Homebrew Official Retroarch WiiU (wip.)

[jacobsson]

@depaul
The mod needs a little clean-up and some testing too.

EDIT: It seems to work as intended, running some super-punch out right now

 

[depaul]

Congratulations

 

[Maxbeta]

@depaul
The mod needs a little clean-up and some testing too.

EDIT: It seems to work as intended, running some super-punch out right now

Does this speed up loading times from USB??

 

[jacobsson]

Does this speed up loading times from USB??

I don't know, do you have a good test game I could try that loads slow?

 

[Masana]

@depaul
The mod needs a little clean-up and some testing too.

EDIT: It seems to work as intended, running some super-punch out right now

terrible, strongly that there is a version to test.

 

[depaul]

Thank you @jacobsson. I will be glad to test if there's a build available. I believe theoretically it'll always be faster to load roms from USB compared to SD card.

Also putting roms on WiiU formatted HDD is better since I can put all my FBA roms that take too much space on SD card.

The biggest playable rom is probably Street Fighter III 3rd strike (sfiii3n). It takes almost 30s to load on SD card.

 

[jacobsson]

I've only built one SNES-core so far. Functionality-wise I won't add anything more than the storage_usb path (if you don't want nand-access of course? I'd advice against that though).

Also since this is not a Salamander build (meaning I have to build every core standalone) I'll have to check how it should be done using a batch build script. If anyone knows I'm all ears! maybe @QuarkTheAwesome ?

 

[Maxbeta]

As @depaul mentioned, it’d be a solid idea to test SF3 Third Strike to see how long it takes to load.

I also wanted to inquire since I’ve read it somewhere mentioned by I don’t really remember who but, is it true games load faster from USB if you are running Mocha fw?

just thought I’d ask to get my suspicions out of the way.

look forward to your build @jacobsson!

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

I've only built one SNES-core so far. Functionality-wise I won't add anything more than the storage_usb path (if you don't want nand-access of course? I'd advice against that though).

Also since this is not a Salamander build (meaning I have to build every core standalone) I'll have to check how it should be done using a batch build script. If anyone knows I'm all ears! maybe @QuarkTheAwesome ?

If it's working on one core and you don't think a reason it wouldn't work on other ones, I'd just PR it in! I would suggest the upstream folks not merge it until they're finished with their 1.8.6 building funtimes, but after that's out there's plenty of nightlies for us to run tests with.
How does one get roms into it? FTPiiU Everywhere?

 

[NinStar]

Just curious, is there any possibility of bringing back the support for HID controllers?

 

[jacobsson]

@depaul Thanks for the tips of testing Third strike!
Before being able to test this I need to understand one thing with the current build of RA though, it's slow as a snail when it comes to load cores.
I've tried removing of core-info to no avail, does it have something to do with my many playlists?

@Maxbeta I'm pretty sure mocha cfw makes loading faster due to the implementation of IOSUHAX. I can't say for sure since Mocha is all I ever used for my setup.

@QuarkTheAwesome I think a PR is probably the vice thing to do, I have not got around cleaning it up to make it presentable yet.
Had some strange include issues that forced me to put the needed functions straight into the main.c file for now (this is probably due to my lack of knowledge of C-programming).

Yes. Unfortunately I rely on ftpiiu everywhere for transferring files, don't get me wrong it's really a great app but speeds are really really slow. Writing from PC -> [FTP] -> storage_usb averages around 150KB/s (not kidding!). On the upside, the reverse flow (reading/downloading to PC from storage_usb) average about 1.25MB/s so read speeds seems to be alright, or at least good enough to saturate the slow network interface.

My big question is what cause the network speeds to be so slow?
From testing I doesn't seem to be directly related to SD card, Hard drive nor USB write speeds. WLAN and ethernet are equally slow, so it's probably not a physical network problem either. I think It almost has to be related to how Nintendo has implemented their network communication in software?

Do we have any internal file manager under CFW available? I'd love to test transfer speeds in between storage interfaces to further see if my theory checks out.

Sorry for the long reply!

 

[depaul]

Thanks @jacobsson. IMHO:
-For cores it's been suggested as a workaround to remove directories : 'info', 'assets', and 'media'. It greatly reduces loading time.
-Wii U FTP is slow for me as well, like 150 KB/s. There hasn't been any WiiU file manager yet. Hopefully soon there will be another method to import roms. Uploading Street Fighter III 3rd strike took almost 4 min

 

[jacobsson]

Thanks @jacobsson. IMHO:
-For cores it's been suggested as a workaround to remove directories : 'info', 'assets', and 'media'. It greatly reduces loading time.
-Wii U FTP is slow for me as well, like 150 KB/s. There hasn't been any WiiU file manager yet. Hopefully soon there will be another method to import roms. Uploading Street Fighter III 3rd strike took almost 4 min

Thanks for the reply!
Now I have the means to set a proper baseline for testing (renaming info, assets and media). I presume you use the FBA core Third strike? I'll make a build of that core tonight, I can send that particular test-core to you as well if interested?

 

[depaul]

Great ! all FBA cores work (FBA, FBA 2012, FBA Neo). I think that FBA 2012 is the fastest one!

 

[Masana]

Perhaps you could mod this software so that it accesses the hard disk and we could move the roms from the SD card to the disk without network with it.

By cons it freezes sometimes but it may be an alternative.

https://github.com/rw-r-r-0644/WiiU-Shell

 

[jacobsson]

Perhaps you could mod this software so that it accesses the hard disk and we could move the roms from the SD card to the disk without network with it.

By cons it freezes sometimes but it may be an alternative.

https://github.com/rw-r-r-0644/WiiU-Shell

Thanks, I appreciate your suggestion! I like that idea very much, it was also my intent when asking. I'll look into this next after I have the RA build tested.

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Has there been any updates to improving loading speed of Cores/Roms? Or any possible way to load them from usb? I been gone too long to find where I left off at in these threads.

 

[jacobsson]

@depaul & @Maxbeta
As promised here is a test-build of fba2012 if you want to try. It's fresh out the oven so I have not had the chance to test it myself, and it's late here so I'm going to bed Please let me know if the load times seem to be on par with the SD-card (or if it even starts?). Good night!

 

[depaul]

Hello @jacobsson. Hope you're sleeping well
The build works fine. The fba_2012 core when loaded allows me to browse the Storage_usb (WiiU HDD) and therefore I could load the file from USB.

For the loading time it still seems slow even from USB, maybe there could be some improvement in the future. But no rush great we could now store roms in USB instead of SD card.

 

[ChiefReginod]

It seems like the best way to speed things up would be to make it check if the selected core is already loaded or not, and if it is, don't reload that core again from scratch like it's currently doing every time.