Homebrew WiiU and 3DS emulation?

RobbieTheELK

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Been browsing a few older threads asking the question and it seems like it's always a "no".

Why can't the WiiU run 3DS games? I'm sure the WiiU HW is better than HW in a small portable device like this 3DS?
 

Anxiety_timmy

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Just to put this into spectrum,the wii u is power pc so things like nintendont or vwii are gone.Next the wii u is a measly 1.23 ghz but since its a tri core cpu then its max speed is 3.69ghz.All of this would be good except you need to be anywhere to 10 to 8 times as powerful as what you want to emulate.7 times is really pushing it.The problem is that the 3ds's cpu is 536mhz with all 2 cores and that's not counting the other 128mhz for the arm9.So plain and simple yes it is possible but with ass performance.And don't get crappy new 3ds in the picture.Thats a full on 3.2 ghz
 

mightymuffy

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Just to put this into spectrum,the wii u is power pc so things like nintendont or vwii are gone.Next the wii u is a measly 1.23 ghz but since its a tri core cpu then its max speed is 3.69ghz.All of this would be good except you need to be anywhere to 10 to 8 times as powerful as what you want to emulate.7 times is really pushing it.The problem is that the 3ds's cpu is 536mhz with all 2 cores and that's not counting the other 128mhz for the arm9.So plain and simple yes it is possible but with ass performance.And don't get crappy new 3ds in the picture.Thats a full on 3.2 ghz
7 times is really pushing it ehh..... tell that to my old Pentium 200MMX which could emulate the 93Mhz N64.... Whilst giving the usual ballpark figure of 10x speed is a good answer to tell newbies/those not in the know, adding stuff like 7x or 8x is just ridiculous and will confuse them further. Plus, by that logic there's pretty much no PC out there that should be able to run Cemu, which is of course false. Sheer clock speed is not even half the reason as PineappleGod said.
 

RobbieTheELK

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Wait folks, my WiiU plays GameCube Games (Ninendont), it also plays Wii Games and NintendoDS games.
I understand emulation is CPU intensive, but why can't we inject games and have them run natively like the above?

BTW, just emulated Luigis Mansion 2 via Citra on my PC, it's skipping like mad, getting 44FPS and at times dips to 10.
This is on a GTX 1070 with 16GB DDR4 and Intel i5 @ 4Ghz. WTF??
 
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MichiS97

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Wait folks, my WiiU plays GameCube Games (Ninendont), it also plays Wii Games and NintendoDS games.
I understand emulation is CPU intensive, but why can't we inject games and have them run natively like the above?
You just said it yourself. You can't make something run natively if it's not native. Gamecube, Wii and Wii U use the PowerPC architecture, which is why vWii and Nintendont are a thing.

The 3DS uses an ARM CPU which is a completely different architecture, hence the need for an emulator

Also, @wiiuepiccpu I'm sorry but you just made me die inside a little bit. A tri-core 1.23 GHz CPU doesn't mean the max speed is 3.69 GHz. The max "speed" still is 1.23 GHz.
 
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depaul

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Let's look at PC 3DS emulator (Citra): even some modern PCs have difficulties achieving full speed.
Given their different architectures, it's very improbable that the Wii U could support 3DS emulation at all.
 

RyoX9

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I was never a fan of backward compatibility because i decided to play mario galaxy on my wiiu and graphics were so crap that i would prefer emulating in 1080p or 4k on a pc.
By the way wii on wiiu is so crap it gave me headache.
Forget wiiu 3ds cannot be emulated on switch or ps4 pro....
 

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I was never a fan of backward compatibility because i decided to play mario galaxy on my wiiu and graphics were so crap that i would prefer emulating in 1080p or 4k on a pc.
By the way wii on wiiu is so crap it gave me headache.
Forget wiiu 3ds cannot be emulated on switch or ps4 pro....

Try setting wii u to 480p, this makes wii games look 10x better than when wii u is set to 720p or 1080p.
 

MikaDubbz

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Something like this would have been so perfect for the Wii U
dsuwiiu.jpg

Especially if it was more than just DS, but 3DS as well. Really would have been the great final follow up to the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player. Especially when you consider that the Wii U seemingly was built for such a potential device with it's 2 screens. Granted, we did get standard DS compatabilty via the virtual console and injects, but 3DS compatibility really would have made it all complete in regard to playing portable Nintendo titles on the TV.
 
