Homebrew Official Retroarch WiiU (wip.)

[ChiefReginod]

CHBC. Load times are still pretty bad. I'm thinking about running a timer under various scenarios for comparison...

Do we know the max SD card read speed for the Wii U? It could maybe shed some light if we're using SD cards with read speeds slower than that.

 

[MikaDubbz]

edit: NVM

 

[cugel]

I have a Sandisk Ultra 64gig 80mb/s. Formatted Fat32 with I think with 32k cluster size.

 

[MikaDubbz]

Can DOSbox games only be played with a keyboard connected to the Wii U? I can play games with the keyboard, but try as I might, I'm not able to remap keyboard controls to a Wii U controller for Dos, unless I'm just missing something.

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Yeah these load times is nasty, I seen faster load times on basic homebrew emulators on wii.

 

[MikaDubbz]

Yeah these load times is nasty, I seen faster load times on basic homebrew emulators on wii.

Yeah I personally prefer to use the individual dedicated vWii emulators when available on my Wii U, especially if they have Gamepad and Wii U pro controller support, as they pretty much all do at this point. Beyond booting up quicker, they're also just more user friendly emulators, and so atmospheric with those built in music tracks, lots of nostalgia tied to the earliest versions of those emulators on only the original Wiis from that music for me. I just use Retroarch for everything else that doesn't have a great Wii U emulator or a working emulator for the system at all, stuff like Atari 2600, Arcade, Neo Geo Pocket Color, TurboGrafx 16, Virtual Boy, etc.etc. Sure some of thsoe might be playable in other ways on a Wii U, but those that do don't offer Wii U Pro Controller or Gamepad support like Retroarch does for pretty much everything it can boot.

 

[azy77]

Just tried latest stable 1.8.5 and to my pleasant surprise Amiga and C64 cores iare working perfectly for me. Been playing Amiga all day yesterday

Only issue is I can't map the left thumbstick for directions, only dpad for both cores, despite setting controls as left analogue in input settings.

Apart from that I use A600 core for all games and they all run full speed. Happy days.

Also using rgui menu everything loads very quickly almost instant. Also save states work as long as you load the same disk as when was quick saved.

Edit: Not sure how or what I did but left analogue is now working.

Update: LHA files are working on Wii U, no more disk swapping. Have updated P-UAE core to 3rd April nightly, after that date it does not load kickstarts for me. A1200 AGA games running full speed here, unbelieveable, can now honestly say that the wii u is the best retro machine for emulators.

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Just tried latest stable 1.8.5 and to my pleasant surprise Amiga and C64 cores iare working perfectly for me. Been playing Amiga all day yesterday

Are there any good games on those systems?

Honestly I never known about that until like recently where people make youtube videos about it. Reason why I never known about it cause it was never sold or able to purchase in my area. Making it seem like some foreign exclusive thing like the msx.

 

[azy77]

I play them mainly for nostalgic reasons

The sound chip on Amiga surpassed the Snes and Genesis.

Main games I played are : Project X, Cannon Fodder, Shadow of the Beast 3, Super Twintris, Batman the Movie, Lotus 2 and Myth History in the making.

I'd check them out on Youtube to see if they are your cup of tea.

You have to load disk from within the quick menu and have to ensure bios are named correctly and placed in system folder.

 

[ChiefReginod]

I've been using a timer under various settings and scenarios to determine which things affect load times the most. I'm still testing but my preliminary findings are fairly shocking...

Using ANY kind of playlist, regardless of format (old or new), playlist settings, or even the number of items in the playlist increased load times by about 20 seconds compared to loading them directly from the Load Content menu. This applied to Favorites and History as well, even if there was only one item in either of them. I've found no speed difference whatsoever between a playlist with 1 entry vs a playlist with 800 entries. Using playlists at all added about 20 seconds to ROM loading times.

Zipped vs unzipped was a much smaller difference. It was maybe just a second or two faster unzipped, at least with the smaller ROMs I've been testing with.

Also, Rgui is definitely the fastest menu driver. Fastest to boot, fastest to load ROMs and fastest to close content. The next-fastest was glui, which was an average of 4 seconds slower in each of those actions. XMB was about 11 seconds slower. Ozone was about 15 seconds slower.

