Homebrew Official Retroarch WiiU (wip.)

cugel · Apr 16, 2020

Sonic Angel Knight said:
Well I made sure the rom works on my android before copying it over to the wii u sd card. Though the Android retroarch seem to have way more available "cores" than the wii u offers. Final burn alpha 2012 and Final Burn Neo are the only two on the wii u. Not sure which one I should be using since I just want the most up to date version. I didn't bother with mame cause all of them have lower dates listed so I assume they were outdated compared to FBA.

If the rom is old newer cores may not be able to run it, and the other way around.

FinalBurn NEO is the latest version of FinalBurn. The majority of the devs split off when the dude controlling FinalBurn Alpha licensed it to Capcom without asking them, for that big crazy fighting stick that came out recently.

Just copy over all of the cores from the archive, they aren't very big, and try all the MAME and FinalBurn cores you can. If those don't work, look into downloading the romsets I mentioned in my post up the page. You can find them both on archive.org or other places.

Sonic Angel Knight · Apr 16, 2020

cugel said:
If the rom is old newer cores may not be able to run it, and the other way around.

Okay, honestly ever since I had interest in emulating arcade games, it's been the most complicated thing to do. I never did like using them because of that reason even though there is exclusive games that you can only play on them (due to lack of ports) While playing the arcade version of said games may be better than the ports, it was never worth the frustration of setting this all up. Though I understand what you mean with compatibility, it's just tiresome to try and match your "compatible rom" with a "Compatible emulator"

cugel said:
FinalBurn NEO is the latest version of FinalBurn. The majority of the devs split off when the dude controlling FinalBurn Alpha licensed it to Capcom without asking them, for that big crazy fighting stick that came out recently.

Oh, right. I remember, the capcom home arcade thing.

Didn't know much about this thing using final burn alpha. But this came out last year. That was long time ago since 2012.

cugel · Apr 16, 2020

Sonic Angel Knight said:
Didn't know much about this thing using final burn alpha. But this came out last year. That was long time ago since 2012.

They didn't stop developing FinalBurn Alpha in 2012, that just happens to be the RetroArch core for the 2012 version of FinalBurn Alpha. Retroarch keeps certain cores of old versions of emulators because they know they work with a certain romset and take X amount of horsepower to run.

Sonic Angel Knight · Apr 16, 2020

cugel said:
They didn't stop developing FinalBurn Alpha in 2012, that just happens to be the RetroArch core for the 2012 version of FinalBurn Alpha. Retroarch keeps certain cores of old versions of emulators because they know they work with a certain romset and take X amount of horsepower to run.

Well I tried the Final Burn Neo core and it works properly now. I even got the Neo Geo bios setup to use the Universe Bios 4.0, so that worked out well. Thanks for explaining the difference in cores to me.

MikaDubbz · Apr 16, 2020

While I can get most of the supposedly supported cores for the Wii U version of Retroarch to work, there are a handful of the older school systems I've tried that wont work, has anyone had luck with Wii U Retroarch loading games for: Atari ST, Amiga, MSX, Intellivision, Odyssey 2, Colecovision, and/or ZX Spectrum? Everything else I've tried works just fine, but games for these systems don't seem to work on my Wii U despite the first post saying they're supported on the Wii U.

cugel · Apr 16, 2020

MikaDubbz said:
While I can get most of the supposedly supported cores for the Wii U version of Retroarch to work, there are a handful of the older school systems I've tried that wont work, has anyone had luck with Wii U Retroarch loading games for: Atari ST, Amiga, MSX, Magnavox Intellivision, Odyssey 2, Colecovision, and/or ZX Spectrum? Everything else I've tried works just fine, but games for these systems don't seem to work on my Wii U despite the first post saying they're supported on the Wii U.

Some of those are complicated to get running, especially the ones that are computers like the Amiga and the ST and the MSX. I haven’t gotten most of them going myself but I know the first step is getting the proper bios files. Google the names of the cores and you should find more in depth solutions to getting them working.

