHz, I even doubt it gives 1.0GHz
Here's a bit of a dumbed down explanation: Cycle perfect emulation is incredibly taxing. It wouldn't surprise me if you needed a PC with that powerful of a CPU if you're using pure LLE. Most emulators use shortcuts and HLE, sacrificing accuracy for speed, using hacks and ROM specific patches to compensate for the lack of accuracy. They're generally perfectly playable, but not perfect. You should probably read up on emulation and how it works before making comments that come off as rather arrogant.
 
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DarkFlare69

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Yeah, we said it won't happen, ever.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------



It's not about focus, it's because adding Wii U emulation to Dolphin is (for various reasons) about as sensible as adding Wii U emulation to LibreOffice.
Not really. Dolphin is the only good Gcn emulator. It's the only goodnWii emulator. Why not continue this and make it the only good Wii U emulator?
 

TecXero

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Not really. Dolphin is the only good Gcn emulator. It's the only goodnWii emulator. Why not continue this and make it the only good Wii U emulator?
Because that would be a lot of work. It would probably be just as much work to just make a separate emulator, maybe a bit less so you don't have to worry about breaking things Wii/NGC side. Just because they use similar architectures doesn't mean they aren't very different. The Wii U, while being built upon the Wii, is still a very different beast. It wouldn't surprise me if some components from Dolphin are used, if a serious Wii U emulation project pops up, though.
 

DarkFlare69

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Because that would be a lot of work. It would probably be just as much work to just make a separate emulator, maybe a bit less so you don't have to worry about breaking things Wii/NGC side. Just because they use similar architectures doesn't mean they aren't very different. The Wii U, while being built upon the Wii, is still a very different beast. It wouldn't surprise me if some components from Dolphin are used, if a serious Wii U emulation project pops up, though.
I never said it'd be easy. But i can see your points
 

TecXero

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I never said it'd be easy. But i can see your points
In the end, just treat it as a separate console. It is a lot more different than the Wii than the Wii was to the NGC. It would almost be like lumping PS3 and Xbox 360 together just because they use similar architecture. Big emphasis on almost.
 

Noctosphere

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Read : http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/...-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/
I understand what all these guys who say "perfect" are coming from, I also was one of those who misunderstood the meaning of "perfect emulation", infact I also misunderstood what an "emulator" means :D

By perfect emulation, I supose you mean "Having exactly the same experience as I was playing on the console AND playing at 60FPS", right?
Well, for I, Perfect emulation doesn't mean 60fps but 25 fps or more. The human eyes frame rate... you know?
 

The Real Jdbye

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By perfect emulation, I supose you mean "Having exactly the same experience as I was playing on the console AND playing at 60FPS", right?
Well, for I, Perfect emulation doesn't mean 60fps but 25 fps or more. The human eyes frame rate... you know?
Perfect emulation means every game runs exactly the same as on the real hardware, even including bugs that were also on the original hardware.
A better term is 100% accurate emulation. Without that, some games will always have differences when compared to the original hardware and in some cases they are gamebreaking because they either rely on quirks of the original console, or the emulator fails to implement certain things the game expects.
If you read the entire thing you will understand.
 
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Noctosphere

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So... it's fake?
This wii u emulator is most probably fake.
However, my preview software allowing you to play game before their release isn't
look I play Rise of the Tomb Raider right now :
http://imgur.com/mqa8xkb
All you have to do is fill 3 survey or get a premium membership for 25$
 
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Ericzander

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So... it's fake?
It's as real as my PS4 emulator.

Okay, I'm going to try to drop the sneakiness and just be blunt. People... Don't get your hopes up. If you want to play Wii U games, get a Wii U. There isn't a Wii U emulator and if there WAS you wouldn't be able to run it at anything close to a playable speed (I'm not talking 20fps. I'm talking like 5 or less.)
 

epicmartin7

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It's as real as my PS4 emulator.

Okay, I'm going to try to drop the sneakiness and just be blunt. People... Don't get your hopes up. If you want to play Wii U games, get a Wii U. There isn't a Wii U emulator and if there WAS you wouldn't be able to run it at anything close to a playable speed (I'm not talking 20fps. I'm talking like 5 or less.)
I do know that modern technology besides a military supercomputer probably would never be able to run Wii U games near perfect. So it's not really surprising that this could potentially be fake of course, but yet again, who really knows at this point. I'm just going to go back to my wait and see approach. We'll see if they release anything in the next couple of days or not. If it does get a release, it'll be nothing more than a 5 fps tech demo at best. It'll still be definitely cool to see though.
 
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Noctosphere

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By the way, I heard it requires about 10 time the specs of the console to emulate it, but I have a question about specs :
It's about CPU cores. How does it works to compare them?
Wii u is tri-core 1.24 GHz
My pc is 4Core 3.4 GHz
If I want to compare them, should I proceed that way?
Wii U : 1.24 x 3 = 3.72 GHz
My PC : 3.40 x 4 = 13.6GHz
So, my pc cpu isn't 10 times more powerful than wii u but 3.66 times
 

Exzap

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How long's it been worked on/how many people are working on it? Exjam and co have been working on their repo for a while, but it's mainly been just two people working on it in their free time.
I initiated the project about 2 years ago, but counting away all the weeks inbetween where nothing happend the effective development time is about 6 months. Right now, I am the only developer on the project, although I had help in the past from two friends. There are plans to recruit more long-term members in the future.

