Technical differences between vWii and Wii "Virtual Console"

[Intoxicus5]

I am very curious about how the vWii and Wii "Virtual Console" actually work? And how they work differently from each other?

Is the vWii actually Wii hardware running on the Wii U motherboard? Or is it a translation layer type flange similar to Proton/WINE? Or is it something more on the level of the Nvidia Universal Driver Architecture? (Translation layers and the Nvidia UDA are NOT emulation btw. There's a reason WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator".)

How different is the Wii "Virtual Console" that runs from the Wii U Menu? I had assumed it was "passing" the games to the vWii. But from what I've gathered it's not doing that. It's more it's own thing that doesn't run directly from the vWii system.

 

[SDIO]

The Wii U has a Wii Mode in hardware. It Even has the GX1 GPU in hardware just for that. The Application (PPC) Code runs bare metal.
The IOS are different from the original Wii, to deal with the differences in the IOP. The Virtual Console uses a special IOS, the HAIIOS, which is shipped with the VC Title. It's a strange hybrid between IOSU and a vIOS

 

[Intoxicus5]

The Wii U has a Wii Mode in hardware. It Even has the GX1 GPU in hardware just for that. The Application (PPC) Code runs bare metal.
The IOS are different from the original Wii, to deal with the differences in the IOP. The Virtual Console uses a special IOS, the HAIIOS, which is shipped with the VC Title. It's a strange hybrid between IOSU and a vIOS

Interesting.

It sounds like it's actually using Virtualization and perhaps running some kind of VM type container? This makes me think that the term "Virtual Console" may actually be a reference to how they're running these things in a technical sense. But that could be a stretch.

Can you tell me more or give me some links/search terms to go deeper?

I don't know much about PowerPC architecture and these older iOS versions in general. I would guess if I really really want to go deep I should also look into the root PowerPC architecture that the Wii & Wii U come from.

 

[tech3475]

Fail0verflow did a talk years ago which may be of interest:
https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2014/console-hacking-2013-omake/