Homebrew Official Retroarch WiiU (wip.)

[ploggy]

The main issue with pcsx rearmed is it requires mmap, which we don't have on current wiiu toolchains, also in order to get lightning we need to port it to the wiiu, even if lightning supports PPC! With Mupen64Plus Next and Flycast things are harder, we need OpenGL support for wiiu hombrew, which is a PITA considering how complex GX2 is.

O I was going by the comment made by the guy who ported Lightrec and assumed PPC support meant it would work on WiiU out of the box.
I heard WiiU lacked mmap but thought it would be relatively easy to implement (compared to porting a Dynarec)
I always thought Mupen64/Flycast would be a no go on WiiU without serious effort because of the lack of GL on WiiU.. GX2 is similar to GL just not enough for it to work. Then there's the lack of PPC Dynarec's for those on top.

 

[Billy Acuña]

O I was going by the comment made by the guy who ported Lightrec and assumed PPC support meant it would work on WiiU out of the box.
I heard WiiU lacked mmap but thought it would be relatively easy to implement (compared to porting a Dynarec)
I always thought Mupen64/Flycast would be a no go on WiiU without serious effort because of the lack of GL on WiiU.. GX2 is similar to GL just not enough for it to work. Then there's the lack of PPC Dynarec's for those on top.

Older versions of Mupen64Plus had PPC dynarec (and reicast too iirc), with some work they can be adapted to Mupen64Plus Next and Flycast respectively, but OpenGL needs to happen first to get them to build for wiiu.

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

I'm not sure which one lightrec uses (or whether the core does it, etc), but yeah, we'd need a mmap or mprotect equivalent for Cafe. There's a few idiosyncrasies here - usually mprotect lets you flick any memory between rw- and r-x, but Cafe only supports this for a certain region, so we need to know ahead of time what allocations are used for JIT - stuff like that. I doubt it'd be a direct wrapper we could dump in wut.

Personally, I can see two options: either libretro extends its API for cross-platform JIT'ing, which would be the cleanest solution and possibly improve the other console ports; or some #ifdef __WIIU__ hacks get dropped into beetle's source to call out to the appropriate Cafe functions, which is the most likely to happen.

wut does have documented headers for Cafe's codegen stuff, though for some reason at time of writing this isn't in the online docs. It's something, at least.

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

Also worth mentioning: this probably wouldn't work when run from HBL under Mii Maker (including the RetroArch forwarder channel afaik). HBL channel would work; not sure about the upcoming Health&Safety loading techniques. This comes back to borrowing the permissions of the host app, which historically don't include JIT access.

 

[Billy Acuña]

I'm not sure which one lightrec uses (or whether the core does it, etc), but yeah, we'd need a mmap or mprotect equivalent for Cafe. There's a few idiosyncrasies here - usually mprotect lets you flick any memory between rw- and r-x, but Cafe only supports this for a certain region, so we need to know ahead of time what allocations are used for JIT - stuff like that. I doubt it'd be a direct wrapper we could dump in wut.

Personally, I can see two options: either libretro extends its API for cross-platform JIT'ing, which would be the cleanest solution and possibly improve the other console ports; or some #ifdef __WIIU__ hacks get dropped into beetle's source to call out to the appropriate Cafe functions, which is the most likely to happen.

wut does have documented headers for Cafe's codegen stuff, though for some reason at time of writing this isn't in the online docs. It's something, at least.

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

Also worth mentioning: this probably wouldn't work when run from HBL under Mii Maker (including the RetroArch forwarder channel afaik). HBL channel would work; not sure about the upcoming Health&Safety loading techniques. This comes back to borrowing the permissions of the host app, which historically don't include JIT access.

For libnx it uses HAVE_LIBNX for JIT calls, for wiiu we could use HAVE_WUT, HAVE_CAFE or what so ever. Either way using HAVE defines is pretty much standard nowdays on RetroArch and Libretro cores

 

[ploggy]

Didnt PPSSPP for WiiU have a jit? did that use mprotrct/mmap? could that in any way help towards pcsx/beetle? they are all mips - PPC right?

 

[Frelis69]

Hello.
Do we know if there is any possibility of midi support (Driver Midi) in the future for RetroArch on our Wii U?

 

[Billy Acuña]

Didnt PPSSPP for WiiU have a jit? did that use mprotrct/mmap? could that in any way help towards pcsx/beetle? they are all mips - PPC right?

Being mips is irrelevant here, once lightning gets ported to wiiu it could "fairly easy" to JIT'ing, but it needs some days of work. Anyway mmap needs to be implemented first to have pcsx rearmed port to work over.

 

[Maxbeta]

Got a bit of a setup technical question for you guys.

I'm looking to upgrade to a 4K tv soon and I'm particularly looking at the Samsung brand.

However, on my current LED TV setup which I've had and enjoyed for years I noticed that Retroarch would always perform at a max of 59.40Hz frame refresh rate.

What I'm wondering is if anybody here has already made the jump to 4K and has their Wii U Retroarch running at a steady 60Hz refresh frame rate or higher.

