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]

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:Excellent article

[distr0]

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 17, @03:21PM
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 18, @03:48PM

24 hrs and 27 minutes, that has to be a record

Re:Wheeeee... wiiiiiiiiii

[Josejx]

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:The PSP "emulator"

[adisakp]

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 WINE style system where you're not actually emulating at all, you're just replacing system calls.

Re:The PSP "emulator"

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Hmm...

[Sockatume]

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

The PSP Emulator

[Bragg]

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.

Is enough, but just not yet.

[DrYak]

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.

Rampant misinformation

[marcansoft]

... 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.