MikaDubbz · Apr 16, 2020

cugel said:
Some of those are complicated to get running, especially the ones that are computers like the Amiga and the ST and the MSX. I haven’t gotten most of them going myself but I know the first step is getting the proper bios files. Google the names of the cores and you should find more in depth solutions to getting them working.

Ah, not sure why I didn't think to look for bios files. I'll start there.

Incure · Apr 16, 2020

Now knowing Rgui is the gui to use on the Wii U because of the acceptable speed, i went on tweaking it. My experience on the Wii U is that the aspect ratio's with the gui's is a hit or miss. If you want 16:9 menu's and games that are 4:3 in there 4:3 aspect ratio, then use the following settings:

Settings → video → aspect ratio: "Core provided"
Settings → user interface → appearance → menu aspect ratio: "16:9"
- lock menu aspect ratio: "OFF"

Game/playlists selections will be 16:9, only the quick menu is 4:3. This is contrary to the official rgui manual, where the setting: "Fit Screen" "Integer Scale" should had fixed the quick menu aspect ratio. But not on the Wii U...

16:9 menus also means you can display Thumbnails en Boxarts without overlapping the gamenames. The Wii U can display decent quality and speed with the "Bilinear or Sinc/Lanczos3" setting as downscaling method in the settings. Unfortunately 3D box art is not transparent with Rgui (only Wii U issue?), so for now I use the "Hack the kernel" menu color theme, because that's the only build-in theme that has a black background so it hides the missing transparency a bit. It looks a bit ugly with the green font, so in the future I gonna make a custom Rgui theme for this and share it here.

RetroArch with a (tweaked) Rgui is in my opinion so far the best setup for the Wii U. Losing most eye-candy but still with thumbnails/boxarts, stable and acceptable speed. Next step is finding my SD card corruption problems and enable cheats for all systems on the Wii U.

QuarkTheAwesome · Apr 16, 2020

Sorry, are we saying XMB doesn't have an acceptable speed? I remember it being fine last I tried (which admittedly was quite some time ago) - is this a recent change? or do y'all just have very large playlists?

@cugel Not sure exactly what you want me to put there - there has been some changes to the assets directory though, a few flips between retroarch/assets and retroarch/media, so folks may end up with their files in the wrong place. I believe assets/ is where it's "meant" to be.

MikaDubbz · Apr 16, 2020

QuarkTheAwesome said:
Sorry, are we saying XMB doesn't have an acceptable speed? I remember it being fine last I tried (which admittedly was quite some time ago) - is this a recent change? or do y'all just have very large playlists?

@cugel Not sure exactly what you want me to put there - there has been some changes to the assets directory though, a few flips between retroarch/assets and retroarch/media, so folks may end up with their files in the wrong place. I believe assets/ is where it's "meant" to be.

XMB works fine, haven't noticed much of any difference in speed for the various guis, not sure what they're on about. Having said that, I personally prefer glui on Wii U (with material ui dark theme and text size increased 30%). I'd rather use Ozone, but that still has the bug on Wii U where the game titles disappear when you make the game titles the main focus.

Incure · Apr 16, 2020

QuarkTheAwesome said:
Sorry, are we saying XMB doesn't have an acceptable speed? I remember it being fine last I tried (which admittedly was quite some time ago) - is this a recent change? or do y'all just have very large playlists?

I now tested multiple versions from 1.7.7 till 1.8.5 and all of them have very slow loading times with XMB (noticeable with first time startup, loading a game and returning to the menu). And yes, I have fairly large playlists (complete collections of the classic systems) but that is in my opinion also the beauty of RetroArch.

Ozone is also pretty fast (and now the default menu from Libretro), but indeed has a display title bug. I think the average user will appreciate the speed of rgui and can be scared away with using XMB on the Wii U. When I started with RetroArch I even thought it crashed because of the long black screen...

MikaDubbz · Apr 16, 2020

Incure said:
I now tested multiple versions from 1.7.7 till 1.8.5 and all of them have very slow loading times with XMB (noticeable with first time startup, loading a game and returning to the menu). And yes, I have fairly large playlists (complete collections of the classic systems) but that is in my opinion also the beauty of RetroArch.

