Hacking Dreamcast on Wii

[Extreme Coder]

There are 2 factors that decide this:

- Developer interest. You can sit all day around here discussing whether it's feasible or not, but an emulator is certainly not going to write itself.

- Feasibility. I can't really say for sure, but I really doubt the Wii can emulate the Dreamcast perfectly and with sound, but I might be wrong. The Wii is a bit more powerful than an Xbox 1, and that hasn't seen a DC emu AFAIK. and if an emu does happen, it will most probably be a port of one of the ones already available on the PC, since I doubt someone will bother writing a Dreamcast emulator from scratch for the Wii.

This is what I think atleast

 

[Hadrian]

All machines are 32bits my friend, there is no such machine as 64bits or 128bits yet.

Not heard of an Atari Jaguar then?

 

[Screemer]

All machines are 32bits my friend, there is no such machine as 64bits or 128bits yet.
Not heard of an Atari Jaguar then?

or about nintendo 64:

n64 specs

CPU 64-Bit MIPS R4300i RISC (93,75 MHz)
GPU 64-Bit RCP (62,5 MHz)

 

[LightyKD]

Nice to know my thread is still going but seriously... lets talk about what would be needed to make Dreamcast on Wii a reality. Would it be possible to port one of the PC/Linux emulators to the Wii Also, I move for having ISO files load off the disc but will settle for SD loading if ISO loading from disc is too hard for the developer and I'm more than willing to be a beta tester

 

[Extreme Coder]

Nice to know my thread is still going but seriously... lets talk about what would be needed to make Dreamcast on Wii a reality. Would it be possible to port one of the PC/Linux emulators to the Wii Also, I move for having ISO files load off the disc but will settle for SD loading if ISO loading from disc is too hard for the developer and I'm more than willing to be a beta tester

Did you miss my post?

 

[beamquaker]

just buy one they go for pennys and they play copied games (i mean back ups) out the box . i love my old dc it died well before its time . as for emulating it on a wii i cant see it . i would like to see sega cd psx i have loads of games for these

 

[WhiteWingedKnigh]

The Wii isn't "barely" more powerful than the PSP. The PSP struggles with full N64 emulation while the Wii can pull it off no problem. The PSP is closer in power to the Dreamcast honestly, but never close to as the Wii. The PSP clocked is 333mhz, the Wii is actually around the original Xbox....720MHZ is the unofficial number going around.

How is this 'barely' more powerful than the PSP? That's like double. wtf @ petty Wii trolling.

Lol, why do people look at the numbers and compare!

The Wii's CPU Completely destroys Xbox's Intel, Why? Its two completely different architectures! The Cpu in Wii is a PowerPc Chip, While the Cpu in the Xbox is a x86 Chip, The PowerPc utterly destroys the Xbox's x86 chip in every single thing possible, processing, physics, speed, performance, anything you can think of, The Wii can produce shaders and near next-gen quality graphics.

The Shader support isn't built in the Wii Gpu, but it definitely can produce them through the TEV (Texture Environment Unit) But the TEV is a pain in the booty for developers to use, which is why you see a lack of decent looking games, The wii can do everything the Xbox 360 and Ps3 can, but it takes somework and will not be at the Quality of the Big Boys, The Gpu in the wii is just a more powerful GC Gpu. The TEV is programmable but difficult to program, which explains why the Quantum3 Engine is able to use the Wii's Entire TEV Unit and took over a year to make, Now this engine is young and give it sometime, soon we might be able to see almost near exactly Xbox 360 quality if thats possible.

The ATI Hollywood can actually produce "insane fillrates" to use Factor 5's words. Hollywood is capable of a pixel fill-rate of almost 972 mega pixels. Having such a high fill-rate capability means that the Wii can perform advanced shaders, advanced texture filtering and advanced multi-layer texture effects better than the Gamecube and any last gen console could do.

BTW if you go to my The Conduit Thread in the Games Discussion you'll see a video show in High Quality (Its a link in the thread in one of my posts.) showing The Conduit off at PAX08 on Sep 8th, 2008, the game looks like a early 360 game and that was 4 months ago, HVS said the graphics have improved and the engine is already improving further.

