Fixing vWii Mode

I think you can use NUSGrabber.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/download-the-new-nusgrabbergui.411228/

 

I just tried it, but I don't see a way to download system updates.

 

There's this, but I don't know if it still works.
https://github.com/zhuowei/NUS-Downloader-WiiU

 

I believe that it's basically the same thing, as they direct you to the title database listing: https://wiiubrew.org/wiki/Title_database

Of course, if the updates aren't listed there, they're gonna be hard to find by just trying different combinations over and over.

This is all rather frustrating, as some people clearly know how to get the updates because they datamined them in the past.

 

Just reporting that I do not have the green chroma bleeding / fringing issue on my WiiU's vWii, as shown in the Pokemon Colosseum image in OP.

I also do not have the issue with the uneven clumps of scanlines in the 240p test suite; each line is distinct and evenly spaced.

I do notice the following issues:

• Test suite: the tops of the white circles being cut off on that pattern. However that appears to be a vertical position offset issue, not an issue with bad scaling algorithm causing uneven pixel spacing.
  
• Test suite: the red highlighted menu text appears to bleed past the boundaries of the text (chroma subsampling?). However on the colour bleed test pattern, each red vertical line is still clearly distinct.
• vWii's HDMI output contains a thick border of black pixels around the edge of the screen (overscan compensation?) which requires manually changing the TV's overscan setting when switching between WiiU and vWii (unless you are happy enabling TV's overscan for both vWii and WiiU).
• vWii's picture for Wii games appears filtered / softened to a moderate degree. It is not as clean and raw as vWii Nintendont outputting Gamecube games in progressive with deflicker disabled, though it is not as bad as Gamecube with deflicker filter enabled. Subjectively, it seems about half way between Gamecube+deflicker and Gamecube+progressive.
  
• vWii Nintendont seems to have a pixel aspect ratio issue where games are being output at 640x480 instead of 720x480, causing round objects to appear horizontally squished / elliptical. This can be corrected by setting video width to 720, but it doesn't work for all games, eg. not working for Mario Sunshine and Star Fox Adventures.

My console is an Australian WiiU running 5.5.2 and vWii original IOS58.
On WiiU I am running Haxchi; on vWii I'm running Homebrew Launcher, Nintendont, and 240p test suite.
I am launching Wii games directly from WiiU's menu, not from vWii. Maybe that has something to do with it? i.e NOT using a vWii USB Loader.
My HDMI output is locked at 1080p60 for everything. It is not feasible to change this as it takes an eternity to enter WiiU's system menu and change the resolution back and forth when alternating between WiiU and vWii.

 

On the linearity screen, is a perfect circle shown? I.e.: does it measure 10cm (for example) in diameter no matter where you measure it from?

 

Yes (measured with a ruler - 144mm on my screen from top to bottom and left to right).

On the subject of Gamecube's pixel aspect, I will have to set up my original Gamecube console and take some measurements with a ruler, because it is driving me nuts! Some game assets seem to look subjectively 'correct' at 640x480, such as the dimensions of character faces on 3D models. However 2D elements, such as HUD and some textures, seem to be obviously nonsymmetrical unless stretched to 720x480. I am starting to suspect the game dev's may not have been aware of this and created some assets on square pixel monitors (eg. PC monitor) and imported them directly into the game without previewing them on a non-square 720x480 (NTSC) display. I seem to recall a Youtube video talking about a similar issue with SNES games too, where circles aren't circles because the game dev's don't realise the final NTSC/PAL output is going to be non-square pixels.

edit: this was the one:

 

If your TV handles analog inputs correctly, then the GameCube's 240p test suite should also give a perfectly round circle. I calibrated my CRT's geometry with the same program on the Wii, and I realized that my capture card input had to be squished to be 654x480 to look right, not 640x480. This is because the Wii and GameCube have a 10:11 pixel aspect ratio, so the horizontal scale needs to be adjusted by multiplying by 10/11.Note that this resolution capture is only right for 720px-wide content, of which there is little.

