Rom Hacks for Wii U

[TonyNESgri]

Let's say I want that amazingly-looking Zelda Ocarina of Time (or Majora's Mask ?) mod on my Wii U...



Since there are mods such as CTGP for Mario Kart or Project M for Smash, would it be possible to play rom hacks on Wii U or on vWii ? Is there any other way than playing on the computer for instance ?

Thank you in advance. ^^`


By the way, I added a similar commentary onto the video's commentary section today. My YouTube profile is Tony Nes'. Feel free to reply to it if you prefer it that way.


Also, I posted that same thread on Reddit.

 

[FAST6191]

Yes, no and "it depends" has to be the answer.

To elaborate more though.

Yes you can run ROM hacks.

The trouble, especially for N64 stuff, is the emulators available are rather more limited than that which you see on PC and the way some of the hacks are done they might work on hardware but still not work on the Wii U setups, and the stuff a lot of N64 peeps liked to do with texture replacement (be it for higher resolution or for translation purposes) is right out as far as I know (and likely always will be), anything with Lua will also be troubled.

Secondary to that now is Zelda Ocarina has joined Mario 64 in being decompiled ( https://gbatemp.net/threads/zelda-o...-reverse-engineered-to-100-completion.603645/ ), and a bunch of other games in being leaked source code in the gigaleak thing. This will mean various hackers might use the source code to effect wider reaching changes that the emulators available on the Wii U might struggle more with (if you have seen talk of ROM size limits, or in the SNES world special chips, in the NES world then mappers, in GB/GBC then mbcs... this is that). Has not happened yet that I have been made aware of but it is really just a matter of time -- the amount you can change with source code as a competent programmer over a few weekends is comparable to what a seriously skilled hacker might take years to accomplish, or if you prefer see what people were doing with the Mario 64 ports and source code shortly after that appeared.

For the most part though you can try it easily. The way you normally inject ROMs into the system or run them via homebrew... you put your patched ROM in as the ROM you want to try and try it. If you are injecting into a Nintendo provided emulator you might try another base emulator, though most of the time the community finds the most compatible version so it is not like it used to be where different versions of the emulator might be more or less compatible with different ROMs.

 

[TonyNESgri]

Yes, no and "it depends" has to be the answer.

To elaborate more though.

Yes you can run ROM hacks.

The trouble, especially for N64 stuff, is the emulators available are rather more limited than that which you see on PC and the way some of the hacks are done they might work on hardware but still not work on the Wii U setups, and the stuff a lot of N64 peeps liked to do with texture replacement (be it for higher resolution or for translation purposes) is right out as far as I know (and likely always will be), anything with Lua will also be troubled.

Secondary to that now is Zelda Ocarina has joined Mario 64 in being decompiled ( https://gbatemp.net/threads/zelda-o...-reverse-engineered-to-100-completion.603645/ ), and a bunch of other games in being leaked source code in the gigaleak thing. This will mean various hackers might use the source code to effect wider reaching changes that the emulators available on the Wii U might struggle more with (if you have seen talk of ROM size limits, or in the SNES world special chips, in the NES world then mappers, in GB/GBC then mbcs... this is that). Has not happened yet that I have been made aware of but it is really just a matter of time -- the amount you can change with source code as a competent programmer over a few weekends is comparable to what a seriously skilled hacker might take years to accomplish, or if you prefer see what people were doing with the Mario 64 ports and source code shortly after that appeared.

For the most part though you can try it easily. The way you normally inject ROMs into the system or run them via homebrew... you put your patched ROM in as the ROM you want to try and try it. If you are injecting into a Nintendo provided emulator you might try another base emulator, though most of the time the community finds the most compatible version so it is not like it used to be where different versions of the emulator might be more or less compatible with different ROMs.

A lot of thanks for your long and detailed reply !

So, to try out the ROM I'm interested in, I can try to install it either in the Homebrew Launcher (like for example Doom or Flappy Birds downloaded from the Homebrew App Store), or in an emulator such as Wii 64 ? For the latter, do I have to create an injection in UWUVCI for instance ? And what exactly do you mean by 'patching the ROM' ? Sorry if my questions sound dumb.

 

[FAST6191]

For various reasons ROM hackers will make patches containing only the changes they made to the ROM -- smaller, allows options, dodges copyright issues with distributing whole ROMs...

These patches come in a variety of formats, and versions thereof which is its own particular fun time. You will tend to want to read any patch notes that come with your patch for the name of the patcher it used.
http://www.romhacking.net/ will tend to house all the patchers, and even has its own online patcher you can try http://www.romhacking.net/patch/

Homebrew systems have two main approaches to emulation.
1) Homebrew developers write their own emulators to do things.
2) Commercial developers write their own emulators usually to emulate very specific games, and without fun extras that homebrew/PC emulators have like cheats, savestates, filters, control tweaks, turbo...

2) however tend to be first on the scene -- homebrew is overwhelmingly a weekends and evenings project (citra for the 3ds was probably the first where devs really went full time on things, and it shows in how fast it happened relative to the complexity required where emulators have existed since the 1990s) where commercial stuff has the benefit of only needing to support a given list of games (homebrew tends to go for working with all of them and a general approach) and several full time developers to make it during work hours.

1) is also somewhat lacking for the Wii U -- the Wii U was never a particularly noted thing in the homebrew world compared to the likes of the GBA, DS, PSP, xbox and Wii so fewer people made emulators for it, much less highly optimised and polished ones.

To do 2 you also have to replace the ROM the emulator is bundled with to instead feature your own. This can be tricky compared to homebrew stuff where it is more "select ROM from nice list, press go". I am not sure what the specifics of Wii U N64 emulation are these days though (PCs, ports and said source code stuff mentioned above do far better for me).

 

[TonyNESgri]

For various reasons ROM hackers will make patches containing only the changes they made to the ROM -- smaller, allows options, dodges copyright issues with distributing whole ROMs...

These patches come in a variety of formats, and versions thereof which is its own particular fun time. You will tend to want to read any patch notes that come with your patch for the name of the patcher it used.
http://www.romhacking.net/ will tend to house all the patchers, and even has its own online patcher you can try http://www.romhacking.net/patch/

Homebrew systems have two main approaches to emulation.
1) Homebrew developers write their own emulators to do things.
2) Commercial developers write their own emulators usually to emulate very specific games, and without fun extras that homebrew/PC emulators have like cheats, savestates, filters, control tweaks, turbo...

2) however tend to be first on the scene -- homebrew is overwhelmingly a weekends and evenings project (citra for the 3ds was probably the first where devs really went full time on things, and it shows in how fast it happened relative to the complexity required where emulators have existed since the 1990s) where commercial stuff has the benefit of only needing to support a given list of games (homebrew tends to go for working with all of them and a general approach) and several full time developers to make it during work hours.

1) is also somewhat lacking for the Wii U -- the Wii U was never a particularly noted thing in the homebrew world compared to the likes of the GBA, DS, PSP, xbox and Wii so fewer people made emulators for it, much less highly optimised and polished ones.

To do 2 you also have to replace the ROM the emulator is bundled with to instead feature your own. This can be tricky compared to homebrew stuff where it is more "select ROM from nice list, press go". I am not sure what the specifics of Wii U N64 emulation are these days though (PCs, ports and said source code stuff mentioned above do far better for me).

Okay. Sounds good to me. I'm gonna check the two solutions later on.