In my blog post from saturday I have been explaining that I was working on porting BatteryCheck to the Wii U. During the weekend I have been updating that post with spoiler blocks about the progress and in relatively little time I was able to get it compiled and uploaded over the network to HBL to show "hello world" on screen! Working around various errors and crashes I got the debug output showing on my PC which is REALLY helpfull to see where the code crashed!
It took a while longer to actually figure out by accident how to get access to the SD card! This is not (yet) explained in any tutorials I have read so far! See my previous post for how I figured it out eventually
. With access to the game files that I had placed on there manually I could work my way through fixing issues until everything loaded without any errors. Most of them came from the fact that the PowerPC CPU is big-endian, just like the GameCube and Wii are, but the compiler option "GEKKO" gives problems on the Wii U! So I had to rewrite those checks in the code in various places to swap the bytes in the correct order on both "GEKKO" and "__WIIU__" platforms. After that was all done the message "loading complete!" showed in the debug output! This means that the level, graphics, animations and sounds were all loaded and converted. Ready to be used!
By placing a few debug messages I can see that even the game's main loop is working. I can jump...fall....and land on the ground again! I think! The problem is that both the TV and LCD are completely black at the moment! In simple terms the examples that are provided for Wii U homebrew are ..... ehm.... limited. They show how to compile and get some text on screen...but nothing about loading sprites, textures and things like that! Only by looking at other completed working homebrew on github it can be learned how the graphics ...should work. Sort off...kinda...
Like most people say the Wii U homebrew scene is not that active anymore...most people moved on to the switch I read everywhere! I think my project shows you can work on more than one platform at the same time........but anyway there is an other issue that makes it difficult I think. The Wii U is not yet fully exploitable without jumping a few hoops...which is why I had not dared it myself earlier. I just decided to jump in a few weeks ago. But the exploits that did came out had various possibilities for the homebrew they could load. In the early days there was an insanely low file size limit...but it was a start ofcourse. I think by now compiling with WUT into a RPX is the way to eliminate these limitations. But the multitude of exploits and CFW options fragmented the homebrew that was made on the Wii U. At least that is how I figured it out. I might be wrong!
What this means for my port is that while loading and the game loop seem to work, without examples of how to convert my loaded graphics into a texture and how to apply it to a quad....I can't show ANYTHING on screen! Or can I??? While my preferred way to use the GPU is with as little libraries and abstractions as possible....I have no choice on the Wii U I think. The only thing that IS available and hopefully working is SDL2! It's not my favorite way of making it work though...as SDL feels like "bulk" to me. But maybe on the Wii U it's "ok" since it's a powerful machine. It's not that I am completely against SDL though, in fact my early prototypes I wrote with SDL and python3 under Linux! That is where my "fear of slowness" comes from. I had a lot of graphical glitches with it...but that might also have something to do with running it in Linux on an Intel integrated graphics at the time. 
While I have my doubts about using SDL for the main game...it might actually be a PERFECT fit for the installer!! The installer is currently fully text based and does it's job of unpacking the gamefiles from the original "Setup.exe" and placing them on the SD card. But I would like to make it a more graphical experience and give the user an option to select where the "Setup.exe" is located. Maybe even give to option to download it from one of the available sources that are remaining after the "official one" was taken offline a couple of months ago. I just need to ask around if such a setup is "ok" to be shared here for downloading a Freeware game from archive.org. it will allow a more user friendly experience to setup the files the game needs.
That's about it fur the current status of my port on the Wii U. Guess it's time to learn how to do things with SDL again....
Until next time
It took a while longer to actually figure out by accident how to get access to the SD card! This is not (yet) explained in any tutorials I have read so far! See my previous post for how I figured it out eventually
. With access to the game files that I had placed on there manually I could work my way through fixing issues until everything loaded without any errors. Most of them came from the fact that the PowerPC CPU is big-endian, just like the GameCube and Wii are, but the compiler option "GEKKO" gives problems on the Wii U! So I had to rewrite those checks in the code in various places to swap the bytes in the correct order on both "GEKKO" and "__WIIU__" platforms. After that was all done the message "loading complete!" showed in the debug output! This means that the level, graphics, animations and sounds were all loaded and converted. Ready to be used!By placing a few debug messages I can see that even the game's main loop is working. I can jump...fall....and land on the ground again! I think! The problem is that both the TV and LCD are completely black at the moment! In simple terms the examples that are provided for Wii U homebrew are ..... ehm.... limited. They show how to compile and get some text on screen...but nothing about loading sprites, textures and things like that! Only by looking at other completed working homebrew on github it can be learned how the graphics ...should work. Sort off...kinda...
Like most people say the Wii U homebrew scene is not that active anymore...most people moved on to the switch I read everywhere! I think my project shows you can work on more than one platform at the same time....
....but anyway there is an other issue that makes it difficult I think. The Wii U is not yet fully exploitable without jumping a few hoops...which is why I had not dared it myself earlier. I just decided to jump in a few weeks ago. But the exploits that did came out had various possibilities for the homebrew they could load. In the early days there was an insanely low file size limit...but it was a start ofcourse. I think by now compiling with WUT into a RPX is the way to eliminate these limitations. But the multitude of exploits and CFW options fragmented the homebrew that was made on the Wii U. At least that is how I figured it out. I might be wrong! What this means for my port is that while loading and the game loop seem to work, without examples of how to convert my loaded graphics into a texture and how to apply it to a quad....I can't show ANYTHING on screen! Or can I???
While my preferred way to use the GPU is with as little libraries and abstractions as possible....I have no choice on the Wii U I think. The only thing that IS available and hopefully working is SDL2! It's not my favorite way of making it work though...as SDL feels like "bulk" to me. But maybe on the Wii U it's "ok" since it's a powerful machine. It's not that I am completely against SDL though, in fact my early prototypes I wrote with SDL and python3 under Linux! That is where my "fear of slowness" comes from. I had a lot of graphical glitches with it...but that might also have something to do with running it in Linux on an Intel integrated graphics at the time. While I have my doubts about using SDL for the main game...it might actually be a PERFECT fit for the installer!! The installer is currently fully text based and does it's job of unpacking the gamefiles from the original "Setup.exe" and placing them on the SD card. But I would like to make it a more graphical experience and give the user an option to select where the "Setup.exe" is located. Maybe even give to option to download it from one of the available sources that are remaining after the "official one" was taken offline a couple of months ago. I just need to ask around if such a setup is "ok" to be shared here for downloading a Freeware game from archive.org.
it will allow a more user friendly experience to setup the files the game needs.That's about it fur the current status of my port on the Wii U. Guess it's time to learn how to do things with SDL again....
Until next time