However, as far as I know, things work like this: the game has an internal resolution and an external resolution. See here (https://gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=Swiss/Forced_Progressive_Compatibility_List) for more info.

For example, Double Dash runs at 608x448 internally and 666x448 externally. As far as I understand it, the Video Interface scales the video horizontally. With a pixel aspect ratio of 10:11, the VI makes the video width 1.1 times what the internal resolution is. And if we take 666/608, we get 1.09539473684210.... essentially a negligible difference. This signal is then sent to the TV, and the CRT tries its best to draw 666 pixels per scanline, drawing 448 scanlines.

But wait a second, 666x448 isn't 4:3! That's OK, because not all CRTs can display 666x448 without overscan. The important thing is that the TV itself is the frame, and that frame is 4:3.

Now, for games running at 640x480, such as Wind Waker, this is where I get confused. Why does this game output 660x480? I'm not really sure. I don't know if that wiki's information is completely correct, and I don't remember what my Carby with GCVideo reported for resolutions.

Really, someone else more advanced in knowledge of this than me should talk about it.

The bottom line is that developers should've tested their circles on CRTs and known about the 10:11 pixel aspect ratio, because I'm pretty sure that it was part of the documentation given to them.

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Hai (the Wii USB/eMMC launcher) is any different from regular Wii mode, and both have noticeable chroma artifacts.
At least I can prove that 480p does lose some detail.



Also, it looks like even my RVL-CPU-01 has a bit of chroma bleeding, but it's not really noticeable in reality. Maybe it's caused by my capture device + AVC chroma subsampling at 480p. Either way, the artifacts are different (way more noticeable and green-ish on Wii U).

 

Thanks for that info! I saw this post as well which backs up what you are saying:

However this slightly conflicts with my own measurement of in-game circles which appear symmetrical when width = 720, and ever so slightly squished when width = 704.

As I have no capture card, here is a Photoshop simulation of what I'm observing.


Nintendont width = 720; circle measures symmetrical with ruler on screen


Nintendont width = 704; circle measures slightly unsymmetrical
Photoshop: image width reduced to 98% (704/720)


Nintendont width = Auto / 640; obvious aspect problem
Photoshop: image width reduced to 89% (640/720)

However, since I tend to believe the claim about 10:11 pixel ratio, I lean towards 704 being the correct width, with the assumption that the artistic intent of the HUD is that the circle is ever so slightly squished.

 

It's 100% correct. I personally gathered it using a debugger.

 

Hi folks !

Does anyone here have never though that the issue come from anamorphic 16:9 handled by the Wii U ?
It seems like an evidence for me, but maybe I’m wrong...

I haven’t a softmoded Wii U yet, but still play my original Wii games on Wii U setting to 480p 4:3. In that way, there is no Chroma Shift, and it’s outputting Rec 601 as expected. (However, I haven’t verify the overscan and the amount of pixels cropped on each side, maybe this issue still remains...)

So basically if I’m right, to play in 16:9, we got to output as intented in a 720x480 4:3 frame and let the TV stretch to 16:9.
If I had a modded Wii U, I will seek in that way :
(I cant post link yet.. I’m talking about « Forcing 4:3 display in Wii retail VC injections » thread on this forum )

Edit : I've verified there is no problem of overscan in 480p 4:3. However, the Wii U output a standard DTV 480p frame (720x480) and the Wii in 4:3 only uses the inner 640x480 of it (resulting in an aspect ratio that is slightly too narrow). It's the same issue as the Dreamcast aspect ratio pecularities in progressive. Perhaps, using the Wii via YUV in 480p 4:3 appears to be the same on certain TV.

 

Can you think of a reason as to why Wind Waker renders 640x480 and then outputs 660x480 while Luigi's Mansion renders 640x480 and then outputs 640x480?

— Posts automatically merged - Please don't double post! —

Do you only have a Wii U? I can help test with a Wii running Nintendont and Swiss, but we have to decide on one game to test. We also have to be 100% sure that the game renders what is supposed to be a perfect circle or square.