Very cool. Are you going with HLE or LLE? Did you need to implement IOSU?
HLE for all the Wii U libraries and the PPC Cafe OS kernel. As a result, IOSU emulation is not necessary. We decided for this approach because it's easier and more visible when progress is made. Somewhere down the line we may move away from HLE where possible.

palantine said:
Why keep the development closed?
In short, I believe the project does not profit from being open-sourced. Not at this stage at least. We are trying to take a different approach which will hopefully lead to more speedy development. I'll share more details in the future. At present, getting the emulator ready for the release is the top priority.

palantine said:
Did you base it off Dolphin or start from scratch?
Started from scratch since there isn't really anything that could have been reused. The only reusable component would be the PPC interpreter, but for this I used my own PPC interpreter from a different unreleased emulator project (this interpreter is based on PearPC, but was completely rewritten. iirc Dolphins interpreter has a similar history?)

palantine said:
Was implementing SMP difficult?
It's there but has not really had any noticeable implications so far. At this stage we use 1 thread to emulate all three cores. Changing it to one thread per core shouldn't be too difficult. The shared core clock timer might be annoying to emulate, but thats about it. Everything else is abstracted away inside API functions. I have yet to encounter any game which relies on accurate cache behavior.

Just curious, is it possible for you to capture footage of the emulator running?
I recorded some footage early September. I uploaded it here. There are a lot more graphical glitches compared to the current build. Also, speed was increased to 30 FPS. The original capture ran at 5-8 FPS.
 

The Real Jdbye

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By the way, I heard it requires about 10 time the specs of the console to emulate it, but I have a question about specs :
It's about CPU cores. How does it works to compare them?
Wii u is tri-core 1.24 GHz
My pc is 4Core 3.4 GHz
If I want to compare them, should I proceed that way?
Wii U : 1.24 x 3 = 3.72 GHz
My PC : 3.40 x 4 = 13.6GHz
So, my pc cpu isn't 10 times more powerful than wii u but 3.66 times
To be honest, more cores doesn't help a whole lot when it comes to emulation, you can separate the emulation between cores to some degree, but two CPU cores still have to be emulated on two CPU cores, due to synchronization. You can't just make something use more CPU cores than it was designed for, since the game is not designed to run certain tasks simultaneously (multithreaded apps/games have to specifically take this into account to avoid crashes)
You can emulate other hardware on another core, given that you take the proper precautions to keep the threads synchronized so as to avoid crashes due to threads trying to access things at the same time or otherwise not matching up to the real hardware well enough that games will still work, but this will limit the performance increase, so that async audio for example will only give a small performance increase.
 
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Noctosphere

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To be honest, more cores doesn't help a whole lot when it comes to emulation, you can separate the emulation between cores to some degree, but two CPU cores still have to be emulated on two CPU cores, due to synchronization. You can't just make something use more CPU cores than it was designed for, since the game is not designed to run certain tasks simultaneously (multithreaded apps/games have to specifically take this into account to avoid crashes)
You can emulate other hardware on another core, given that you take the proper precautions to keep the threads synchronized so as to avoid crashes due to threads trying to access things at the same time or otherwise not matching up to the real hardware well enough that games will still work, but this will limit the performance increase, so that async audio for example will only give a small performance increase.
mmmh... not sure to be sure to understand so tell me if i understand...
two cores doesnt mean double CPU power but double performence.
for example, emulating snes requires 3GHz. i dont know if what about to say is right but its just for example. so 3GHz for snes would mean :
800mhz for models
1000mhz for textures
500mhz for audio
600mhz for AI & scripting
100mhz for other things
if this is for a monocore cpu, would it means that on a dualcore cpu it would be 400mhz for models or it would mean that each Hz used by the 800 mhz for model generation can be used for one more thing, like 800mhz for models so textures would then requires 200 more mhz?
honnestly i'm not sure to understand how cores works. but i was sure before that if you want to compare 2 diffent cpu, like a tetracore 3,4ghz and an hexacore 3,2ghz, you have to proceed with this operation so you would know which one is the most performant :
#ghz x #core = performance
for example, the tetracore 3,4ghz would have a performance of 13,6 and the hexacore 3,2ghz, 19,2
so the hexacore 3,2ghz is better than the other
 

The Real Jdbye

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mmmh... not sure to be sure to understand so tell me if i understand...
two cores doesnt mean double CPU power but double performence.
for example, emulating snes requires 3GHz. i dont know if what about to say is right but its just for example. so 3GHz for snes would mean :
800mhz for models
1000mhz for textures
500mhz for audio
600mhz for AI & scripting
100mhz for other things
if this is for a monocore cpu, would it means that on a dualcore cpu it would be 400mhz for models or it would mean that each Hz used by the 800 mhz for model generation can be used for one more thing, like 800mhz for models so textures would then requires 200 more mhz?
honnestly i'm not sure to understand how cores works. but i was sure before that if you want to compare 2 diffent cpu, like a tetracore 3,4ghz and an hexacore 3,2ghz, you have to proceed with this operation so you would know which one is the most performant :
#ghz x #core = performance
for example, the tetracore 3,4ghz would have a performance of 13,6 and the hexacore 3,2ghz, 19,2
so the hexacore 3,2ghz is better than the other
Well, in your example most of those things would run on a single CPU core. Models and textures would be handled by the GPU obviously and audio might be on a separate CPU core, if using async audio. So at most two CPU cores would be used.
More than two cores at that point would make zero difference because the emulator wouldn't be able to use them anyway.

A 3 core CPU emulated on a 6 core CPU would never use more than 3 cores otherwise it would cause all kinds of issues with the emulation, so the extra cores are useless in that case unless being used for something else like sound emulation or emulating other parts of the hardware. This is simply because a program that is designed to run on 3 CPU cores cannot be made to run on more cores reliably even with emulation. It could be made to run on less, but it couldn't be made to run on more. A program has to be made to run on multiple cores because everything has to be tightly synchronized otherwise all kinds of issues can occur.
 
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