Wii output is fixed. Hooray!

godreborn · Mar 29, 2023

Vague Rant said:
Yep, covers everything that runs in Wii mode, as long as you arrive there via the Wii U Menu. That means the Wii icon, the disc icon with a Wii disc inserted, Wii retail VC or Wii VC injections. The one time it doesn't work is if you boot into Wii mode before the plugin is running. That means if you hold Plus/Start while booting up the Wii U and come to the Boot Selector (Wii U Menu, vWii System Menu, vWii Homebrew Channel), selecting either of the vWii options will boot you into Wii mode before evWii ever starts, so you won't get the enhancements.

I'll try it out tomorrow. I always play dkc returns, so I'll try it with that.

bobrocks95 · Apr 12, 2023

Vague Rant said:
Personally, I don't think this trade-off is worth it for most users*.

Yesterday, I did a write up of several things that affect the way the Wii's picture looks. It includes a section on the viWidth, which is the main thing being discussed in that video.

Summarizing, the Wii's picture is often stretched from its native internal resolution for good reasons: accounting for the pixel aspect ratio and filling up the screen better. This particular scale is done with 8× super-sampling. If I was a diving judge I'd give it a 9.5/10, it's a nice quality scale that has very little negative impact on the final picture, but a substantial positive one.

Ultimately, there's far more substantive things you can do to improve the Wii's image quality (switching to 4:3 and disabling the "deflicker" filter are the two main ones) rather than removing this step, which looks the nicest out of everything that happens to the Wii image and provides obvious benefits.

I'll also note that this video is a bit confused about aspect ratios, saying Resident Evil 4 isn't really widescreen and renders in 4:3. This is literally just how widescreen works on the Wii, like ... all the time. All widescreen games do that. The System Menu does that. It's called anamorphic widescreen and it's completely normal. It's why 4:3 looks a little bit sharper than widescreen: because it is (link to the same document as before).

I said "most users", the exceptions would be if you're performing video capture or using an external upscaler device with your Wii, like an OSSC. In pure picture quality terms, you're probably better off getting the pixels as "raw" as you can and correcting the aspect ratio later, but there is a convenience cost there.

There's some Wii deflicker filter removal buzz going around various forums again right now and I came across this and wanted to ask- is the Gamecube's horizontal rescaling a much lower quality than the Wii's? Swiss has an option to disable horizontal scaling and it seems to greatly clean up the picture just in my brief testing. It certainly doesn't seem like some 8x supersampled rescale (which sounds impossible for the Wii to do too but maybe I'm misunderstanding).

My input chain is Carby HDMI -> Portta HDMI to component converter -> OSSC -> line2x to 960p -> Datapath Vision DVI capture card. Here's WarioWorld:

Stock output

Swiss force 480p (no difference for WarioWorld) + 1:1 horizontal scaling + image editor AR adjustment to roughly equivalent

Zoom-in (stock left, Swiss right)

Maybe the Wii scaling wouldn't hold up to this much scrutiny either but I see noticeably less ringing on the forced 1:1 scaling picture. LG OLED's all-direction zoom or a Retrotink5x can both adjust the aspect ratio at a high quality.

At the end of the day you mention convenience and that's the biggest takeaway for me. I want to put my game in my Gamecube or Wii, and start it up, but it really doesn't seem like I can do that if I want to get the best picture quality possible.

Swiss can be autobooted with newer Gamecube mods (PicoBoot and Kunai), but once you're in I'd love to see an option to autoboot straight into a disc game with default settings overrides (force 480p to ensure the deflicker is off, 1:1 setting to remove horizontal scaling) instead of having to select things in multiple menus. Any advice on cutting down steps in Swiss would be appreciated since I think I can streamline it at least a bit.

For Wii it seems like you either boot up USBLoaderGX, or suffer. Maybe there's a way to set up USBLoaderGX to just autoboot what's in the disc drive too? Anything to automate these settings would be great, but it doesn't seem like we're there yet.

Vague Rant · Apr 14, 2023

bobrocks95 said:
There's some Wii deflicker filter removal buzz going around various forums again right now and I came across this and wanted to ask- is the Gamecube's horizontal rescaling a much lower quality than the Wii's? Swiss has an option to disable horizontal scaling and it seems to greatly clean up the picture just in my brief testing. It certainly doesn't seem like some 8x supersampled rescale (which sounds impossible for the Wii to do too but maybe I'm misunderstanding).