 

[LightyKD]

The Wii isn't "barely" more powerful than the PSP. The PSP struggles with full N64 emulation while the Wii can pull it off no problem. The PSP is closer in power to the Dreamcast honestly, but never close to as the Wii. The PSP clocked is 333mhz, the Wii is actually around the original Xbox....720MHZ is the unofficial number going around.

How is this 'barely' more powerful than the PSP? That's like double. wtf @ petty Wii trolling.

Lol, why do people look at the numbers and compare!

The Wii's CPU Completely destroys Xbox's Intel, Why? Its two completely different architectures! The Cpu in Wii is a PowerPc Chip, While the Cpu in the Xbox is a x86 Chip, The PowerPc utterly destroys the Xbox's x86 chip in every single thing possible, processing, physics, speed, performance, anything you can think of, The Wii can produce shaders and near next-gen quality graphics.

The Shader support isn't built in the Wii Gpu, but it definitely can produce them through the TEV (Texture Environment Unit) But the TEV is a pain in the booty for developers to use, which is why you see a lack of decent looking games, The wii can do everything the Xbox 360 and Ps3 can, but it takes somework and will not be at the Quality of the Big Boys, The Gpu in the wii is just a more powerful GC Gpu. The TEV is programmable but difficult to program, which explains why the Quantum3 Engine is able to use the Wii's Entire TEV Unit and took over a year to make, Now this engine is young and give it sometime, soon we might be able to see almost near exactly Xbox 360 quality if thats possible.

The ATI Hollywood can actually produce "insane fillrates" to use Factor 5's words. Hollywood is capable of a pixel fill-rate of almost 972 mega pixels. Having such a high fill-rate capability means that the Wii can perform advanced shaders, advanced texture filtering and advanced multi-layer texture effects better than the Gamecube and any last gen console could do.

BTW if you go to my The Conduit Thread in the Games Discussion you'll see a video show in High Quality (Its a link in the thread in one of my posts.) showing The Conduit off at PAX08 on Sep 8th, 2008, the game looks like a early 360 game and that was 4 months ago, HVS said the graphics have improved and the engine is already improving further.

... THANK YOU!!! At least someone else besides me understands the potential of Nintendo's little white box!!!

 

[20clarky08]

@ WhiteWingedKnight + LightyKD

thanks for both your statements, i will be forwarding that last post in a email to my oh so f*ckin annoying PS3 fan boys friends, who classify the Wii as just a kids toy because of the games that have mainly been released so far..

they are yet to take into account the main reason for the kiddish games and also the reason Mr. Nintendo's bank manager is probably alot happier than Mr. Sony's right now..

dont see Nintendo loosing money on each console do we lol

 

[WhiteWingedKnigh]

Hehe, I know my stuff, thank god for me having in interest in Computer Engineering besides Fighting. But the Little White box is a good console, did you know that elbits is more cpu demanding than Half-life 2? theres a physics test in the game where there are 483 books and a whirlwind running at the same time, the game was running pretty smoothly, so that test was a good test for the cpu, meanwhile the GPU was take a nice coffee break!

But the wii is definitely more powerful than people make the wii look, if the TEV wasn't limited in programing The Conduit would look soooooo much better, but for some reason only the 1st party developers know how the thing works from front to back, also ATI limited the TEV programming... Idiots... But what we see on The Conduit is good enough. Don't believe me look at this vid! and this was 4 months ago! and the game graphics have improved since!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWPwVRriIL0&fmt=18

Also the problem with the wii is that custom shaders have to be implemented for the gpu. Developers don't want to go through the trouble of making them, let alone perfecting them.

The TEV unit if it was as powerful as the next gen consoles, would transform the way games look, i mean comon! custom shaders!?! I would kill to develop with that!

 

[djdynamite123]

dont see Nintendo loosing money on each console do we lol

exactly, Nintendo make a true profit, Microsoft and Sony don't well am much...

