Emulation Dreamcast Emulation?

[A Plus Ric]

Hoo-wee, this got interesting ;D

@ploggy and @ShadowOne333, I got a bit stuck on URetro and figured it'd probably be best to just write individual emulators anyway; code not written specifically for the Wii U can sometimes be a bit of a pain and I was finding libretro cores have exactly that problem. With the hardware the way it is you can have more fun with it porting/writing a proper emu.

@pedro702 has made point 1 exactly. Think about what stuff like that says to developers.

@A Plus Ric woooooow i hope you aren't calling me a lazy bipolar
(Not that there's anything wrong with being bipolar, more that I'm just not bipolar. I am pretty lazy, though.)

Both of you - Sound support does not an emulator make.

@JasonH I don't really have any connections to Wii devs and I'm fairly sure none of the other guys do; though we'd love to have anyone that's interested. Try #wiiubru on Freenode, that's where most of us hang out (although you can probably understand that there isn't much going on over there)

@shinyquagsire23 That 2D sample looks amazing. Hopefully I can start understanding GX2 now that you've made some simpler examples.

Everyone - I was feeling pretty down when I wrote my last post, I'm not actually depressed or anything.
Also people please don't guilt-trip me through PayPal I'll just stop accepting payments kthnx

(schemes a NES emulator that only does the CPU and sound; no graphics)

I wasn't calling you bi polar lol. I was stating that I'm being attacked like I'm one of those jerks that talk smack hard-core as if they were bi polar. I was more stating on the fact that basically one person is doing it. So 1 person out of all these doing it. Is hard to be motivated and keep interest. I mean that in the sense of why I stated the way I did. 1 person doing all the work esp not just porting something but trying to do something different for it. It is something that to be done in a timely fashion needs motivation and interest by the dev. Which is why I said ever or in a while. Maybe you all are just expecting this as a direct bash at you because that's how people here roll (Always bashing devs directly like it would get them what they want sooner)?

I know the drill, I spend my free time writing scripts for an old outdated mmorpg. I work 2 jobs and do buying and selling on the side. But my interest is in making cool odd mods for that game so I do them almost daily cuz I enjoy it, so please don't think I'm just a rube looking to get you to finish it by stating an opinion. I'm not gonna be upset either way like some here.

 

[DutchyDutch]

Stupid idea: but it would be cool if devs had a way of earning money with their projects, so they have more reasons and motivation to do it. Imagine a crowdfunding project for the retroarch devs so they can buy a Wii U and port it over to the Wii U. Or some smaller scale ones. Or maybe a site, where devs get paid ad-rev for their downloads.

 

[EmulateLife]

Stupid idea: but it would be cool if devs had a way of earning money with their projects, so they have more reasons and motivation to do it. Imagine a crowdfunding project for the retroarch devs so they can buy a Wii U and port it over to the Wii U. Or some smaller scale ones. Or maybe a site, where devs get paid ad-rev for their downloads.

The problem with that is then you'd get 100 people claiming to be working on it, you wouldn't necessarilly know who to give the money to because some of them would be simply looking to steal money. Of course if someone is well established and you trust them it may work who knows but once money's involved it changes things immediately.

 

[myunholysins]

The problem with that is then you'd get 100 people claiming to be working on it, you wouldn't necessarilly know who to give the money to because some of them would be simply looking to steal money. Of course if someone is well established and you trust them it may work who knows but once money's involved it changes things immediately.

Or you could have a pool, like a list of things that we want to see and who ever comes forward and releases it gets the money from that pool and if know one comes forward in a year than every just gets there money back. Kinda like a bounty. And we can have email receipts, so we know who gave how much money for which pool.

For example say iosu is at the top it has 100 dollars in it, and who relases it gets it. Obviously not someone who leaked it but who's ever work it was and if it was multiple of people that worked on it, it be split. An if in due time no one relases it. The people that put there money in get there money back. Personally for me I want to see a GameCube emualtor or nintendont over on the wii u with 1080p, but a lot people say it's impossible. I would def put money towards something like that though.

 

[Baphomet]

This thread has nearly turned into a useful discussion and a bit of insight into things. D:

I'm gonna agree with those who say the main reason Wii U Homebrew development isn't a hotbed of activity is simply down to morale. Some of the comments I've seen posted over this and various discussions are just horrifically negative, occasionally venturing into the territory of being console warz™ garbage you'd get on GameFaqs. I don't think money/donations is the issue here either. Sure, $20 here or there is neat. But, is it worth it if you think something you might make for the Wii U would get "dis homebrew sux, make a PS2 emu brah" + "I donated. ur a lying clown" type of comments?

My only experiences of homebrew devs have been QuarkTheAwesome & Brienj. They come across as nice people with good senses of humour and they are always helpful if you have a question or two. The board also has a ton of people who spend time making faqs and there are those who take the time out for people who have some pretty niche problems. The building blocks for getting more people interested are there imo.

