Homebrew Homebrew Request Thread 2021

WiizNutz

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Wiis are dirt cheap, everywhere, and use less power than a laptop.
Couple of ideas to get them plugged in, useful, and ready to fire up and play.

More of an answer to the question, is the Wii homebrew scene dead?, than a chance at anything actually being coded.
Here is an opportunity to dump your Wii homebrew ideas, in the hope a passing wii coding enthusiast might say

"That is a cool idea, achievable, and I'd have fun working out how to do it"

Maybe the Wii is retro enough to start becoming hip again, maybe a covid induced streak of boredom is enough to give someone the motivation.
Maybe this is where your idea will die.

I'll get the ball rolling

Reasons you could have a Wii plugged in, but the software doesn't exist yet, so you don't.

One

Winamp avs studio, and 'milkdrop', used eq responses and beat detections of music, waveform rendering and reiterating geometries, to create visualisations.
It ran on late ninties PCs, but had scaleable functionality to run on higher end hardware.
There is a vast array, thousands, of user generated scripts, it was a real hobby for people, and there is still a community developing tools, scripts and software.

Implentations of the original software have been ported to various platforms, but not the wii, despite the open source code on github.

It would be cool if the wii could convert a stream from a networked media player, from a plugged in usb mic peripheral, or from an embedded media player.

One A
- In fact, your wii could be your go-to interface between your phone and your amp, hooking in over wifi rather than a minijack cable

Two

A homebrew means to ping the wiimotes, perhaps executed using on-console buttons or a GameCube controller from priiboot, using wiimote one to find wiimote two from homebrew...or sending the audio from a usb mic?
Access to the bluetooth speaker on the wiimote is currently beyond homebrew. Although it has been acheived from pc hardware, something about the documentation, something about the broader understanding, is incomplete.
I've noted elsewhere, but the on board speaker could be a gift for emulating low bit rate samples of retro games

3&4&5 - Linux

Native homebrew might be preferable but not possible. These next couple could use a super small, fast booting, linux image, with only the requisite bits of os loaded.
Would be cool to bea ble to configure bits of the boot script from a homebrew gui, but just the text editor in WiiExplorer could edit parameters.
Could restart to the wii loader on detecting a wiimote.

Three

A NAS client
WiiExplorer has a samba share thing, and there's ftpii, but, while they may have worked in the past, they are now very very unreliable.
This could be highly impactful, because not everyone can afford a dedicated hard drive for the wii. This would enable folks to leave it plugged there, sharing media over a network, without the need to transfer games to an sd card

Four

A torrent client
Piracy is bad. Can i have a torrent client now?

Five

Idle/Screensaver/photo album

The wii is capable of functioning as a static display, holding a display image, message, streaming music or text or a photo album from a network or memory.

One could imagine a common config file, a protocol, for homebrew launcher applications to save their state and launch a screensaver homebrew - after 10 mins of photos - this could, in turn, launch a ftp or torrent client, or shut down.

Six

i've mentioned this before, but mouse emulation with the wiimote. Perhaps dynamically controlling the mouse speed/screen zoom with the nunchuck
This would open up so many games that just are not playable on other consoles

Seven

I've mentioned this before too, but such a massive leap with such little work required - ID software, who made Quake, had a simple scripting language so users could define how inputs defined outcomes.
It would be superb if such a syntax, a simple scripting language could be developed to reassign and scale the many analog outputs of the Wii peripherals to the analog inputs of early consoles and arcade machines.
Use the wiimote as the yoke in starwars, use the balance board to play pong etc...

That's it - i'll be sure to check back with more ideas, waffle with you about things thst will probably never happen, but it's fun to imagine...
 
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BlazeMasterBM

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kaisersozeh

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Well it's not exactly MY idea, but it's something I think would be interesting, is if someone made a WAD for a website through the Internet Channel (but it sends argument to open the specific site)
I think xflak's modmii wii do this - generate a forwarder wad that points the Internet channel to a website.
 

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I think xflak's modmii wii do this - generate a forwarder wad that points the Internet channel to a website.
Not really a wad but if you're using WiiFlow, you can make websites forwarders easily with the bootopera plugin. You just have to edit one file: https://gbatemp.net/threads/wiiflow-internet-bookmark-plugin-pack-with-covers-and-bookmarks.358239/

Regarding the music visualizer, having the source code doesn't really help here. It's mostly tied to the windows winamp code. One could write something on top of existing players like wiimc or mplayer-ce maybe...

There were some good and simple linux distributions like Easy Linux : http://forum.wiibrew.org/read.php?29,68339
The links are dead but could perhaps be found elsewhere. A light torrent client is possible, I'm pretty sure some have done this. There are very few resources left in Wii linux though. I've compiled and tested some emulators few years ago. It was slow and no convenient way to start them(but possible).

One of the emulator missing is the Sharp X68000. That'd be nice to play this Super Mario version. We'd have almost all 8/16 bits versions this way.
 