 

[Dookieman]

The Wii isn't "barely" more powerful than the PSP. The PSP struggles with full N64 emulation while the Wii can pull it off no problem. The PSP is closer in power to the Dreamcast honestly, but never close to as the Wii. The PSP clocked is 333mhz, the Wii is actually around the original Xbox....720MHZ is the unofficial number going around.

How is this 'barely' more powerful than the PSP? That's like double. wtf @ petty Wii trolling.

Lol, why do people look at the numbers and compare!

The Wii's CPU Completely destroys Xbox's Intel, Why? Its two completely different architectures! The Cpu in Wii is a PowerPc Chip, While the Cpu in the Xbox is a x86 Chip, The PowerPc utterly destroys the Xbox's x86 chip in every single thing possible, processing, physics, speed, performance, anything you can think of, The Wii can produce shaders and near next-gen quality graphics.

The Shader support isn't built in the Wii Gpu, but it definitely can produce them through the TEV (Texture Environment Unit) But the TEV is a pain in the booty for developers to use, which is why you see a lack of decent looking games, The wii can do everything the Xbox 360 and Ps3 can, but it takes somework and will not be at the Quality of the Big Boys, The Gpu in the wii is just a more powerful GC Gpu. The TEV is programmable but difficult to program, which explains why the Quantum3 Engine is able to use the Wii's Entire TEV Unit and took over a year to make, Now this engine is young and give it sometime, soon we might be able to see almost near exactly Xbox 360 quality if thats possible.

The ATI Hollywood can actually produce "insane fillrates" to use Factor 5's words. Hollywood is capable of a pixel fill-rate of almost 972 mega pixels. Having such a high fill-rate capability means that the Wii can perform advanced shaders, advanced texture filtering and advanced multi-layer texture effects better than the Gamecube and any last gen console could do.

BTW if you go to my The Conduit Thread in the Games Discussion you'll see a video show in High Quality (Its a link in the thread in one of my posts.) showing The Conduit off at PAX08 on Sep 8th, 2008, the game looks like a early 360 game and that was 4 months ago, HVS said the graphics have improved and the engine is already improving further.

... THANK YOU!!! At least someone else besides me understands the potential of Nintendo's little white box!!!

Sir, you are mistaken. The Wii is not powerful enough to emulate the Dreamcast and never will. It is that simple. The DC runs at 200MHZ SH4 CPU, which is fairly complex and powerful, and really NOT that far away from the Wii in terms of power. They say that you need roughly 4x the amount of power to emulate a system. 200x4 = 800MHZ to emulate, which the Wii does not have, and that is only taking into account the CPU.

Now take into account the GPU on the DC, which is a 100MHZ PowerVR2 chip, which is amazingly powerful and can create all sorts of great effects that even the PS2 could not, and ones that are still used today. Then one would need to emulate the sound processor of the Dreamcast, which is a Yamaha 45mhz chip set. Add all these numbers up, and what do you get? Something that not even the big boy PC's can handle very well. So why are earth would you think a tiny 720MHZ machine can emulate a Dreamcast when even PC's nowdays have trouble with it? And they are 10x+ more powerful then the Wii. Plus the emu's for PC's still are perfect yet.

Of course you can make a Dreamcast emu for the Wii, but it would not be worth your time to play games on. Simply for a tech demonstration would merit such a daunting task.

The short answer is no. It will never happen on the Wii.

I'm a huge Nintendo fanboy, I am just realist. I only own a Wii. I was once like you, I wished for a N64 emu for the DC, fake after fake and multiple developers pounding it into my that it couldn't happen finally made me a person who take reality into account.

 

[TheWon]

The Wii isn't "barely" more powerful than the PSP. The PSP struggles with full N64 emulation while the Wii can pull it off no problem. The PSP is closer in power to the Dreamcast honestly, but never close to as the Wii. The PSP clocked is 333mhz, the Wii is actually around the original Xbox....720MHZ is the unofficial number going around.

How is this 'barely' more powerful than the PSP? That's like double. wtf @ petty Wii trolling.

