Homebrew DeSmuME Wii - DS Emulator for Wii in development.

[tueidj]

does anyone else remember that they discovered a mic inside the wiimote?
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_...pic_id=25918218
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=165167
old articles are hard to find

No, they found a chip that can do A-D conversion. No actual microphone.

 

[panmusic]

A fuctional DS emulator is a wild dream for a lot of Nintendo fans.But,unless the team expands and very skilled programers join the group,I find it almost impossible to have an emulator without technical glitches and with great compatibility...

I am sure they will.. Have a positive thought.

? have,believe me...
But,I remain cautiously optimistic!

 

[OArikadoO]

For some clarity:

1)WiiDS and the associated screenshot are just a WIP for the emulators GUI. This project was started completely unaware to me but when I saw how far they had come with it Im pleased to say I would certainly accept it and allow them to work our emulator into it. Posting the screenshot was to drum up hype because we had cool stuff working we were almost ready to show everyone (plus seeing the GUI excited me). It apparently worked.

2)DeSmuME Wii is what we're really calling the core half of the project. Right now it will emulate some ROMs. There will not be an official release made until obviously it reaches a much better stage in development. Until then, it will stay on the SVN. Of course, anyone is welcome to contribute to the project or compile and run it.

3)Hate is much appreciated. Please keep it up so we're encouraged to do what the Wii64 team did by privatizing the project and disappearing for a year.

4)Thank you very much to alp63 who posted a video of DeSmuME Wii running the Space Invaders homebrew game earlier in this thread.

 

[oneleggedjack]

time to bring on the flames of hate

 

[panmusic]

Welcome Arikado and thanks for your statement!!!
It is very nice to read your comment as it indicates that you have a clear goal in your mind.
I wish you the best of luck to you and your team.Your google codepage is already bookmarked and I visit it everyday in hope for some progress.
I have 3 question for you.
1)How feasible you think it is a fully working DS emulator for Wii or is this just an experimental project for the present?
2)How are you planning to emulate DS's mic?
3)Can you give us your estimate for the first official release(even for Alpha)?

Thanks again!

 

[spotanjo3]

@OArikadoO,

Please ignore the ignorant for they know nothing about your work. Keep up the good work and we will support you. KEEP UP!

 

[Bladeforce]

Why isnt this in the emulation section?

 

[OArikadoO]

1)How feasible you think it is a fully working DS emulator for Wii or is this just an experimental project for the present?
2)How are you planning to emulate DS's mic?
3)Can you give us your estimate for the first official release(even for Alpha)?

1)Didnt the PSP port of DeSmuME end up being pretty fast? On a basis of hardware, the Wii should be able to surpass. Now that we have a more clear direction of development since things are now working, we'll try to shorten and limit the code as much as possible to free up memory and increase speed and compatibility. So far, every homebrew ROM I've seen run (aside from graphical glitches which will be resolved by optimization for the Wii platform) is running at the same speed Im seeing them run on DeSmuME on my PC. It is very encouraging. We promise to max out the Wii's power and make out code as efficent and small as possible to emulate as best as possible.

2)With very few exceptions, when DS games ask you to shout into the mic ("OBJECTION!") they dont check to see you shouted the correct thing, they just check to see you shouted. I could probably map that effect to a button. Options involving using WiiSpeak or the USB Microphone are being looked into as well.

3)Once we get a few critical issues taken care of (should be no later than tomorrow unless there is serious compatibility issues between the DeSmuME core and the Wii causing more massive rewrites) involving the screen rendering and placement, input, the ability to toggle on and off sound, and add debugging stats for users to look at and report to us to help us, we will begin regularly keeping a compiled dol of the latest revision available to download on the google code page. Right now we are not simply to avoid ubiquitous complaints over things I mentioned in this paragraph that are of our utmost priority to fix/add right now.

 

[MissingNo._]

Just like DSONPSP. Why DeSmuMe? Why not No$Gba?!
Com'on now, really?

Didnt the PSP port of DeSmuME end up being pretty fast?

...are you high? I can't even get it to run Electroplankton.

 

[farcry15]

no$gba isn't open source.

 

[corey89]

What are your plans on screen layout? Will you add an option to either have a gap between the screens or combine the 2 screens?

 

[panmusic]

Thanks for your answers,Arikado!
My positive thoughts have been multiplied!

 

[Bladexdsl]

it's not april fools yet

 

[Jacobeian]

1)How feasible you think it is a fully working DS emulator for Wii or is this just an experimental project for the present?
2)How are you planning to emulate DS's mic?
3)Can you give us your estimate for the first official release(even for Alpha)?