The negativity and unrealistic expectations has to be kept in check if some part of you cares about these things happening. I'm not saying you have to be an ass kisser. But, getting all upset about one incident where something you expected to happen, didn't happen, that is dumb. Time to let go. We also aren't going to get all these emulators over night, especially the more advanced ones. Regardless of whatever of logic you might have of it being "easy to do".

I have a dream. A dream where some person makes a Commodore 64 emulator for fun and the first comment on these boards isn't "wtf. make a gacube emeleter. its easee jus port it".

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

@the_randomizer Don't read into my post too much - you'll notice I said it's better to make individual system emulators and that is exactly what's happening. It's just that (afaik) none of us actually have any experience with emulation and most of us are working on weirdly specific things that don't show many results (me: swkbd/dmaesploit, brienj: GX2 [He actually seems to understand it! :0] etc. etc.) It is happening slowly though.

The Wii U is just one of those platforms where it's not so simple to just copy-paste an emulator (That's what I did with LiteNESU, we all know how well that worked out) and now I'm getting the hang of this development lark I want to write my own anyway (setting myself up to fail I know, but who else is going to write an emulator in PowerPC Assembly? ). While I will admit I haven't got much done lately I'm trying to get back into it and get some projects done. Watch this space.

 

[the_randomizer]

@the_randomizer Don't read into my post too much - you'll notice I said it's better to make individual system emulators and that is exactly what's happening. It's just that (afaik) none of us actually have any experience with emulation and most of us are working on weirdly specific things that don't show many results (me: swkbd/dmaesploit, brienj: GX2 [He actually seems to understand it! :0] etc. etc.) It is happening slowly though.

The Wii U is just one of those platforms where it's not so simple to just copy-paste an emulator (That's what I did with LiteNESU, we all know how well that worked out) and now I'm getting the hang of this development lark I want to write my own anyway (setting myself up to fail I know, but who else is going to write an emulator in PowerPC Assembly? ). While I will admit I haven't got much done lately I'm trying to get back into it and get some projects done. Watch this space.

Like, believe me, I'm trying my damnedest to not be negative about the scene, it's just there's so much uncertainty I don't know what to believe or follow when it comes to the scene, you know? With regards to the Wii U scene, I know things aren't so cut and dry, the PPC/GX2 ASM is a nightmare to code for and understand. I just wish I actually took my college programming classes more seriously three years back, but I digress, maybe then I could help, I don't know. That being said, I hope more people can hop on board as emulators shouldn't have to fall on only a handful of capable people, that just makes it all the more stressful.

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

Like, believe me, I'm trying my damnedest to not be negative about the scene, it's just there's so much uncertainty I don't know what to believe or follow when it comes to the scene, you know? With regards to the Wii U scene, I know things aren't so cut and dry, the PPC/GX2 ASM is a nightmare to code for and understand. I just wish I actually took my college programming classes more seriously three years back, but I digress, maybe then I could help, I don't know. That being said, I hope more people can hop on board as emulators shouldn't have to fall on only a handful of capable people, that just makes it all the more stressful.

GX2 is a nightmare, but you don't have to use it. Personally I've been using OSScreen and planning on getting brienj to do all the GX2 work for me (<3) although now shinyquagsire has made a simpler example I may be able to learn it myself ;D

Same deal with PPC ASM - you can just use C (or even C++ if you never want to debug anything ever) which is much easier. This lot isn't like the good 'ol VC injections, here we're dealing with more normal-looking code.

Lucky I don't really get stressed

 

[shinyquagsire23]

GX2 is a nightmare, but you don't have to use it. Personally I've been using OSScreen and planning on getting brienj to do all the GX2 work for me (<3) although now shinyquagsire has made a simpler example I may be able to learn it myself ;D

Same deal with PPC ASM - you can just use C (or even C++ if you never want to debug anything ever) which is much easier. This lot isn't like the good 'ol VC injections, here we're dealing with more normal-looking code.

Lucky I don't really get stressed

GX2 only sucks getting set up (shaders are a pain to initialize, so are framebuffers, depth buffers, etc). Actually drawing with it is honestly not that bad once you get things to work.

EDIT: Oh yeah and the major pain with shaders is that there is not a single one used in homebrew which actually gives you the source for the shader itself, so the only way to actually use them is to look at the code using the shader or reversing the shader itself. I only managed to make texture2D.gsh work because it was relatively simple.

 

[ShadowOne333]

I love seeing how you guys work together

 

[handy333]

I tried that dc emulator on my smart TV...it's okay...
It ran SA2 decently in the chao world but when things start to speed up (due to sonic) it lags.

Oh wait, that wasn't about the wiiU's version that we are hoping for.
I say this would be a great achievement if possible. The game pad could act as the vmu.