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Something like this would have been so perfect for the Wii U
dsuwiiu.jpg

Especially if it was more than just DS, but 3DS as well. Really would have been the great final follow up to the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player. Especially when you consider that the Wii U seemingly was built for such a potential device with it's 2 screens. Granted, we did get standard DS compatabilty via the virtual console and injects, but 3DS compatibility really would have made it all complete in regard to playing portable Nintendo titles on the TV.


And you don`t see the problems with that? That thing would easily cost 150$. And: How are you supposed to use "Streetpass" on it? Some or even many games require you to have streetpass, otherwise you simply would not get all content of the game to see since that´s "Locked" behind streetpass-function (you should go walking around, connect with others that then gives you the reward you get new content for your game;). If this "thing" wouldn´t have streetpass, you would have to put it into your 3DS first, download all streetpass-data and make all Streetpasses on 3DS first and then plug it into that "thing" here. Lol

What about the double screen? It didn´t work well on WiiU. There are reasons VC was a fail on WiiU. One was: It didn`t work that well to have 2 very big seperate screens while on a DS/3DS both screens are very near to each other. Only those games worked well where you literally only needed one screen to work with. But the second you were needing both was the second you had to decide "Should the WiiU-gamepad act as the touchscreen? Then you can´t see it while the action takes place on the big TV-screen" or vise-versa: You have both things taking place on the screen, but then it´s 180° to be turned around (which is stupid).


I really couldn´t see how it would work without any flaws dude. And nearly nobody would pay the price of 150$ for an "addon". I didn`t buy a "Gamecube"-Gameboy-Addon. I didn´t buy a "gameboy Printer" addon. I never bought addons which are that pricy, because i don´t burn my money.

So it simply wouldn´t be a success without a price of less then 30$.

An then you have the classic-problem: Why should somebody buy such a device for 150$ (and it would easily cost that much to create it and sell it, since 3DS-hardware is- for what it was- overall expensive, we all know that, there´s reason a 2DS is vastly downgraded in terms of quality, speaker, Streetpass, 3D etc in order to come for 99$ only)- when it has not many games being made for it?

Same Problem as "NIntendo Labo" (bombed) and "PS VR". Few games & expensive prices. So NIntendo LABO costs like 50$...and still: How many games do support it? See? 5 games. And that´s it. Pretty much like "PS VR" which supports like 20 games. And then it turned out that it´s just not supported. And people moved on.

And i see another problem:

Assuming you want all the 3DS-hardware in that small case: You still wouldn´t have the special 3DS-Wifi dude. You would only be limited to Singleplayer-games. You couldn`t play "Kid Icarus Uprising" with it´s cool Online-portion. Since i doubt they would put a Wifi-chip in there. No dude. To cut costs it would be cut as well. But it´s not just because of "costs", but also because you couldn´t/wouldn´t carry it around. So it wouldn´t make sense to have a Wifi-chip in there.

and thus no streetpasses would work. You would have to constantly carry it around with you to have streetpasses to make it work.

But as we all know: Streetpass in 2019 is pretty much dead. ANd everybody who didn´t participate on it, won`t get all the game´s content any longer. Soon enough all servers will be shut-off and that´s the second it´s your fate to not have a complete game if you didn´t make all streetpasses for it.

What i see in that picture is a clumsy, big gamecube-like looking console. Nobody would want to take that with them 24/7 in their pockets to fetch Streetpasses dude.
 

MikaDubbz

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And you don`t see the problems with that? That thing would easily cost 150$. And: How are you supposed to use "Streetpass" on it? Some or even many games require you to have streetpass, otherwise you simply would not get all content of the game to see since that´s "Locked" behind streetpass-function (you should go walking around, connect with others that then gives you the reward you get new content for your game;). If this "thing" wouldn´t have streetpass, you would have to put it into your 3DS first, download all streetpass-data and make all Streetpasses on 3DS first and then plug it into that "thing" here. Lol

What about the double screen? It didn´t work well on WiiU. There are reasons VC was a fail on WiiU. One was: It didn`t work that well to have 2 very big seperate screens while on a DS/3DS both screens are very near to each other. Only those games worked well where you literally only needed one screen to work with. But the second you were needing both was the second you had to decide "Should the WiiU-gamepad act as the touchscreen? Then you can´t see it while the action takes place on the big TV-screen" or vise-versa: You have both things taking place on the screen, but then it´s 180° to be turned around (which is stupid).