1)Didnt the PSP port of DeSmuME end up being pretty fast? On a basis of hardware, the Wii should be able to surpass. Now that we have a more clear direction of development since things are now working, we'll try to shorten and limit the code as much as possible to free up memory and increase speed and compatibility. So far, every homebrew ROM I've seen run (aside from graphical glitches which will be resolved by optimization for the Wii platform) is running at the same speed Im seeing them run on DeSmuME on my PC. It is very encouraging. We promise to max out the Wii's power and make out code as efficent and small as possible to emulate as best as possible.

DeSmuME on PSP was more a POC, it does not run anything well (3 FPS maybe ?) and is kind of useless

well, I find this great that people tackles the task of porting new emulators but for this one I think you will soon realize that simply getting the SDL port and some basic demos working on Wii pretty much the limit. In fact, I'd say if was probably the easiest task, no matter how hard you found it was.

NDS emulation requires A LOT of cpu and DSemume is not what you call a fast emulator (but it is portable, unlike No$GBA !, before people ask for that one), so to be able to run it decently on the Wii , you would need more than code shrinking or hand optimizations (the compiler doing probably already 95% of the job for us). Unless you can do what Wii64 team did (PPC assembly, dynamic recomping, rendering using directly Wii graphic hardware advanced features...), I have the feeling you will soon face a wall with this project
Again, I do not want to "flame" it, just bringing a little bit of realism in the topic.

 

[9th_Sage]

Huh, maybe it's more feasible than I thought then. I just have bad memories of trying to run apps such as Desmume on my old laptop, it seemed like you needed a decent computer to do DS emulation with.

 

[djbubba2002]

i just ran the EMU , it plays the sound and stuff, but after two mins , i got a stack dump

but keep up the good work ,

 

[9th_Sage]

Oh...

I have nds bios and I found that the nds bios is a firmware.bin. I understand now. Thanks.

The DS BIOS and firmware are not the same thing. Firmware is referring to the menu that comes up when you turn your DS on, and the BIOS is something entirely different. Probably they'll be called something like arm9.bin and arm7.bin (there's one for each CPU in the DS).

 

[OArikadoO]

@Jacobein
IIRC the PSP emulator pulled off speeds of about a little over 20fps on some games. This is impressive becasue I believe the max fps on most DS games is actually 30, not 60. Of course, games like metroid prime hunters probably did hit 3fps ...

@People_Talking_About_BIOS_And/OR_Firmware
Not really necessary to discuss. You don't need either to use DeSmuME Wii.

@People_Testing_Anything
It would be greatly appreciated if you mentioned what revision and what ROM you tested along with your reports.

It seems that right now anything involving 3D will cause a crash just so everyone's aware. I'd be extremely excited to hear if anyone sees any 3D though.

Also, until we get a GPU fix in (this is our real #1 priority right now) we can only emulate homebrew or commercial ROMs. The current revision in the SVN (58 at time of posting) only emulates commercial ROMs for the moment. If you wish to emulate homebrew ROMs instead of commercial ROMs, uncomment line 357 of GPU.cpp

 

[Jacobeian]

@Jacobein
IIRC the PSP emulator pulled off speeds of about a little over 20fps on some games. This is impressive becasue I believe the max fps on most DS games is actually 30, not 60. Of course, games like metroid prime hunters probably did hit 3fps ...

yeah about that, yoshihiro indeed re-used some highly PSP optimized code for that then quickly abandonned the project when he realized he couldn't pull off much more alone...
in fact, he only claimed that he got some games running at 20 fps at some specific point but from what I tried and various user report, no games were actually playable (that means that in-game, they run way much slower)

again, I do not want to discourage you, this is a very good learning experience but you have to realize that to run NDS games in a "playable" way, there is still a HUGE amount of work needed with no garantee it is even possible to achieve decent speed, I hope you have highly skilled Wii developpers with you, those who know how to talk to the CPU and the GX chipset

 

[OArikadoO]

@Jacobeian

You are in no way being discouraging. Your criticisms are ones I challenged myself with from the very beginning. We will certainly be doing a ton of optimization. And there are certainly talented and experienced people on board: One member of our team, dancingninja, actually only does optimization for VBAGX which involves custom emulation methods for games running slow; He has successfully increased playing speeds on a huge number of games. We have also just added baby.lueshi to the team who ported SDL-MAME to the Wii and is already helping us greatly to optimize DeSmuME for the Wii.

Our current plan of action is getting rid of using SDL (which most of DeSmuME is based on) as it takes up way too much of the Wii's memory that we need for emulation.

Rest assured, we will do everything that we can to take this project as far as it can possibly go. We are even beginning extremely preliminary investigations of implementing dynarec emulation over the interpreter emulation we use now.