Ozone is also pretty fast (and now the default menu from Libretro), but indeed has a display title bug. I think the average user will appreciate the speed of rgui and can be scared away with using XMB on the Wii U. When I started with RetroArch I even thought it crashed because of the long black screen...

I just double checked myself. I have about 15 rather large playlists, and I didn't notice much of any real difference in loading speeds for the same games between rgui, XMB, or glui. Maybe you might wanna try another SD card? Also are you loading your roms from your SD card or a USB drive? I have a large SD card, and all my roms are on it, that might make a difference.

Incure · Apr 16, 2020

MikaDubbz said:
I just double checked myself. I have about 15 rather large playlists, and I didn't notice much of any real difference in loading speeds for the same games between rgui, XMB, or glui. Maybe you might wanna try another SD card? Also are you loading your roms from your SD card or a USB drive? I have a large SD card, and all my roms are on it, that might make a difference.

I made an earlier post about using a FAT32 formatted harddrive (used for Wii games) for trying to speed up the loading times. But that made it even much worse. I'm using a class 10 256GB SD card (this one). One day will try another one or make a video of the loading times, but for now I'm satisfied with the loading speeds in combination with rgui.

MikaDubbz · Apr 16, 2020

Incure said:
I made an earlier post about using a FAT32 formatted harddrive (used for Wii games) for trying to speed up the loading times. But that made it even much worse. I'm using a class 10 256GB SD card (this one). One day will try another one or make a video of the loading times, but for now I'm satisfied with the loading speeds in combination with rgui.

Oh, then I dunno what the deal is, my SD card is 512GB, and I absolutely can't see any real difference between the gui load times on Wii U's retroarch.

cugel · Apr 16, 2020

QuarkTheAwesome said:
Sorry, are we saying XMB doesn't have an acceptable speed? I remember it being fine last I tried (which admittedly was quite some time ago) - is this a recent change? or do y'all just have very large playlists?

@cugel Not sure exactly what you want me to put there - there has been some changes to the assets directory though, a few flips between retroarch/assets and retroarch/media, so folks may end up with their files in the wrong place. I believe assets/ is where it's "meant" to be.

The tutorial currently says the folder is media when it's assets.

Also, instructing people to use the online downloader as a first choice is a bad idea because retroarch in Wii U currently downloads assets.zip and doesn't unzip them so that doesn't work.

In addition the default menu is Ozone and it's messed up and difficult to navigate so that needs some kind of explanation if it's not going to be fixed. And xmb is difficult to navigate without the assets in the proper place.

QuarkTheAwesome · Apr 16, 2020

Load time folks: are y'all using Mocha or CBHC or equivalent? If I remember right RetroArch can take advantage of the raw access those CFWs offer, which is a lot faster in most cases. As a CBHC user it never quite worked for me though, I'm told I'm the only one with this issue so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

cugel · Apr 17, 2020

I guess I should also say that while I have good loadtimes, I'm not using very many playlists and no thumbnails. Also using CBHC.

NotReallySteve · Apr 17, 2020

NotReallySteve said:
Anyone got either an M30 (with usb dongle) or the mega drive mini pad controllers working with this?

Never mind, as usual, figured it out myself.

Sonic Angel Knight · Apr 17, 2020

QuarkTheAwesome said:
Load time folks: are y'all using Mocha or CBHC or equivalent?

Is there a difference in using... whatever your mocha or CBHC is than the haxchi that is commonly used?

n00bsaib0t · Apr 18, 2020

QuarkTheAwesome said:
Load time folks: are y'all using Mocha or CBHC or equivalent? If I remember right RetroArch can take advantage of the raw access those CFWs offer, which is a lot faster in most cases. As a CBHC user it never quite worked for me though, I'm told I'm the only one with this issue so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I recently switched from Mocha to CBHC and if there is a difference in load times I don't notice it. It takes maybe 5 seconds to boot into an old console ROM and maybe 10-15 to boot into an arcade ROM. I personally don't mind the short wait. This is on both XMB and Ozone, although I'm using XMB right now because they just refuse to fix the playlist bug that has been in Ozone since they added it to the WiiU version.

Homebrew Official Retroarch WiiU (wip.)

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