 

[azy77]

Great research.
I'm used to using rgui from the wii days so no biggie for me but I can definitely vouch that it is faster than the other gui's.

 

[ChiefReginod]

The most surprising thing is that the slow load times probably aren't related to read speeds after all. It's more likely something to do with the way playlists are handled. The workaround is to just load everything through the Load Content menu instead.

As an example, here are the load times for Super Mario World (No-intro US ROM, torrentzipped) in rgui with the Snes9x 2010 core:

From Playlist, History or Favorites: 27 seconds (averaged)
From Load Content menu: 6 seconds
From Load Content menu (not zipped): 5 seconds

EDIT: I just tried loading Sonic 3 from the Load Content menu with the Genesis Plus GX core and it took about 28 seconds. Disappointing...

So, although the times listed above for SMW show a pretty dramatic difference, it might be different from core to core. For the Genesis Plus GX core there were only a few seconds difference between loading from playlist and loading the content directly.

 

[azy77]

Interesting, will check out myself when I get a chance for the gens and snes cores.

 

[azy77]

Just checked out and snes and gens cores load games instantly for me. I use rgui and close content each time before loading next game. Even loaded mega cd and that worked instantly.

 

[ChiefReginod]

I must be doing something wrong somewhere then. In any case, it doesn't seem like SD card speeds are the only factor.

 

[azy77]

Which version of retroarch are you using? I am using latest stable 1.8.5 for all cores except P-UAE.

Just checked Mame2003 plus and that took about 10 seconds to load MK.

 

[ChiefReginod]

For those tests I was using 1.8.5 stable, nothing updated.

However, I just installed the latest nightly and there's been a significant speedup. Playlists are still slower to load than from Load Content but it's only by about 5 seconds more now. So that's great. The Genesis Plus GX core is still slow to load Mega Drive ROMs, but it was only about 10 seconds for Sonic 1 on my SD card vs about 25 seconds before.

Tbh I don't know what the takeaway is here. The latest nightly is much faster, I guess?

 

[azy77]

If that is better for you then that is great. I may update in the future.

Edit - this may be a longshot, but what if all the pics/ pngs and settings for playlists were removed from the sd card so retroarch would not have them loaded up then you tried loading a game from new content? As I do not have any playlists or thumbnails etc. which may contribute to faster loading.

 

[ChiefReginod]

If that is better for you then that is great. I may update in the future.

Edit - this may be a longshot, but what if all the pics/ pngs and settings for playlists were removed from the sd card so retroarch would not have them loaded up then you tried loading a game from new content? As I do not have any playlists or thumbnails etc. which may contribute to faster loading.

I don't think that's it since I even tried a "no assets" install with nothing but the extracted nightly build. No playlists, no settings changed or anything. There was no speed difference between that setup and a full assets setup with playlists, BIOS, altered settings, etc. Thumbnails on the other hand would probably slow things down, but I haven't tried them here.

With the current build I'm averaging around 5 seconds load times from the Load Content menu for all cores except Genesis Plus GX, which as I mentioned takes about 10 seconds. That's a huge, huge improvement over what I was getting before. All playlist entries average about 10 seconds now. It's still not as fast as some of the other RetroArch ports but it's a lot better than before.

My SD card probably isn't the fastest, though, so if you have a faster card you'll probably get even better speeds. My SD's read speeds in h2testw were something like 70 MBps and 20(-ish) MBps write speeds.

 

[depaul]

@ChiefReginod another interesting find : Slow SD speed might be software related.

An "interesting" find about slow SD card speed:

- Everyone knows that Retroarch reading speed from SD card is slow... like 2 or 4 MB/s;
- BUT when I install Wii U titles from SD to USB using WUP installer (USB installation method), the installation speed is very good as it can reach 20 or 22 MB/s, which is the normal speed.

==> So can we assume the slow Retroarch is related to software and not hardware? probably a badly optimized I/O library?

Maybe Retroarch can check I/O method used by WUP intaller?

Thanks.