Homebrew Wii U Linux

[Joom]

Depending on how large you scale the image and how much you wiggle the cursor around, I've seen the FPS dip to about 21 running Super Mario Bros.

It gains frames through entropy? That's always fun. Anyway, this project continues to be interesting. I'm waiting for the day that I can turn my Wii U into an Openbox thin client with Wayland.

 

[CompuCat]

Score! Video playback is technically working with smplayer, an mpv frontend. (Took forever to compile, but at least it did, unlike VLC.) It's quite slow (thanks, fbdev), but it works. I haven't tested the precompiled version, but I'm assuming it doesn't work, as it likely uses AltiVec instructions. So far I've tested 480p MPEG-2 software decoding.

EDIT: holy cow, 1080p h.264 is monumentally slow, but it works! (Better than I expected, honestly.)

EDIT 2: Testing with the null backend confirms that the Wii U definitely has enough horsepower to decode 480p MPEG-2 at full speed (it's only using about half of the available CPU time); fbdev is definitely the bottleneck here.

 

[depaul]

Thanks that looks promising. Looking forward to see the full potential of Wii U unlocked!

 

[M7L7NK7]

Would WINE ever be possible? Just wanna play rollercoaster tycoon and warcraft 2 lol

 

[CompuCat]

Nope. WINE requires that the base system still have an x86 processor; the Wii U is based off of a PowerPC chip.

 

[MrKatanaObiWan]

.

 

[Deleted member 424658]

Nope. WINE requires that the base system still have an x86 processor; the Wii U is based off of a PowerPC chip.

Wine doesn't require a x86 processor, it just needs the proper processor to run the programs. Wine was ported to Android and can run Windows ARM programs.
The reason Wine doesn't support PPC is because there's no PPC build of Windows.
Also someone wrote a tutorial for getting Wine running on PPC actually. It makes use of qemu.
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1382096

 

[CompuCat]

Fair enough-I had forgotten (thankfully) about ARM-based Windows.

I mean, you *could* use QEMU, but that's going to be horrendously slow.

 

[Gunstorm]

Hey all, here's a quick update on the state of things. I haven't been able to work much on linux-wiiu due to real life (and that's likely true for the other devs too), but Quark and I have been working on a better solution for installing Debian than finagling around with tarballs and images and all that *fun* stuff. I'm currently cleaning up the Linux side of things right now (chroot is a royal pain), and Quark's been off bug hunting in linux-loader to implement support for a few bootloader features necessary for a clean installer. (They're not features you'll see on the surface, so don't worry if nothing seems to look different.)

@depaul: regarding emulators, go ahead! I've actually been thinking about trying a few myself. GCC is throwing internal compiler errors everywhere, though, so compiling anything non-trivial from scratch is mildly annoying at best and awful at worst. Anything needing a recompiler is probably a no-go unless someone's written one for PPC, so PSX and N64 are probably out for now. You could give NES/SNES a shot...

@Joom: sadly no wireless yet. rw's the one mainly working on this; I'm not in the loop about how it's going right now. Use a USB-Ethernet adapter for now.

Hi My friends, the project stills alive?

the last activity here is about a month ago
https://gitlab.com/linux-wiiu/linux-wiiu/activity

here too https://www.reddit.com/r/WiiUHacks/...iiu_a_port_of_linux_4116_to_the_wii/?sort=new

 

[Giodude]

What am I missing. It's hanging on manufacturer: broadcom Corp. Keep in mind I can barely read the tv screen since I don't have an extra HDMI cable here so it's at 480i.

 

[uyjulian]

Hi My friends, the project stills alive?

the last activity here is about a month ago
https://gitlab.com/linux-wiiu/linux-wiiu/activity

here too https://www.reddit.com/r/WiiUHacks/...iiu_a_port_of_linux_4116_to_the_wii/?sort=new

Just because there has been no activity for a month does not mean it's dead. In fact, the last activity according to that link is 2 weeks ago.
Command line+usb ether works fine right now.

 

[M7L7NK7]

Switch Linux will probably kill it now

 

[Deleted member 424658]

Switch Linux will probably kill it now

This was publicly usable after Switch Linux was shown (iirc).

 

[Billy Acuña]

This was publicly usable after Switch Linux was shown (iirc).

Before actually:
https://twitter.com/quarktheawesome/status/964972185444954112?s=20

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

Switch Linux will probably kill it now

Here's a snippet from the catalog from my local EB games:

I'm a broke high school student. You guys have nothing to worry about there

Honestly, the reason nothing's happened for a while is kinda weird and personal. School got crazy for a week and a half, and I decided that whenever I wanted to program during that time I'd go do something else instead (the idea was to keep the focus on school). That's all finished now, but I'm having trouble getting back into it. I trained myself too well, apparently.

I do intend to keep this going though. Sorry for making it seem otherwise.

 

[markehmus]

Here's a snippet from the catalog from my local EB games:

I'm a broke high school student. You guys have nothing to worry about there

Honestly, the reason nothing's happened for a while is kinda weird and personal. School got crazy for a week and a half, and I decided that whenever I wanted to program during that time I'd go do something else instead (the idea was to keep the focus on school). That's all finished now, but I'm having trouble getting back into it. I trained myself too well, apparently.

I do intend to keep this going though. Sorry for making it seem otherwise.

i tried so hard to scroll over to the DS side of that pick

 

[M7L7NK7]

$428 preowned?? They're $449 new at Target, stupid eb

 

[Deleted-351540]

$428 preowned?? They're $449 new at Target, stupid eb

Yeah, I don't get that either. I can get a pre-owned at GameStop for about $275.

https://i.imgur.com/dd3nZr7.png

 

[CompuCat]

To be fair, that's $428 AUD, not USD. Still...ouch.

 

[Loller06]

Mission accomplished guys, running xfce4 on wiiu-linux, took me two hours to install and run