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Thanks for the responses folks
Well it's not exactly MY idea, but it's something I think would be interesting, is if someone made a WAD for a website through the Internet Channel (but it sends argument to open the specific site)
Did you have a specific site in mind? I remember WAP protocol websites used to work quite well!
Someone should tell Niki Minaj
Like, Flash is over - although the wayback machine organisation was talking about hosting some stuff...
What would be great is if the wayback machine folks hosted flash games in a way that's accessible from a wii...but how to ask the right people to make that happen, even if they would?
Seems possible, at least....

Regarding the music visualizer, having the source code doesn't really help here. It's mostly tied to the windows winamp code. One could write something on top of existing players like wiimc or mplayer-ce maybe...
I had a look round github, not that I could learn much, and there are a few stand alone applications separated from winamp. Kosher open licence. Not sure how active the community is, but there's a lot of work already done. I did note the project derived from 'Milkdrop' was written in C++
You seem like the man to ask, Is that something a Wii could run?
Don't know if this is the same question, but could it just be, like, a reinterpretation of opengl code to gx chip code, if such a thing is possible?
A visualisation machine ready plugged into my tv would be superb, especially if I'm already streaming my phone to the amp via the wii.

There were some good and simple linux distributions like Easy Linux : http://forum.wiibrew.org/read.php?29,68339
The links are dead but could perhaps be found elsewhere. A light torrent client is possible, I'm pretty sure some have done this. There are very few resources left in Wii linux though. I've compiled and tested some emulators few years ago. It was slow and no convenient way to start them(but possible).

I did find something more recent, i'll find it, because I completely failed to get it to boot up and reading this encouraged me to try again.
To emphasise my point, i was suggesting paring down the actual OS, so that it loads just the resources it requires - eg, the NAS image would be an OS image with just the network and disk access resources required to do that. No video, gui, sound, bluetooth, just a means to get back to the loader. Maybe an SSH client (dunno if that would be appropriate)?
The front end setup could be a wii app - eg, scrolling through an rssclient, downloading .torrents - and the resource heavy bit could be bare naked linux
A Couple of questions, I'd value your insight.
Could you put an OS image(s), even a swap file, onto the flash of a wii?
All of my content is on drives, my wii is empty except for small forwarders--this would be a great way to use the free space.
Could you wipe the Ninty OS, most of the flash, and still boot Wiiflow, or a neek image, from priiloader?
Could a really small OS image, booting from flash, be *so* quick that it changes it's usefulness?
Last question, if Wiiflow boots from priiloader, nothing Ninty is loaded, would it be possible to boot a linux image from wiiflow, even select from various images?
One of the emulator missing is the Sharp X68000. That'd be nice to play this Super Mario version. We'd have almost all 8/16 bits versions this way.
Is there a way to play LCD Mario Games? I spent a lot of hours playing one - showing my age!
 
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WiizNutz

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I always thought Flash was impossible on Wii in terms of games. Idk, I could be totally wrong. Lmao
You could play flash games, media, from the internet browser. A couple of flash things were quite good, seemed almost customised for the interface. I was just riffing on the idea...it would be cool to have some of that around
So what website were you thinking of, what content, or were you just wondering aloud? Only asking 'cause it would be great if you have any suggestions, always looking for wii content
 
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You could play flash games, media, from the internet browser. A couple of flash things were quite good, seemed almost customised for the interface. I was just riffing on the idea...it would be cool to have some of that around
So what website were you thinking of, what content, or were you just wondering aloud? Only asking 'cause it would be great if you have any suggestions, always looking for wii content
Oh rly? Also, I didn't have any site in mind... maybe 4chan? Idk
 
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Wiimpathy

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Thanks for the responses folks

Did you have a specific site in mind? I remember WAP protocol websites used to work quite well!
Someone should tell Niki Minaj
Like, Flash is over - although the wayback machine organisation was talking about hosting some stuff...
What would be great is if the wayback machine folks hosted flash games in a way that's accessible from a wii...but how to ask the right people to make that happen, even if they would?
Seems possible, at least....


I had a look round github, not that I could learn much, and there are a few stand alone applications separated from winamp. Kosher open licence. Not sure how active the community is, but there's a lot of work already done. I did note the project derived from 'Milkdrop' was written in C++
You seem like the man to ask, Is that something a Wii could run?
Don't know if this is the same question, but could it just be, like, a reinterpretation of opengl code to gx chip code, if such a thing is possible?
A visualisation machine ready plugged into my tv would be superb, especially if I'm already streaming my phone to the amp via the wii.



I did find something more recent, i'll find it, because I completely failed to get it to boot up and reading this encouraged me to try again.
To emphasise my point, i was suggesting paring down the actual OS, so that it loads just the resources it requires - eg, the NAS image would be an OS image with just the network and disk access resources required to do that. No video, gui, sound, bluetooth, just a means to get back to the loader. Maybe an SSH client (dunno if that would be appropriate)?
The front end setup could be a wii app - eg, scrolling through an rssclient, downloading .torrents - and the resource heavy bit could be bare naked linux
A Couple of questions, I'd value your insight.
Could you put an OS image(s), even a swap file, onto the flash of a wii?
All of my content is on drives, my wii is empty except for small forwarders--this would be a great way to use the free space.
Could you wipe the Ninty OS, most of the flash, and still boot Wiiflow, or a neek image, from priiloader?
Could a really small OS image, booting from flash, be *so* quick that it changes it's usefulness?
Last question, if Wiiflow boots from priiloader, nothing Ninty is loaded, would it be possible to boot a linux image from wiiflow, even select from various images?

