After a very long sabbatical, I decided to dust off one of the old Wiis I had lying around and load it up with emulators. To my surprise, a whole lot of Wii hacking had taken place since I last looked at one, and so I set out to install WiiFlow and the plugins in this regard, and so far most of it works better than I could have imagined!
I am trying to get quasi88 (PC-88 emulator) to work half as well as BlueMSX-Wii does.
I'm currently using the version that comes with the Lite Plugins pack; I've tried one labeled as 0.6.3 Beta 6 as well as another one that's based on 0.6.4 called Wii88 (though most of the quasi88 labeling is still present making it easy to forget it's Wii88 when you go to do your edits and what not) and it seems the one in the Lite Plugin Pack works significantly better (though I could stand to do some more research on all versions at this stage).
Unfortunately, Quasi88 doesn't seem to have zip nor M3U support (or if it does, I'm going about it incorrectly). According to the documentation for the original/PC emulator, it can be fed file info through an M3U file, however selecting a M3U with WiiFlow or manually loading it in the Load Disk page of the emulator have both been unsuccessful (quasi88 says it doesn't recognize the file).
I did manage to get quasi88 to load a macOS configuration file (sometimes referred to as a "dot file" ie "._filename.ext") and it thinks it's a floppy with 32 indexes. This makes me think it may just be possible to get the program to queue up the necessary disks for any virtual drive provided we figure out how to feed it this information. I also ran this experiment with a "dot file" of the M3U file, which exhibited the exact same behaviour as the XML "dot file".
Of course, it's mostly blank/useless data, so quasi88 can't do anything with it (although it will attempt to read it, it seems). If I manually map the IMAGE-NEXT1/IMAGE-PREV1 to the FN keys (which I can't seem to find a way to save for some reason, so I have to either manually do it any time I want to test it or I can save the emulator in a state with those options already there, but it'll also put the emulator into the exact configuration it was in when I made the save state if I do that), it even cycles through each image appropriately, and on the first image I can briefly see a message at the bottom of the screen which reads "FDC read/write Error in DRIVE 1" before disappearing, suggesting quasi88 is attempting to load automatically each time the disk image is cycled in either direction without a reset or any additional loading instructions being necessary.
Loading the “dot file” in a text editor reveals the content to be:
Which looks like this on my screen:
HexFiend reveals the file is ~4KB and mostly blank (the two images here are the beginning and end of the file; any/everything in-between is 00):
Trying to get it to load a normal XML file (which the "dot file" was originally attached to) is met with the same error message as trying to load any other non-disk file.
According to the documentation for the PC emulator (which this port does strive to be unchanged from the release it was based on, TMK), quasi88 supports command lines with options and multiple file entries (I would imagine any elf/dol file we use as a plugin must accept command lines to work with WiiFlow, but I'm still new to this and my understanding is still rather basic). I believe it also supports up to 6 disks to be preloaded in this regard. The syntax for command loading is purportedly:
I've also been playing with the config file and noticed that sometimes the emulator overwrites it and other times it does not (this version does not have a button or apparent way to 'save' configuration, though some settings it will remember and others it will not). I have tried adding some settings to it using syntax I've seen in the PC documentation and the source code (which is from a different version than the DOL I'm using, but since I don't have that SC it's the best lead I've got at the moment), however those lines tend to disappear after running the emulator, except for the times they do not disappear.
Also, I checked the ELF file with a hex editor and while it says the config file it's looking for would be config.rc, however if I load with my config file named quasi88.rc, it boots to all it's defaults and creates a whole new quasi88.cfg file.
This calls all file loading into question for me, now. I'm assuming all my BIOS files are loaded, but I really don't know - perhaps that's why cassette loading isn't working. I don't know if they keyboard config file should be .rc like in the source code and hex, or .cfg like what it actually seems to make for its config, or if it might not even look at it at all!
I also have not yet figured out how to get a verbose/log output from this, so there's possibly some info right under my nose that I'm missing...
I am trying to get quasi88 (PC-88 emulator) to work half as well as BlueMSX-Wii does.
- XML files that let you customize Command Lines and other quick options
- Multiple configurations saved as 'machines'
- Zip support
- Cassette support (this may actually be present in quasi88, though I haven't gotten it to work yet)
Unfortunately, Quasi88 doesn't seem to have zip nor M3U support (or if it does, I'm going about it incorrectly). According to the documentation for the original/PC emulator, it can be fed file info through an M3U file, however selecting a M3U with WiiFlow or manually loading it in the Load Disk page of the emulator have both been unsuccessful (quasi88 says it doesn't recognize the file).
I did manage to get quasi88 to load a macOS configuration file (sometimes referred to as a "dot file" ie "._filename.ext") and it thinks it's a floppy with 32 indexes. This makes me think it may just be possible to get the program to queue up the necessary disks for any virtual drive provided we figure out how to feed it this information. I also ran this experiment with a "dot file" of the M3U file, which exhibited the exact same behaviour as the XML "dot file".
Of course, it's mostly blank/useless data, so quasi88 can't do anything with it (although it will attempt to read it, it seems). If I manually map the IMAGE-NEXT1/IMAGE-PREV1 to the FN keys (which I can't seem to find a way to save for some reason, so I have to either manually do it any time I want to test it or I can save the emulator in a state with those options already there, but it'll also put the emulator into the exact configuration it was in when I made the save state if I do that), it even cycles through each image appropriately, and on the first image I can briefly see a message at the bottom of the screen which reads "FDC read/write Error in DRIVE 1" before disappearing, suggesting quasi88 is attempting to load automatically each time the disk image is cycled in either direction without a reset or any additional loading instructions being necessary.
Loading the “dot file” in a text editor reveals the content to be:
Code:
Mac OS X 2∞‚ATTR;ö…ˇ‚††com.apple.lastuseddate#PS´iT˛®7This resource fork intentionally left blank ˇˇWhich looks like this on my screen:
HexFiend reveals the file is ~4KB and mostly blank (the two images here are the beginning and end of the file; any/everything in-between is 00):
Trying to get it to load a normal XML file (which the "dot file" was originally attached to) is met with the same error message as trying to load any other non-disk file.
According to the documentation for the PC emulator (which this port does strive to be unchanged from the release it was based on, TMK), quasi88 supports command lines with options and multiple file entries (I would imagine any elf/dol file we use as a plugin must accept command lines to work with WiiFlow, but I'm still new to this and my understanding is still rather basic). I believe it also supports up to 6 disks to be preloaded in this regard. The syntax for command loading is purportedly:
Code:
quasi88 [-option] [image-file [image-No] [image-file [image-No]]]I've also been playing with the config file and noticed that sometimes the emulator overwrites it and other times it does not (this version does not have a button or apparent way to 'save' configuration, though some settings it will remember and others it will not). I have tried adding some settings to it using syntax I've seen in the PC documentation and the source code (which is from a different version than the DOL I'm using, but since I don't have that SC it's the best lead I've got at the moment), however those lines tend to disappear after running the emulator, except for the times they do not disappear.
Also, I checked the ELF file with a hex editor and while it says the config file it's looking for would be config.rc, however if I load with my config file named quasi88.rc, it boots to all it's defaults and creates a whole new quasi88.cfg file.
This calls all file loading into question for me, now. I'm assuming all my BIOS files are loaded, but I really don't know - perhaps that's why cassette loading isn't working. I don't know if they keyboard config file should be .rc like in the source code and hex, or .cfg like what it actually seems to make for its config, or if it might not even look at it at all!
I also have not yet figured out how to get a verbose/log output from this, so there's possibly some info right under my nose that I'm missing...
Last edited by GhaleonX,