Please post your setup if you do as this would save me time and possibly money when getting my next TV.

Thanks in advance!

 

[depaul]

Are you concerned with 59.4 Hz? and you want to force 60 Hz?
I remember you can alter refresh rate in Wii U Retroarch, but I don't think there is much difference.

 

[Alacres]

Anyone else get random disconnect/reconnects when using the Wii U Pro controller? It will work fine, sometimes for hours on end, but then will occasionally give me that "device is disconnected (Wii U Pro controller) in port #1" and if I'm in the middle of a button press it will mess it up. Really annoying. I tried resyncing my Pro controller and at first I thought that fixed it but it started doing it again. Anyone else experience this? It's an OEM controller btw.

 

[jeminasity]

Anyone have issues with Retroarch assets being squished, no matter what menu driver is being used? The images are overlaying the actual text -- this is with the most updated nightly rpx and updated assets folder.

Edit: rgui is fine (but only because there's no icons in it -- xmb, ozone, etc all don't display properly)

 

[depaul]

Anyone have issues with Retroarch assets being squished, no matter what menu driver is being used? The images are overlaying the actual text -- this is with the most updated nightly rpx and updated assets folder.

Edit: rgui is fine (but only because there's no icons in it -- xmb, ozone, etc all don't display properly)

Download assets.zip and extract the contents of the extracted folder into sd:/retroarch/media.

 

[jeminasity]

Download assets.zip and extract the contents of the extracted folder into sd:/retroarch/media.

Still having the same issue, unfortunately. Downloaded assets.zip to retroarch/media on the SD card and unzipped. Tried that, then tried deleting the assets folder in retroarch/assets (and left media alone). Still having same issue, no matter what I'm trying. I do know that before I updated to the latest nightly and latest assets (I was using a nightly from Sept 2019), it was working fine in xmb.

Images to what I'm seeing below, with what my folders look like.

 

[MikaDubbz]

Anyone have issues with Retroarch assets being squished, no matter what menu driver is being used? The images are overlaying the actual text -- this is with the most updated nightly rpx and updated assets folder.

Edit: rgui is fine (but only because there's no icons in it -- xmb, ozone, etc all don't display properly)

Happened to me the other day, took me forever to realize that my solution was going to the video settings, and changing the resolution back to 16:9. A random game I loaded seemed to have changed that setting on a system based level and not just individual game, so it caused the text and icons to overlap like youe xplain.

 

[jeminasity]

Happened to me the other day, took me forever to realize that my solution was going to the video settings, and changing the resolution back to 16:9. A random game I loaded seemed to have changed that setting on a system based level and not just individual game, so it caused the text and icons to overlap like youe xplain.

Haha, thanks for the help. That was definitely the issue, but having it at 16:9 also messes up some of the games and crashes Retroarch. I ended up swapping to using rgui anyway, since I initially wanted to use ozone (but there's a known bug with playlists). Thanks though!

 

[Xemma]

Hello friends, help me with these doubts!
How to use shader on WiiU Retroarch? Should I download from (buildbot.libretro.com/assets/frontend/bundle/shaders/shaders_slang /) ??? Sorry, they said you would have to compile using such an official SDK tool! If the process for obtaining the shaders is still this, can someone explain to me the way to do it? Or could someone who has compiled it help or make it available privately?


Another thing I would like to know is if the version of Retroarch wiiu can already run Killer Instinct I and II of Arcade through Mame2003?


Waiting for answers!

 

[Xemma]

I forgot to ask!
How do I put music on the Retroarch menu? I'm putting the sound folder with the bgm.ogg file inside the media folder and nothing happens! I'm using summer 1.7.1 Retroarch!


Can I use the "ozone" Theme in version 1.7.1 ???


What is the most stable version of Retroarch WiiU today? The one I use looks good, but it doesn't allow me to use a Boxart and Titles or Boxart and Snap at the same time!


Thanks for listening!

 

[depaul]

Sorry not much of a help. Anyway:
-Yes Ozone theme works fine on RA WiiU. I suggest to use latest stable version.
-Shaders indeed require official SDK. Because of that support is limited here in this forum and I too have no idea.
-Sorry about thumbnails and boxart I never managed to make them work. I believe you have to create playlists with PC tools and then copy images folders. I remember a user here, @Retroaussie, that managed to get boxarts and snaps to work on Wii U.

 

[n00bsaib0t]

Sorry not much of a help. Anyway:
-Yes Ozone theme works fine on RA WiiU. I suggest to use latest stable version.
-Shaders indeed require official SDK. Because of that support is limited here in this forum and I too have no idea.
-Sorry about thumbnails and boxart I never managed to make them work. I believe you have to create playlists with PC tools and then copy images folders. I remember a user here, @Retroaussie, that managed to get boxarts and snaps to work on Wii U.

When you say Ozone “works fine” do you mean the new version just released actually fully works as intended or simply that it doesn’t crash? Because up through 1.8.4 playlists still weren’t working on Ozone. They haven’t ever worked on Ozone on WiiU so it would be great for that to finally be fixed.

 

[depaul]

Yes playlists are broken for me too.