Wii Gets Custom Firmware, Purported PSP Emulator

Engadget is reporting that some recent unofficial Wii modding news has had a couple of interesting breakthroughs. First, it seems that a team has released what is being called the "first custom firmware for the Wii" that supposedly allows writable DVDs to be read in emulators. Second, the folks from TeamShift have shots of a "working" PSP emulator for the Wii. Unfortunately "working" only means between 4 and 8 frames per second, so still a long way from playable.

Excellent article

[eln (21727)]

I especially like how this article and its twin [slashdot.org] are back to back on the main games.slashdot.org [slashdot.org] page.

Re:

[homesnatch (1089609)]

I also heard that someone got some custom firmware running on the Wii!

http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/18/wii-gets-custom-firmware-purported-psp-emulator/ [engadget.com]

WOOOOOO

[Flaystus (887453)]

OH sweet! Who needs more then 7fps anyway?

Wheeeee... wiiiiiiiiii

[PunkOfLinux (870955)]

I think that this has more meaning than just "oh, look, psp games!" I think that the fact that custom firmware is now running on the wii means that it will become the hacker's choice, if you will. It's already a huge success in the modding world, and this will just make things more interesting. I can't wait till they get a simple way to get scummvm running on the wii (yes, there IS a port for it). If they do that, I'll have a wii before the end of the month.

Re:Wheeeee... wiiiiiiiiii

[Josejx (46837)]

I'm not sure what you're waiting for. With the Homebrew Channel, you can start ScummVM directly from the Wii Interface. The only tricky part is getting the HBC installed and there are plenty of tutorials for that.

Re:

[PunkOfLinux (870955)]

Exactly. I want simple. Hell, if they sold scummvm for the wii, I would buy it in a heartbeat, as long as I could have stuff on the network or something. I love scumm games.

Re:

[cHALiTO (101461)]

Absolutely. I got the HBC installed using the install dvd image (have a modded wii, but you can use some other tricks to install it on an unmodded wii too). If I want to play MI I just select the homebrew channel from the wii menu, then select scummvm, and that's it. Piratey fun point'n'clicking from the couch.

Hmm...

[Tpl2000 (1174767)]

Y'know, the picture they give is fake. I'm not saying the lighting is wrong, or anything... but it's a "perfect" picture. the image on the screen is at exact right angles, and that would be damn near impossible regardless of what surface your camera is on. Also, the power light on the Wii appears to be orange. HMMMM......

Re:Hmm...

[Sockatume (732728)]

Looks green to me, and the top of the screen definitely isn't square.

Elf Loader

[gravis777 (123605)]

So I was trying to find that "custom firmware", but could not find it anywhere on the page. All the emulators on dcemu that the engadget article pointed to all seemed to use the Elf SD emulator, which is like a hack to Zelda: Twilight Princess. That is why I got so excited about the custom firmware headline - I was hoping I would not have to jump through all these hoops just to get a SNES emulator to work. That would be so cool - I just want to put all my ROMS on a disc, and play them using the classic cont

The PSP Emulator

[Bragg (147168)]

Given the screenshot, it seems likely that this is a port of the Potemkin emulator which was released under GPL about a year ago. I have not tested Potemkin but, i haven't read that it's fake anywhere either.

When are homebrew developers...

[sjonke (457707)]

... going to make something other then emulators and ports of Doom/Quake/Etc?

Rampant misinformation

[marcansoft (727665)]

... as usual.

Let's set a few things straight:

• Currently, there is no public method for reading DVD-Rs on an unmodded Wii.
• This isn't the first "Custom Firmware" (I hate that word) for the Wii. Not even close. Not even the first public one. Or, alternately, this isn't and there has never been a true wii Custom Firmware, depending on how you look at it.
• The "Custom Firmware" is only a small patch to the firmware that does two things: disable signature checks and disable a certain read restriction on the DVD code. What this does is let you use standard-format DVD-Rs (i.e. ISO9660 or Video DVDs) with the DVD drive on the Wii, but you still need a modchip.
• The difference between this firmware and the original is exactly 5 bytes. 4 for the DVD maximum read restriction (an unsigned int), and one code byte patch for the signature disable. Hardly earth-shattering.

We released a legal open source firmware patcher [hackmii.com] some time ago. Approximately three days before this purpoted "custom firmware" came out, svpe had added the DVD restriction removal patch to it (this was in response to an outright modification to an older firmware, released with the original code and hence illegally, by nitrotux, which he distributed with a disc dumper, but our patcher patches all of the recent versions of the firmware which use a completely different subroutine for the check, so the patch is different even though the result is the same). The first revision of Waninkoko's "custom firmware" was so hastily done that it was basically a PPF patch over the original firmware. Except it's encrypted. And he even changed the key. Hence, the patch was useless and he ended up distributing the entire patched-and-reencrypted file in the form of the patch (the entire patcher was 2MB, which is the size of the entire firmware). The fact that he made this trivial mistake makes me think that he did this very quickly and stole the patches from the open source patchmii (the DVD patch is identical except for the actual number involved in the restriction, and the signature check disable patch, which is relatively hard to find and there are several ways of doing it, is exactly the same). He later released a newer version without the blatant patch fuckup which is presumably legal to distribute now, although it still requires people to rip the original firmware from a recent game (whereas our open source patcher automatically downloads it from Nintendo's servers).