My input chain is Carby HDMI -> Portta HDMI to component converter -> OSSC -> line2x to 960p -> Datapath Vision DVI capture card.

Maybe the Wii scaling wouldn't hold up to this much scrutiny either but I see noticeably less ringing on the forced 1:1 scaling picture. LG OLED's all-direction zoom or a Retrotink5x can both adjust the aspect ratio at a high quality.

Thanks for picking me up on that, I used the wrong word. It's oversampling rather than supersampling that is used by the GameCube/Wii, i.e. an 8x pre-scale interpolated back down to the output resolution. As far as I know, the GameCube and Wii should have the same horizontal scaling quality.

Wario World is an interesting case; that's certainly an example where the scaling is more impactful than most. The game only runs at 512 pixels wide, so it's suffering a much larger scale than the average GameCube/Wii game, which by far most commonly run at the full 640 wide, or at least a lot closer to it. But yeah, while the existing scale on Wii is really solid, if you have the means to do the scale externally to the Wii, the improvement is worthwhile.

bobrocks95 · Apr 14, 2023

Vague Rant said:
Thanks for picking me up on that, I used the wrong word. It's oversampling rather than supersampling that is used by the GameCube/Wii, i.e. an 8x pre-scale interpolated back down to the output resolution. As far as I know, the GameCube and Wii should have the same horizontal scaling quality.

Wario World is an interesting case; that's certainly an example where the scaling is more impactful than most. The game only runs at 512 pixels wide, so it's suffering a much larger scale than the average GameCube/Wii game, which by far most commonly run at the full 640 wide, or at least a lot closer to it. But yeah, while the existing scale on Wii is really solid, if you have the means to do the scale externally to the Wii, the improvement is worthwhile.

Ah, maybe I just happened upon a game that was close to a worst-case example. I'm also zooming quite heavily on my captures so yeah it really comes down to how easy it is for one to a adjust it externally on their setup. Worth looking into for digital setups with scalers involved, but not for everyone.

Considering how disastrous the 480p deflicker filter is for Wii I looked into autobooting discs with USB Loader GX and compiled a version with that option added, but as of right now I'm curious why it resets the disc drive twice.

niuus · Apr 15, 2023

CheatFreak47 said:
I thought that too, but it seems to be in practice it's more like:
evWii set to 704x480 -> boot2vwii 720p/1080p -> USB Loader GX with deflicker set to Off (Extended) and Video Width set to Auto

Good tip. Would be useful to give some decency to the vWii, at its current state is way too blurry and disgusting.

I used these default values but the improvement was very mild.

"dmcuTV_xEnd": 720,
"dmcuTV_xSize": 704,
"dmcuTV_xStart": 8,
"dmcuTV_yEnd": 480,
"dmcuTV_ySize": 480,
"dmcuTV_yStart": 0,

Jayro · Apr 15, 2023

My Wii U is being used with a CRT TV, so I guess I don't need to worry about any of this stuff?

bobrocks95 · Apr 15, 2023

Jayro said:
My Wii U is being used with a CRT TV, so I guess I don't need to worry about any of this stuff?

If it's a 480i standard def CRT you probably want the deflicker on, though you can pop in Pikmin 2, Smash Bros Melee, or Brawl if you want to see what it would look like with the deflicker off.

Clector · Apr 15, 2023

When setting the Wii mode to interlaced the Wii U normally puts it's own sort of deflicker filter on top of what the Wii software and hardware side already produces, so it should be safe to disable it, maybe better for that exact reason?

If it's an interlaced CRT TV, a Wii may be a better option, there's no problem at all as is from the Wii's interlaced output and it can do all video modes as intended that the Wii U Wii mode won't (possibly beneficial if using with an standard definition CRT). The Wii U should be alright though I think.

bobrocks95 · Apr 15, 2023

Clector said:
When setting the Wii mode to interlaced the Wii U normally puts it's own sort of deflicker filter on top of what the Wii software and hardware side already produces, so it should be safe to disable it, maybe better for that exact reason?

If it's an interlaced CRT TV, a Wii may be a better option, there's no problem at all as is from the Wii's interlaced output and it can do all video modes as intended that the Wii U Wii mode won't (possibly beneficial if using with an standard definition CRT). The Wii U should be alright though I think.