I really couldn´t see how it would work without any flaws dude. And nearly nobody would pay the price of 150$ for an "addon". I didn`t buy a "Gamecube"-Gameboy-Addon. I didn´t buy a "gameboy Printer" addon. I never bought addons which are that pricy, because i don´t burn my money.

So it simply wouldn´t be a success without a price of less then 30$.

An then you have the classic-problem: Why should somebody buy such a device for 150$ (and it would easily cost that much to create it and sell it, since 3DS-hardware is- for what it was- overall expensive, we all know that, there´s reason a 2DS is vastly downgraded in terms of quality, speaker, Streetpass, 3D etc in order to come for 99$ only)- when it has not many games being made for it?

Same Problem as "NIntendo Labo" (bombed) and "PS VR". Few games & expensive prices. So NIntendo LABO costs like 50$...and still: How many games do support it? See? 5 games. And that´s it. Pretty much like "PS VR" which supports like 20 games. And then it turned out that it´s just not supported. And people moved on.

And i see another problem:

Assuming you want all the 3DS-hardware in that small case: You still wouldn´t have the special 3DS-Wifi dude. You would only be limited to Singleplayer-games. You couldn`t play "Kid Icarus Uprising" with it´s cool Online-portion. Since i doubt they would put a Wifi-chip in there. No dude. To cut costs it would be cut as well. But it´s not just because of "costs", but also because you couldn´t/wouldn´t carry it around. So it wouldn´t make sense to have a Wifi-chip in there.

and thus no streetpasses would work. You would have to constantly carry it around with you to have streetpasses to make it work.

But as we all know: Streetpass in 2019 is pretty much dead. ANd everybody who didn´t participate on it, won`t get all the game´s content any longer. Soon enough all servers will be shut-off and that´s the second it´s your fate to not have a complete game if you didn´t make all streetpasses for it.

What i see in that picture is a clumsy, big gamecube-like looking console. Nobody would want to take that with them 24/7 in their pockets to fetch Streetpasses dude.

It's just a fun what-if scenario, no need to freak out over it dude, lol.
 

depaul

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There is something like that already available, you can even find it now for less than 50$. It plays 3DS games out of the box. And you know what, It's called Nintendo 3DS!

/end_of_joke
 

The Real Jdbye

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With enough speedhacks and optimizations it might actually be possible to get 3DS emulation running at good speed on the Wii U. But there is not a single homebrew developer left that still gives a shit about the Wii U, not that there were that many to begin with, so a big project like that was never realistic.
Just to put this into spectrum,the wii u is power pc so things like nintendont or vwii are gone.Next the wii u is a measly 1.23 ghz but since its a tri core cpu then its max speed is 3.69ghz.All of this would be good except you need to be anywhere to 10 to 8 times as powerful as what you want to emulate.7 times is really pushing it.The problem is that the 3ds's cpu is 536mhz with all 2 cores and that's not counting the other 128mhz for the arm9.So plain and simple yes it is possible but with ass performance.And don't get crappy new 3ds in the picture.Thats a full on 3.2 ghz
That's just a general rule. Dolphin was able to run full speed on far less than 10 times the clock speed of the Wii. I am nowhere near knowledgeable enough about the specifics of the PowerPC and ARMv6 architectures to say how difficult it is to emulate ARMv6 on PowerPC, but in theory it might be possible with enough speedhacks and optimizations.
And you can't combine the core speeds. They have to be emulated separately. They *can* all be emulated on a single core CPU with multithreading but you can't split one core and emulate it across multiple cores, it just doesn't work that way. Can't make something multithreaded if it wasn't multithreaded to begin with.
And you don`t see the problems with that? That thing would easily cost 150$. And: How are you supposed to use "Streetpass" on it? Some or even many games require you to have streetpass, otherwise you simply would not get all content of the game to see since that´s "Locked" behind streetpass-function (you should go walking around, connect with others that then gives you the reward you get new content for your game;). If this "thing" wouldn´t have streetpass, you would have to put it into your 3DS first, download all streetpass-data and make all Streetpasses on 3DS first and then plug it into that "thing" here. Lol

What about the double screen? It didn´t work well on WiiU. There are reasons VC was a fail on WiiU. One was: It didn`t work that well to have 2 very big seperate screens while on a DS/3DS both screens are very near to each other. Only those games worked well where you literally only needed one screen to work with. But the second you were needing both was the second you had to decide "Should the WiiU-gamepad act as the touchscreen? Then you can´t see it while the action takes place on the big TV-screen" or vise-versa: You have both things taking place on the screen, but then it´s 180° to be turned around (which is stupid).