Now onto the news. Recently, we actually did figure out a way of reading DVD-Rs without a modchip. Since this can be used for piracy (and could potentially cause quite an increase in it, since a free simple non-warranty-voiding pirate-game-playing hack is very appealing compared to the current modchip situation), we have tried to contact Nintendo about it (privately and publicly [hackmii.com]). If they ignore us, then we'll probably release an open source library and tools that will let Wii homebrew read information from a DVD-R on any Wii, modchip or not.

For anyone trying to draw parallels between the PSP and the Wii, I suggest this article. As for the PSP emulator, I'll believe it when I see more than a single screenshot.

Re:

[marcansoft (727665)]

That's correct. Technically, Nintendo could make a DVD-Video player channel. If Nintendo ignores our attempts to contact them, we'll give porting a DVD player a shot.

Here is some actual information:

[crhylove (205956)]

That is mostly on topic. There is a new Open Source wii emulator out that runs in both x86 and x64 windows. It was initially just a gamecube emulator, but it now emulates several wii titles, and shows perfect graphics until it realizes you have no wiimote, for which there is currently no software interface, either.

But still, a wii emulator is ALREADY OUT that shows graphics, and it's OPEN SOURCE (now)!

http://www.dolphin-emu.com/ [dolphin-emu.com]

Re:The PSP "emulator"

[p0tat03 (985078)]

Probably not fake, but also probably not realistic, nor will it ever see widespread use. Knowing the PSP's specs, and knowing the Wii's specs, there is simply no way you can make an emulator run at a reasonable pace. The performance of the emulating machine must be *many times* faster than that of the emulated machine, to account for the massive amount of overhead. The performance gap between the two machines simply is not enough to make this happen.

Re:The PSP "emulator"

[psavo (162634)]

well.. the main thing behind PSP is that it has fairly fancy 3D chip inside, the CPU is not "that" good by itself. 3d acceleration of "slower" console emulation lowers emulation overhead very much.

Re:

[adisakp (705706)]

Not necessarily true. First of all the Wii is quite a bit faster than PSP. Second, they are both MIPS so you don't need to emulate most code, it can run natively. You just have to hook the right calls. Third, most PSP games do not access any hardware directly (all the rendering is done through a library similar to a very light opengl and all the file and audio calls are similarly through system libraries). If you got the system libraries running, all you have to do is hook them up and then you can do a

Re:The PSP "emulator"

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

First of all the Wii is quite a bit faster than PSP.

333MHz vs. 729MHz. Even if we assume that they have a different performance profile on a per-cycle basis, a little more than twice the clock speed is not really enough for smooth emulation.

Second, they are both MIPS so you don't need to emulate most code

Since when does the Wii contain a MIPS chip? Last I checked, the "Broadway" chip was a PowerPC processor running at 729MHz.

Third, most PSP games do not access any hardware directly (all the rendering is done through a library similar to a very light opengl and all the file and audio calls are similarly through system libraries).

That's true of nearly all modern consoles. Yet the last time I looked into GameCube emulators, they still showed very poor performance on a modern PC. And that's counting that most 3D emulation is done by using replacement libraries whenever possible.

Is enough, but just not yet.

[DrYak (748999)]

The 2x speed factor could be enough if the CPU emulation uses good dynamic recompilation.
And efficient libraries replacement can give the necessary performance boost.

That's how fast emulation of the N64 was possible back then.

The main problem is that the emulator isn't mature yet :

- Wii's target architecture is PowerPC. Coder haven't as much experience doing fast assembler optimization for PPC compared to IA32 (which 90% of the emulators currently target)
- PSP's architecture is MIPS. This isn't an architecture that has been emulated as extensively as, say, the Z80 or 68k architecture (for those there are lots of ultra highly optimized emulation libraries).

=> Thus you won't currently get a high performance DynaRec egine.

- The PSP is quite recent and the libraries replacement still have to mature a lot (compared to the current state of N64 or PSX libraries).

=> thus even if most game use mainly hi-level interfaces, the emulators aren't currently quite good at harnessing that.

Re:

[phantomfive (622387)]

Yup. The screenshot shows a splash screen running at 7 fps. If that's a splash screen, imagine what a real game would run at.

Re:

[qoncept (599709)]

You must be referring to the 5 guys that spotted the dupe before you.

Re:

[Smauler (915644)]

Who's loosing credibility? I need some of that action!

No, seriously, I do. All of us grammar Nazis gonna get in a huddle and lap up the loosed credibility. We's gonna hunt down all that there loosed credibility. And there ain't nobody gonna stop us.

Re:

[CastrTroy (595695)]

I know a guy who played on a passive lcd display on an old laptop. There was more than 8 fps, but everything really blurred together to the point where it was almost unplayable. When he upgraded to a real screen, he started to really win quite a bit, as he was so used to playing with such a bad view of the game. He almost learned to play blind.

Re:

[Merls the Sneaky (1031058)]

sure bowling is cool but why the hell wouldnt I go out and...you know bowl for real. [end rant]

I dunno, maybe because you don't like rent a foot fungus?