Didn't know vWii had yet another issue, Nintendo truly botched everything about its video output huh...

Clector · Apr 16, 2023

From what I tested on it's moment, it only seems to do that when the Wii mode setting is set to interlaced. The system setting one, not when a software uses interlaced, if set to progressive and a software uses interlaced output it'll not apply that (but the Wii U will deinterlace the output on that case).

I imagine that's why I haven't seen this mentioned, as it's probably not a very popular use for the Wii U and normally 480i can't even be selected when using HDMI on the Wii U system settings.

The Wii U's Wii mode output on 480i by default will also scale the image, so for example 576i/p output would be downscaled to 480 and the user can as well force a game output in progressive and the Wii U will interlace the output from the progressive internal image (I imagine the same would apply to 576i output with the European system firmware). But I haven't tested this with evWii.

slickmarioman21 · May 5, 2023

Vague Rant said:
Basically what CheatFreak47 said.

However, for anybody who does go with using USB Loader GX to match the video width to the framebuffer, you might also want to set the viewport width to 640 in evWii. The former will make the image display too slim and the latter will make it display too wide, so they sort of cancel each other out. Unless you have an external upscaler with the ability to account for the squish from changing the video width, you may as well do that step on the Wii U via evWii. But again, I think it's more advisable to just stick with viewport 704 and letting games set their own video width unless you know for a fact they're doing it wrong, because a one-size-fits-all solution isn't really possible. Every game is different (and uses different video widths), so forcing them all to use the same one will have mixed results.

As an example of a game doing it wrong, The Simpsons: Hit and Run for GameCube uses a video width of 640 (equivalent to the Framebuffer setting in USB Loader GX) but is rendered with the assumption of square pixels (equivalent to setting video width to 704). You can tell because everything in the game looks squishy: circles look like eggs, etc. In this case, it makes sense to either adjust the width in Nintendont or set evWii to viewport width 640, either of which will stretch the game out to the originally intended aspect ratio.

Just want to clarify what the consensus is for Wii & GameCube games on the Wii U. For picture quality closest to what the GameCube and Wii output, it's best to set the system to 480p, 4:3 or 16:9 depending on the game, evwii setting the viewport to 704, and deflicker to off extended. Will this fix all the issues people have with the Wii U video output except for the slight green shift? I'll skip Boot2Wii because it doesn't affect picture quality from what I understand but rather just gets to the channels faster.

It seems framebuffer is doing something the wii didn't technically intend for even if it makes certain games look better so I am not interested in that.

704 is the correct viewport because the Wii never output any video beyond that?

And from what I read on earlier threads, in order for vWii to output to correct colors it should be set to 480p in the Wii U system settings.

Vague Rant · May 5, 2023

slickmarioman21 said:
Just want to clarify what the consensus is for Wii & GameCube games on the Wii U. For picture quality closest to what the GameCube and Wii output, it's best to set the system to 480p, 4:3 or 16:9 depending on the game, evwii setting the viewport to 704, and deflicker to off extended. Will this fix all the issues people have with the Wii U video output except for the slight green shift? I'll skip Boot2Wii because it doesn't affect picture quality from what I understand but rather just gets to the channels faster.

It seems framebuffer is doing something the wii didn't technically intend for even if it makes certain games look better so I am not interested in that.

704 is the correct viewport because the Wii never output any video beyond that?

And from what I read on earlier threads, in order for vWii to output to correct colors it should be set to 480p in the Wii U system settings.

Deflicker is a normal feature of the GameCube/Wii, so disabling it doesn't really take you any closer or further away from what the normal GC/Wii looks like, since they have it too. But a lot of people (myself included) generally prefer how games look without the deflicker filter, whether that's on original GC/Wii or the Wii U.

For resolution, It's kind of difficult to say what's closest to the Wii/GameCube because the analog-to-digital conversion can be destructive when running at 4:3 and 480p. In that case, we have to sacrifice something to deal with the Wii and GC's 10:11 pixels. The digital output from the Wii U has perfect 1:1 square pixels, so there will be a conversion from 10:11 to square at some point. It's kind of hard to demonstrate this with images because the phone/computer/whatever you're reading this thread on also uses square pixels, but let's go for it anyway.

Below is a raw framebuffer capture of Rush the Rock, from the GameCube game, Midway Arcade Treasures 3, running on a real Wii. It is displayed here with square pixels, not accurate 10:11 GameCube pixels, so it looks wider here than it would in real life.