Is there a way to play LCD Mario Games? I spent a lot of hours playing one - showing my age!

Not sure about this visualizer idea but you'd still need a wii music player right? Hard to say anything about the code you're talking about. Link maybe? Rewriting OpenGL to GX is doable but not that trivial.

About Linux, there's a more recent one : https://github.com/neagix/wii-linux-ngx
There's also a grub like booter called Gumboot.
You could use a minimal debian without a gui indeed. That still takes at least 30 seconds to load a programme.
Using Wii flash Nand would be problematic. First, there's only 512 MB. A very light iso with wifi is surely more than 100MB.
Second, Nand is pretty slow. It would take much longer to load. See Not64 or Neogeo/CPS3 Virtual memory.
Loading 64MB of data takes about 30 seconds(a bit less).
But yeah, if you already know Linux, ready for a lot of tweakings and don't care about a Gui, that may be useful...

And wiping Wii OS, no really it wouldn't help, at all. Don't brick your wii please.
However, launching Linux in Wiiflow might be possible. Using gumboot, I don't how exactly how it's working but I guess the .lst file could be parsed/modified. The bad thing is it's closed source right now. Or maybe writing a custom loader. I used to play with some custom boot2 elf but I don't remember too much now.

For Game & watch games, download Retroarch and look for the core called gw_libretro_wii.dol.
 

WiizNutz

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Not sure about this visualizer idea but you'd still need a wii music player right? Hard to say anything about the code you're talking about. Link maybe?
Running out of battery, so just a quick reply - I found something that had been ported to other platforms, I'll find it in a bit.
Rewriting OpenGL to GX is doable but not that trivial.
If there's a systematic way to do the work, and you could show me a process, I'd be happy pounding that in. I'd need help compiling it.
About Linux, there's a more recent one : https://github.com/neagix/wii-linux-ngx
There's also a grub like booter called Gumboot.
You could use a minimal debian without a gui indeed. That still takes at least 30 seconds to load a programme.
Using Wii flash Nand would be problematic. First, there's only 512 MB. A very light iso with wifi is surely more than 100MB.
Second, Nand is pretty slow. It would take much longer to load. See Not64 or Neogeo/CPS3 Virtual memory.
Loading 64MB of data takes about 30 seconds(a bit less).
But yeah, if you already know Linux, ready for a lot of tweakings and don't care about a Gui, that may be useful...

And wiping Wii OS, no really it wouldn't help, at all. Don't brick your wii please.
However, launching Linux in Wiiflow might be possible. Using gumboot, I don't how exactly how it's working but I guess the .lst file could be parsed/modified. The bad thing is it's closed source right now. Or maybe writing a custom loader. I used to play with some custom boot2 elf but I don't remember too much now.

For Game & watch games, download Retroarch and look for the core called gw_libretro_wii.dol.
Game and Watch tip - Thanks!
You've really helped clarify what is, at least, possible on the hardware. I'd thought the memory on board would be the fastest loading...
Linux - I'm just not that much of a linux head, booting up the Wii using that guide is intimadating but doable for me. I did find a blog of someone speeding up a raspberry pi boot to, like, five seconds - he didn't have to author something from scratch - my impression was that he was using something, a 'linux' rather than 'pi' OS compiling functionality, to do it.
I'll find it again and give you the terminology he was using - it was way over my head. What would the author of xwhiite and ngx use to put the image together?
I'll see what i can pick up from the github.
Thanks man!
 
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WiizNutz

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https://git.busybox.net/buildroot/ was the image building tool the blogger used, I don't know if it's applicable...
http://minimal.idzona.com/the_dao_of_minimal_linux_live.txt was an inspiration
https://mitxela.com/projects/thermal_paper_polaroid is the project - a thermal paper polaroid cool!

Booting a live image from SD, ie, an image stored as a file on a fat 32 partition, rather than booting from a linux partition on an SD card - is this practicable?
Beside the NAS - which is inherently useful to many, but particularly for wii backup gamers with only one large hard drive, a torrent client might be particularly useful to someone running a wii - You could run an rss client to check for updates of a couple of default torrents:

One of, say, the latest wiiflow build, databases, themes
One of cover collections
One of Emulators and bios' - a rolling updated abz's pack

and no one would have to pay for hosting - or demand would be lower- they're already on someone elses' harddrive, shared over torrent.

I'd hazard a guess that most people have pretty much the same folder structure too - so you could share correctly named covers alongside roms...

https://github.com/visbot/vis_avs and https://github.com/visbot/chavs Is what remains of Winamp AVS on github
https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm Is what remains of the cross platform "Milkdrop" on github
 

WiizNutz

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So I got to access the Wii, it's at my son's mum's, and finally had a look at the ngx page.
Answered a lot of my questions, and the reply was "This is over your head"
 
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