The other issue I believe we have with attracting developer support is that 1) we have no guarantee that a wiiu level exploit will be released, and given (1) that 2) 88mb of ram is the limiting resource in vWii, not the processors. There's simply nothing (or very little) to get excited about a 3 core capable vWii without also getting access to more RAM. I ran OtherOS on PS3 for the brief period that sony allowed it, and it was almost completely useless with 256mb of ram, with a further 256mb of swap from the dedicated vram.
If there could be a way to expose some of the WiiU ram to vWii, there might be more people attracted to this project. I get the feeling this might be possible from the WiiU side of the equation, bu f0f has clearly expressed their lack of interest in doing any of that sort of work themselves. Again, chicken and egg.
This does bring me another thought, however. I wonder how much work it would be to make the needed modifications to the WiiU side that would expose its hardware to the vWii. Then attack further homebrew from the vWii with enhanced iOSes aware of the wider hardware. In essence, altering the virtual machine to allow greater capabilities. This would allow greater resources to homebrewers while at the same time limiting haxxors ability to pirate WiiU stuff.
I also believe that moving development threads off of GBAtemp would be constructive. Given the way other volunteers have been treated by this community, I don't blame others for not wanting to get involved and expose themselves to the entitled vitriol this place generates. There is currently no hype here around the WiiU, and that's partial because anytime someone asks "could X happen" they are immediately shut down with "no", usually followed by "stfu noob" or some reasonable facsimile thereof. The community has no idea what a WiiU level hack will allow, to the point where we can't even imagine what it would allow. Some of the greatest tricks on the Wii didn't happen until long after the initial exploit was exposed. DIOS MIOS was supposed to be impossible, until months after its source was released and new ideas got involved. Now it exists. For years people said it was impossible to use classic contollers on gamecube games, and then Devolution happened, again years after the first exploit.
You can't predict how a homebrew community may or may not organically rise. I have no idea how to go about reverse engineering the WiiU OS, even if I had access. And I bet there are tons of hackers who are active now who had no idea how to reverse engineer the gamecube when its first exploits were revealed, but once the exploit was made available they looked into it, became curious, started tinkering, and made things work. We have libogc now because of kids in their bedrooms tinkering. Some of those kids might even be f0f members now. Would any of that have happened if the gamecube exploits were kept secret until interest in homebrew reached an arbitrary threshold? I think not. Did piracy happen on the GC early on? It sure did. But that didn't stop the small minority of hackers who had little interest in the piracy and more interest in making new hardware do new tricks. It also didn't bury the Gamecube commercially (Nintendo did that all on their own).
Even f0f example of the PS3, homebrew wasteland that it is, has increased signs of life the more time that goes by. MultiMan might primarily be a tool for launching backups, but its has other features including a place to download retroarch and other emulators from. I think I read recently that the open source PS3 sdk has had several major updates. Before multiman dominated the scene there were lots of ports like mednafen. And then there's the showtime multimedia browser. NTFS support has been written in. And this is the PS3 scene, which many consider to be the absolute worst example of homebrew on a console. Things are happening.
Release of the WiiU exploit will crack open the floodgates. It might result in mostly piracy early on, but what console exploit doesn't. The homebrew will happen, especially given the potential the second screen will afford. imagine XBMC that you can launch and control straight from the gamepad. Imagine a DS emulator that is actually true to the DS experience. Imagine a twitchtv app to do what Nintendon't! That type of innovation has always been the purpose of cracking proprietary hardware, hasn't it? To make the hardware do things that the corporate suits deemed unsuitable or didn't think of at all.
WiiU deserves that chance. The WiiU community deserves a chance to exist. 30+ people hold the key, but are all disinterested. Give the key to an interested party and see what starts happening.