The above framebuffer dump is 640*448, which is the full internal resolution of Rush the Rock. If I (a person) or the Wii U (a video game console) want to display this picture but simulate the Wii/GC pixel shape without changing the resolution, we would have to do something like this, editing the image to squish it inward:

This second shot is simulating what 10:11 pixels would look like, by squishing the image down to just 582*448, with black bars on the side to fill up the rest of the 640 pixels. You might not immediately notice with the naked eye, but some detail has been lost because we were constrained in what we could do: we're displaying the same picture using less pixels. If it helps anybody to visualize it, Wii pixels are skinnier, so it can fit more of them horizontally into an image compared to the Wii U when running at the same vertical resolution (e.g. 480p).

If you're running the Wii U at 480p, you're essentially doing what that edited image above does, using ~582 square pixels to display what was once the 640 pixels that went into the analog signal of the original consoles. In short, the input resolution is higher than the output resolution. For people familiar with Dolphin, their solution is to display at the native horizontal resolution and increase the vertical resolution to simulate Wii pixels, but we can't just "increase the resolution of 480p" in real life.

The obvious solution on Wii U, then, is to use a higher output resolution, i.e. run the Wii U at 720p or 1080p. At 720p, those 640 input pixels are being scaled across ~873 output pixels. At 1080p, they're being scaled across ~1309 output pixels. In either case that's more than the input, meaning you're not outright losing any of the picture like you are when outputting 480p. However, you now have to contend with the Wii U's upscaling, which you might find unappealing if you have a TV or external upscaler that does it better. It's a tradeoff, honestly I can't really recommend a specific output resolution, it will depend on your hardware setup and your personal preferences.

To say the Wii U will never display more than 704 pixels is slightly misleading because the hardware is capable of it and a handful of homebrews allow this (off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure Eke-Eke's Genesis Plus GX and Extrems's Not64 both support this), but commercial software never does, and the Wii was not designed with the expectation that people would ever see more than 704 pixels horizontally. 704 completely filled all correctly-tuned analog televisions of the era.

My understanding of the "color is wrong at HD resolutions" issue is that it's more of a possibility than a certainty. The Wii U outputs limited range RGB. All televisions will assume a standard-def signal is limited range, but some televisions may assume an HD signal is full range RGB. If your TV has that issue, displaying at 720p/1080p will result in washed out colors, although if it helps, that's the TV's fault rather than the Wii U's. If your TV has support for full range RGB, it probably also has an option somewhere in the picture settings to use limited range RGB for specific inputs, so the issue should be fixable by just setting your TV up correctly.

slickmarioman21 · May 5, 2023

Thank you for the detailed reply. In regards to the color issues some may have, I agree that it is probably due to their television not the Wii U.

I just did some testing on my LG CX which let's me see what color space and color sampling is being used. Also as far as I know, Wii U, Wii, & GC only output limited range 16-235, so my TV is set to Limited not Full.

Wii U Menu

480P = RGB & Rec. 601
1080P = RGB & Rec. 709

vWii

480P = RGB & Rec. 601
1080P = 4:2:2 & Rec. 601

In theory and in a vacuum, there shouldn't be any meaningful difference between RGB and 4:2:2 except for a slight decrease in text sharpness. That however doesn't take into account how the Wii U is upscaling so I am not commenting on that. I just find it interesting it is using chroma subsampling when outputting 1080P in vWii mode but not 480P.

Chroma shift is still present in all modes though I did not closely inspect if it was better or worse depending on the resolution.

Apologies if this has already been discussed. Just trying to nail down the best configuration!

Clector · May 6, 2023

If you want something almost close to what the GameCube and Wii would output in 480p, you can use 480p and set the viewport to 720. Wether this is what you'll prefer or not will vary in what you want and can do, like this you'll have to scale on your own on non 480p displays and the empty overscan area the output may ahve will be there just as on a Wii and GameCube (I have seen some people not liking the empty space of the overscan area here).

Disabling the copy filter (the so called deflicker) and framebuffer is subjective on what's more "true", each software controls what they do with them in their own ways. Unlike popular belief, not all games use the copy filter when set to progressive.
And different software may use different input and output resolutions, it isn't always the same, some even use a 1:1 output already by default, albeit this last thing not being very common. For official software that uses more than 704 pixels for the output image, I think some Virtual Console titles do, I think some MegaDrive ones?