Lol, why do people look at the numbers and compare!

The Wii's CPU Completely destroys Xbox's Intel, Why? Its two completely different architectures! The Cpu in Wii is a PowerPc Chip, While the Cpu in the Xbox is a x86 Chip, The PowerPc utterly destroys the Xbox's x86 chip in every single thing possible, processing, physics, speed, performance, anything you can think of, The Wii can produce shaders and near next-gen quality graphics.

The Shader support isn't built in the Wii Gpu, but it definitely can produce them through the TEV (Texture Environment Unit) But the TEV is a pain in the booty for developers to use, which is why you see a lack of decent looking games, The wii can do everything the Xbox 360 and Ps3 can, but it takes somework and will not be at the Quality of the Big Boys, The Gpu in the wii is just a more powerful GC Gpu. The TEV is programmable but difficult to program, which explains why the Quantum3 Engine is able to use the Wii's Entire TEV Unit and took over a year to make, Now this engine is young and give it sometime, soon we might be able to see almost near exactly Xbox 360 quality if thats possible.

The ATI Hollywood can actually produce "insane fillrates" to use Factor 5's words. Hollywood is capable of a pixel fill-rate of almost 972 mega pixels. Having such a high fill-rate capability means that the Wii can perform advanced shaders, advanced texture filtering and advanced multi-layer texture effects better than the Gamecube and any last gen console could do.

BTW if you go to my The Conduit Thread in the Games Discussion you'll see a video show in High Quality (Its a link in the thread in one of my posts.) showing The Conduit off at PAX08 on Sep 8th, 2008, the game looks like a early 360 game and that was 4 months ago, HVS said the graphics have improved and the engine is already improving further.

I really don't have anything to add too this. I was just glad to see someone with some common sense when it comes to specs. If people would stop falling in line when it comes to Wii bashing you may learn something..

Now if someone can do a Sega CD emulator I would be really happy.

 

[Project_Zero]

I accidentely a Nintendo.

 

[WhiteWingedKnigh]

The Wii isn't "barely" more powerful than the PSP. The PSP struggles with full N64 emulation while the Wii can pull it off no problem. The PSP is closer in power to the Dreamcast honestly, but never close to as the Wii. The PSP clocked is 333mhz, the Wii is actually around the original Xbox....720MHZ is the unofficial number going around.

How is this 'barely' more powerful than the PSP? That's like double. wtf @ petty Wii trolling.

Lol, why do people look at the numbers and compare!

The Wii's CPU Completely destroys Xbox's Intel, Why? Its two completely different architectures! The Cpu in Wii is a PowerPc Chip, While the Cpu in the Xbox is a x86 Chip, The PowerPc utterly destroys the Xbox's x86 chip in every single thing possible, processing, physics, speed, performance, anything you can think of, The Wii can produce shaders and near next-gen quality graphics.

The Shader support isn't built in the Wii Gpu, but it definitely can produce them through the TEV (Texture Environment Unit) But the TEV is a pain in the booty for developers to use, which is why you see a lack of decent looking games, The wii can do everything the Xbox 360 and Ps3 can, but it takes somework and will not be at the Quality of the Big Boys, The Gpu in the wii is just a more powerful GC Gpu. The TEV is programmable but difficult to program, which explains why the Quantum3 Engine is able to use the Wii's Entire TEV Unit and took over a year to make, Now this engine is young and give it sometime, soon we might be able to see almost near exactly Xbox 360 quality if thats possible.

The ATI Hollywood can actually produce "insane fillrates" to use Factor 5's words. Hollywood is capable of a pixel fill-rate of almost 972 mega pixels. Having such a high fill-rate capability means that the Wii can perform advanced shaders, advanced texture filtering and advanced multi-layer texture effects better than the Gamecube and any last gen console could do.

BTW if you go to my The Conduit Thread in the Games Discussion you'll see a video show in High Quality (Its a link in the thread in one of my posts.) showing The Conduit off at PAX08 on Sep 8th, 2008, the game looks like a early 360 game and that was 4 months ago, HVS said the graphics have improved and the engine is already improving further.

