nesdev.org

Is anyone working on an emulator for Wii? I just installed Homebrew Channel on mine and started playing with FCEUGX, and it's pretty good. I'd love to get one of the retrozone NES controllers for this, though using the wii remote sideways works pretty well - I was even able to navigate level 3 of Battletoads!
There are a few things I'd like to see fixed in FCEUGX, and I figured rather than fork it, or have a million different emulators, it would be best to coordinate our efforts a bit. Anyone interested in helping out? I'd like to determine if continuing with FCEUGX is the way to go, or if we should start over with a port of something else. FCEUGX has some nice features, my only real complaints are:
- it fails some of blargg's cpu timing tests
- I'd like to add netplay
- an "auto-update" feature would be nice

So let's kick off the discussion - what direction do you want to see NES emulation on Wii go?

Adding custom mappers to emulators on Wii would have two benefits:

• Publishers of classic NES games couldn't claim we're eating into Wii Shop Channel revenue.
• We'd still be running our games on authentic Nintendo hardware.

Download the Homebrew Browser, there's a million on there.

tepples wrote:Adding custom mappers to emulators on Wii would have two benefits:

• Publishers of classic NES games couldn't claim we're eating into Wii Shop Channel revenue.
• We'd still be running our games on authentic Nintendo hardware.

no, the media would just claim anytime something breaks, it is the fault of modded systems.

hell i even called my local news about the dirty lens problem with brawl bricking Wiis, and they refused the report it claiming their 'experts' stuck to their guns that it only affected modded systems. (untrue)

EVEN THOUGH NINTENDO FORMALLY ANNOUNCED THE MATTER ON THEIR OWN WEBSITE.

over the following month, at-least 50,000 Wiis in this city of 2 million people bricked due to brawl and dirty lenses.

(metro phoenix arizona and its fringe towns has a lot of air pollution and dust)

AND THEY STILL DIDN'T REPORT IT ON THE NEWS.

there are prolly still thousands of families out there that don't realize *still* that nintendo repairs Wiis from that incident for free with prepaid shipping at no cost no questions asked.

I've been tempted to try out installing the homebrew channel via that zelda save hack just so I could try FCEUGX out on the Wii. I have to ask though, have you noticed any issues with the sound quality?

I ask because I have it on my GameCube and it has a very annoying sound bug where you start to hear distortion / corruption in the output after a minute or so. If you pause the emulation, the corruption goes away, but then will just come back in another minute.

Oddly enough, this didn't seem to happen for many people, in fact I could only find one post on the official forum mentioning it. I spent a whole damn weekend trying to debug the relatively simple sound code myself, but never come up with a solution. IIRC, it appeared the problem was stemming from sound buffering, but I tried many different buffering methods, but the distortion would always creep back in eventually

I haven't noticed any audio corruption, though I have only tested a handful of games and my ear for that type of thing is not very good.

Audio corruption?
Yes, this happens all the time for me. I'm running FCEUGX on my PAL Wii, probably one of the early consoles bought at its launch date in Europe.

I'd like to find out what causes this bug, it really is annoying as hell.

FCEUGX may not be intended to run at 50fps. Maybe that is the problem if it is running in PAL50?

Not NES related, but I do get a sound buffer problem on both Visualboy Advance GX & GNUboy when playing Zelda: Links Awakening DX & others. (haven't tried it w/ a GBA game as of yet)

A little annoying on VBAgx, but not enough to consider it an app killer. Couldn't stand it on GNUboy however. Now what I'm waiting for is for someone to break out a PSX emu! You can't deny how epic that would be!

miau wrote:Audio corruption?
Yes, this happens all the time for me. I'm running FCEUGX on my PAL Wii, probably one of the early consoles bought at its launch date in Europe.

I'd like to find out what causes this bug, it really is annoying as hell.

Damn I figured the sound code probably hasn't been touched when moving over to the Wii. If I do decide to try it out anyways, I may look into this again, because it is an app killer for me. BTW my GC / Wii are NTSC

teaguecl: The corruption is somewhat subtle and would happen with any game, but when I was trying to debug it, I was mainly testing with Mega Man 4 and MC Kids.

MottZilla wrote:FCEUGX may not be intended to run at 50fps. Maybe that is the problem if it is running in PAL50?

It happens regardless of what frame rate the emulator runs at.

I have not personally used FCEUGX, but I know a few people that do, and they have the same sound problems. Apparently, the guy that ported it doesn't actually use it much (!!!) and doesn't seem to care.

BMF54123 wrote:I have not personally used FCEUGX, but I know a few people that do, and they have the same sound problems. Apparently, the guy that ported it doesn't actually use it much (!!!) and doesn't seem to care.

You have hit on what I was trying to get at with the original post. Tantric, the guy who ported and is supporting FCEUGX is also supporting several other Wii projects (a SNES emulator port and some other stuff) and so the project does not have his full attention. Collectively I think this forum is the ultimate resource for knowledge and interest in NES - and I think it would be nice to offer our help.
I'll kick things off by taking three action items:
1. Try out Mega Man 4 and see if I can reproduce the audio bug
2. Run all of blargg's tests on the latest FCEUGX release and identify failures
3. Download the source and see if I can get it to compile for a more debug friendly platform - like x86 Linux.

I'll report back in a day or two with results.

Why not just start with another emulator core and rewrite FCEUGX's Wii portions? I'm guessing there are plenty of emulators here that are far more accurate than FCEU and just as fast. This would be something I'd be interested in if I had a Wii and didn't have a million other projects going on..

I was thinking the same thing. How about Nestopia? It seems to strike a good balance between accuracy and speed.

Nestopia would be my first choice as well. If I didn't have so much other crap going on, I would take a stab at it. I'd love to see the NTSC filter implemented as well!

It would've been sweet if Mega Man 9 had an option for using that filter