The problems with the Wii mode colors is because the Wii U is always outputting limited range and internally is always doing Rec. 709, the problem is the Wii uses Rec. 601 and they are also using a real Hollywood for Wii mode, so they can't do much weird things with this.

The logical thing would have been to convert the 601 colors to 709 for the output on 720p and 1080i/p, but instead what seems to be done is that the Rec. 601 image is just output as is and since the Wii U isn't converting the colors and neither properly telling the displays what to use, in most cases you end up with Rec. 601 being wrongly interpreted as Rec. 709 (this also affects the GamePad image).

What happens in 480p is that for SD sources the "standard" is Rec. 601, so usually that problem usually will be avoided as most things may use that for SD sources by default.

The chroma shift problems seems to be related with how the Wii U interprets the signal horizontally for the output, since they are mostly using real hardware backward compatibility and trying to set up the Wii environment for almost perfect compatibility with games, they still have to deal with the video bus signal being 4:2:2 chroma subsampled, so what the emulated VI gets from the XFB is 4:2:2.

Nintendo's implementation for this seems to not be the best (and as said they are also emulating the Video Interface) and while sometimes is fine, sometimes there's a very noticiable chroma shift horizontally that seems to be related in what way the software is setting the video and talking to VI, homebrew seems to almost always be affected. This should be fixable through software somehow, as currently the system already sometimes doesn't have the worst chroma shift as said according to how the software sets the video .

slickmarioman21 · May 6, 2023

In regards to the color, it seems like the Wii U is doing it correctly. In vWii, for both 480P and 1080P my tv was told to output Rec. 601. The only time Rec. 709 was being communicated with the TV was on the regular Wii U menu at 1080p which is correct. At least that is my understanding.

Nintendo Maniac · May 16, 2023

Since this thread got bumped semi-recently, I figured I'd respond to one concern brought up (I actually was going to post this back on the 7th, i.e. exactly just one day after the previous post, but I had issues logging in that, for whatever reason, seem to not be issues anymore...)

martindrengen said:
I much prefer the original Wii Menu to any harddrive launchers

I tend to as well which is why I actually use the "Channel" view in USB Loader GX which, as you may infer, basically looks just like the Wii Menu (it can even show actual installed Wii channels!); you can switch to that viewing mode by clicking the icon on the top bar that is the third from the right:

Note that, when the "lock" icon (second from the right on the top bar) is also selected, this will replace the "Settings" button for each individual channel with a "Back" button instead, giving an even more exact replica of the Wii Menu.

Optionally, if you're using an older Wii console that has bootmii installed as boot2, thenn you can even put a modified bootmii file on an SD card to have the Wii boot directly into USB Loader GX without having to actually mod the system menu in any way (outside of having to install the USB Loader GX forwarder channel):

https://gbatemp.net/threads/possible-to-boot-straight-into-usb-loader-gx.170282/page-2#post-3821881

tmnr1992 · May 19, 2023

Nintendo Maniac said:
Optionally, if you're using an older Wii console that has bootmii installed as boot2, thenn you can even put a modified bootmii file on an SD card to have the Wii boot directly into USB Loader GX without having to actually mod the system menu in any way

You can also do this using priiloader in any Wii console.

grandosegood · Mar 1, 2024

hey all, i'm going to try and patch some wii games to remove deflicker. is it worth it to remove dithering as well, or should i leave that alone?

michalt · Apr 4, 2024

I have been browsing through different forums regarding this topic (picture quality of Gamecube and Wii games on WiiU) and I don't recall I have seen mentioned the WiiU specific image shrinking for 480p output by Nintendont https://github.com/FIX94/Nintendont/issues/1177 Is it recognised by the community?

erster_schlumpf · Apr 16, 2024

A warm greeting to everyone!
I'm sorry to have to touch on this subject again, but unfortunately I'm a beginner.
Do I understand CheatFreak47 in #37 correctly that the following settings need to be made to produce the "best" vWii output:
1. evWii: TV Viewport Width/Height to 704x480
2. boot vWii via boot2vWii with 720p or (?) 1080p
2a. does it matter, or 720p or 1080p?
2b how exactly do you do that?
3. USBLoader: eflicker set to Off (Extended) and Video Width set to Auto

Many thanks for your help!

Wii output is fixed. Hooray!

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