I really couldn´t see how it would work without any flaws dude. And nearly nobody would pay the price of 150$ for an "addon". I didn`t buy a "Gamecube"-Gameboy-Addon. I didn´t buy a "gameboy Printer" addon. I never bought addons which are that pricy, because i don´t burn my money.

So it simply wouldn´t be a success without a price of less then 30$.

An then you have the classic-problem: Why should somebody buy such a device for 150$ (and it would easily cost that much to create it and sell it, since 3DS-hardware is- for what it was- overall expensive, we all know that, there´s reason a 2DS is vastly downgraded in terms of quality, speaker, Streetpass, 3D etc in order to come for 99$ only)- when it has not many games being made for it?

Same Problem as "NIntendo Labo" (bombed) and "PS VR". Few games & expensive prices. So NIntendo LABO costs like 50$...and still: How many games do support it? See? 5 games. And that´s it. Pretty much like "PS VR" which supports like 20 games. And then it turned out that it´s just not supported. And people moved on.

And i see another problem:

Assuming you want all the 3DS-hardware in that small case: You still wouldn´t have the special 3DS-Wifi dude. You would only be limited to Singleplayer-games. You couldn`t play "Kid Icarus Uprising" with it´s cool Online-portion. Since i doubt they would put a Wifi-chip in there. No dude. To cut costs it would be cut as well. But it´s not just because of "costs", but also because you couldn´t/wouldn´t carry it around. So it wouldn´t make sense to have a Wifi-chip in there.

and thus no streetpasses would work. You would have to constantly carry it around with you to have streetpasses to make it work.

But as we all know: Streetpass in 2019 is pretty much dead. ANd everybody who didn´t participate on it, won`t get all the game´s content any longer. Soon enough all servers will be shut-off and that´s the second it´s your fate to not have a complete game if you didn´t make all streetpasses for it.

What i see in that picture is a clumsy, big gamecube-like looking console. Nobody would want to take that with them 24/7 in their pockets to fetch Streetpasses dude.
It's not like StreetPass was popular outside of Japan anyway. I hardly ever got any streetpasses so not having that feature is not a big loss.
 
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With enough speedhacks and optimizations it might actually be possible to get 3DS emulation running at good speed on the Wii U. But there is not a single homebrew developer left that still gives a shit about the Wii U, not that there were that many to begin with, so a big project like that was never realistic.

That's just a general rule. Dolphin was able to run full speed on far less than 10 times the clock speed of the Wii. I am nowhere near knowledgeable enough about the specifics of the PowerPC and ARMv6 architectures to say how difficult it is to emulate ARMv6 on PowerPC, but in theory it might be possible with enough speedhacks and optimizations.
And you can't combine the core speeds. They have to be emulated separately. They *can* all be emulated on a single core CPU with multithreading but you can't split one core and emulate it across multiple cores, it just doesn't work that way. Can't make something multithreaded if it wasn't multithreaded to begin with.

It's not like StreetPass was popular outside of Japan anyway. I hardly ever got any streetpasses so not having that feature is not a big loss.


Lol. in my country, 7 years ago, i got like one hundred Streetpasses/day dude. My (old) black 3Ds was overloaded with Streetpasses. I met hundreds of different people over the years. Maybe it just wasn´t that popular in your country?

And i know how important this was, since e.g. even in simple lego-games you got extra-content in your game if you met somebody over streetpass. So you actually unlocked game´s content via streetpasses. The more streetpasses, the more bonus-content you got.

And again: What about online-multiplayer? So would you be ok with online not being accessible?

And you are knowing that still- to this very day- not even the most-powerful pc can emulate all gamecube-games via "Dolphin" right? Not to speak of the poor emulation of it at all. Gamecube, dude. Not Wii.