One game that comes to mind is Twilight Princess, as it has an aspect ratio and brightness check before starting your game. The boxes on that screen are supposed to be squares.

 

I couldn't tell you, but Wind Waker uses an aspect ratio of 1.28:1 for its perspective projection. So it is closer to correct by the end.

 

Twilight Princess sounds ideal; I'll report back tomorrow with exact measurements of that pattern.

I anticipate the pattern will display correctly on your Wii, since I presume Wii outputs 480p which is already nonsquare pixels (same as GameCube) whereas WiiU has to convert to square pixels 1080p.

I can set WiiU to 480p as well, and solve the geometric distortion, however as I mentioned in the Nintendont thread, this has a dealbreaking side effect of downscaling the game's internal resolution to 540x480 since the game's 4:3 raster is pillarboxed inside the 720x480 16:9 raster. Trying to workaround this with Nintendont's WiiU widescreen setting doesn't work, and results in the same geometric distortion for some reason — in theory it should work though.

 

Where/How did you find the "downscaling internal resolution to 540x480" thing ?

Edit : I've also edited my post above

 

Ok, I made my measurements. Given that I'm on a CRT, I calibrated geometry with the 240p Test Suite, but I can only really get good geometry in the center, so I measured the center square. I am running in 480i over composite, but that shouldn't make a difference for the purposes of these tests.

Confession time: for the "Auto" tests, I measured from the middle of the vertical line on the left of side of the square to the middle of the vertical line on the right side. However, this shouldn't affect the results too much, as the difference in VI widths should be obvious at a glance and in measurements. It doesn't really matter if you measure from the inside of the square or the outside as long as you keep your measurements consistent.

Swiss r1026:
Auto - 4.6cm x 4.6cm
1:1 - 4.4cm x 4.6cm
704 - 5.0cm x 4.6cm
720 - 5.2cm x 4.6cm

Nintendont (5.486, I think -- after the BBA emulation update)
Auto - 4.6cm x 4.6cm
1:1 - N/A
704 - 5.0cm x 4.6cm
720 - 5.2cm x 4.6cm

These results fall in line with your expectations. The "Auto" setting in both Nintendont and Swiss seems to just allow the game to set its own VI width, as it normally does. I suspect that the 1:1 mode is simply the 608x448 internal resolution of Twilight Princess without any VI correction.

@NoobletCheese, if the Wii U handles VI scaling or some other step of the scaling process wrongly, then you should get different results from mine, but with different dimensional values. Please test in 480p, 720p, and 1080p if you can.

 

Thanks, here are mine for comparison:


640 - 80x85 (too skinny)
666 - 85x85 (perfect — agrees with wiki page 666x448)
704 - 89x85 (too fat)
720 - 91x85 (too fat)
Auto - 85x85 (perfect)

So I am surprised to find the Auto width setting of Nintendont is in fact working and necessary, for this game at least.

May I ask a favour — are you able to try Skies of Arcadia Legends NTSC, and measure the circle on the battle HUD?
It takes about 2 minutes from 'Start Game' to the first battle.
That game runs at 640x480 according to the wiki.


Another thing I noticed is that for GameCube games I have some red chroma bleeding to the effect where the left edge of a red square has a column of black pixels, and its right edge has a column of red pixels extending past the square boundary. Some kind of issue with chroma alignment/delay, perhaps the CrCb channels are not perfectly in sync with Y channel or something. The wider I stretch the image with Nintendont's width setting, the worse it gets, so that's another reason I should stick to using Auto width and just accept the geometry for how it is. Out of curiosity I might try component cables with the WiiU and see what that produces.

 

Skies of Arcadia Legends is a Dreamcast port, and games on that system assumed square pixels despite using Rec. 601.

 

Yep, even without very accurate measurements, I can see that the "circle" is taller than it is wide: about 8.3cm x 8.8cm.