I really don't have anything to add too this. I was just glad to see someone with some common sense when it comes to specs. If people would stop falling in line when it comes to Wii bashing you may learn something..

Now if someone can do a Sega CD emulator I would be really happy.

Only if people understood how to read specs and compare... sigh... Maybe what i posted should clear things up for people who only read numbers and compare them

I.E. Omg the wii has less Mhz than Xbox! the Xbox is better! Stupid Wii!

Boy do I crack up when i hear that....

and they claim to know technology... Pfff....

 

[MrBubbles]

I know this is completely off the topic, but I'm wondering with all the tech spec going around if the Playstation 3 can emulate the Playstation 2. Just theoretically if it's possible, as some of you may know there are some Ps3 models without Ps3 BC and I have one of them.

The 60gb and 20gb original modes had the emotion engine which was the Ps2's GPU. Then the revised 80gb model had software emulation, it removed the emotion engine but a certain component of the Ps2 was left onboard, so the Ps3 did the job of the missing GPU. Would the Ps3, theoretically speaking, have enough power to do both CPU and GPU?

 

[WhiteWingedKnigh]

the graphics in conduit suck and barely compare to xbox1. The devs are kidding themselves.

They suck do they? You must be blind boy!

The Conduit at PAX08 *4 months ago* and the game has improved ever since -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWPwVRriIL0...page&fmt=18

For Those Intrested:

Elebits Physics Test - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41w-bbtVFKE *note* read the side about it

not to get off topic, i do hope a dreamcast emu is made. It is possible, but may take a looooonggg time. by then the new nintendo system would be out... or maybe im exaggerating...

 

[MrBubbles]

the graphics in conduit suck and barely compare to xbox1. The devs are kidding themselves.

They suck do they? You must be blind boy!

The Conduit at PAX08 *4 months ago* and the game has improved ever since -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWPwVRriIL0...page&fmt=18

For Those Intrested:

Elebits Physics Test - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41w-bbtVFKE *note* read the side about it

not to get off topic, i do hope a dreamcast emu is made. It is possible, but may take a looooonggg time. by then the new nintendo system would be out... or maybe im exaggerating...

While it's true that The Conduit does go above the call of duty on the Wii, I fear the AI department will take a hit. Just from video impressions mind you. Developers talk all the time about the 360 giving them an edge for AI, I don't have high hopes for the Wii when The Conduit is using so many resources. I hope I'm misinformed and they can pull it off, but I'm not seeing the advance AI the team hyped for the Conduit.

 

[LightyKD]

Look...enough with the nay saying. Lets see what a dev can do. At lease for the sake of showing off, TRY. I think that the Wii and the community as a whole earns that much. Besides, who know what discoveries would come out of a project like this. Oh and if you think I'm just going to give up on my cause... NOT happening. I deal with naysayers all the time, and time after time I've seen them proven wrong. I'm not giving up

 

[WhiteWingedKnigh]

the graphics in conduit suck and barely compare to xbox1. The devs are kidding themselves.

They suck do they? You must be blind boy!

The Conduit at PAX08 *4 months ago* and the game has improved ever since -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWPwVRriIL0...page&fmt=18

For Those Intrested:

Elebits Physics Test - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41w-bbtVFKE *note* read the side about it

not to get off topic, i do hope a dreamcast emu is made. It is possible, but may take a looooonggg time. by then the new nintendo system would be out... or maybe im exaggerating...

While it's true that The Conduit does go above the call of duty on the Wii, I fear the AI department will take a hit. Just from video impressions mind you. Developers talk all the time about the 360 giving them an edge for AI, I don't have high hopes for the Wii when The Conduit is using so many resources. I hope I'm misinformed and they can pull it off, but I'm not seeing the advance AI the team hyped for the Conduit.

Well they said the game was hard set on EASY for one, and they didn't lie about that, as its shown in the Demo's in small letters. But I also hope the Ai is good, people complained about KZ2's AI about 2 months ago, and they had reason to lol. But it improved, so i hope the same goes for the conduit.