Wii-games are easier to emulate because the Wii-games don´t use the "paired single instructions" of the gamecube.

The second your cpu on PC has to emulate many paired single instructions is where it comes to a crawl.

Emulating a 3DS is much, much harder as well than to emulate a Wii, did you know that?
 

The Real Jdbye

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Lol. in my country, 7 years ago, i got like one hundred Streetpasses/day dude. My (old) black 3Ds was overloaded with Streetpasses. I met hundreds of different people over the years. Maybe it just wasn´t that popular in your country?

And i know how important this was, since e.g. even in simple lego-games you got extra-content in your game if you met somebody over streetpass. So you actually unlocked game´s content via streetpasses. The more streetpasses, the more bonus-content you got.

And again: What about online-multiplayer? So would you be ok with online not being accessible?

And you are knowing that still- to this very day- not even the most-powerful pc can emulate all gamecube-games via "Dolphin" right? Not to speak of the poor emulation of it at all. Gamecube, dude. Not Wii.

Wii-games are easier to emulate because the Wii-games don´t use the "paired single instructions" of the gamecube.

The second your cpu on PC has to emulate many paired single instructions is where it comes to a crawl.

Emulating a 3DS is much, much harder as well than to emulate a Wii, did you know that?
Maybe you live in a bigger city than I do but it seemed rare to find streetpasses most places as I've seen many others with the same complaint.
I would say that those games are badly designed if the only way to get that extra content was through StreetPass which especially people in smaller towns would have an issue doing. Bravely Default had a StreetPass mechanic with a lot of equipment and such locked behind it but still allowed you to get all of it by going online ingame once a day and getting a few "friends" added to your list that way rather than through StreetPass. That's a good way of doing it, which I was fine with, but if I had to actually get streetpasses to unlock those things I would have just cheated it with HomePass because there's no way I would have gotten enough, unless it was at a big event or gathering or something where gamers are likely to gather, like the launch of a new big game or console.

For the online multiplayer thing, I'm not sure if you meant in the context of the addon, or an emulator, if it's the first: Why would online multiplayer not work? Not like a wifi chip costs much money. I wasn't really commenting on the concept of that whole device anyway, but I liked the idea of a DS cartridge reader to work with the DS emulator on the Wii U. It would just be nice to have an official way of playing all those DS games on a bigger screen. And I suppose the same thing goes for the 3DS but I don't think an addon for that would be realistic since it would be almost as expensive as a 3DS and on top of that requires you to already have a Wii U. A separate device like the PSTV is a much better idea.

Indeed, Dolphin is not perfect and probably never will be, but it doesn't have to be. I'm happy that it works with as many games as it does, and I haven't come across one that it won't yet, so I think it's pretty safe to say all the mainstream games are well supported. With the occasional bug here and there, like in Super Paper Mario I had to revert to an older version to get past a certain point that just crashed on my particular setup. An issue that is difficult to solve and came about as the emulation got better, but seems to have been solved in the Vulkan plugin. That wasn't an option for me though.

Like I said I'm not that knowledgeable on the specifics of the architectures. And I wouldn't expect compatibility to be great with the speedhacks that would be required. But look at SnemulDS for example, it's a miracle that it manages to run as many games as it does full speed on the limited DS hardware when some of those games still had issues running fullspeed on a PSP with Snes9XTYL. It took a lot of speedhacks to make that happen and as a result compatibility isn't great, but having a handful of games run very well is better than having all of them running slowly. With the same sort of thinking applied to 3DS emulation I believe it might be possible to make an emulator that would run on something as weak as the Wii U at playable speeds in theory. It would have to be written from the ground up for speed over accuracy though.

I did not know that about the Wii being easier to emulate though, so thanks for that info :)
 
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Sonic Angel Knight

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It's too bad too. reminds me how we had Super gameboy and Gameboy player for consoles. nintendo finally made a console that has two screen gameplay and didn't think to make a 3DS/NDS player accessory for it. Would have been nice to finally have those playable on the big screen and with ethernet connected internet. To be honest, WII U playing NDS games by virtual console emulation was a surprise, but it's not as good cause games lack any form of multiplayer feature (not online or even connecting to two nearby systems AKA LAN or even another DS system) :ninja:
 

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