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Emulation (Games) Classic Games (Games)

Nintendo Wii Homebrew Contest 2007 140

Posted by CmdrTaco from the gotta-keep-'em-emulated dept.
Croakyvoice writes "DCEmu is hosting the worlds first Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Gamecube Homebrew Coding Contest with prizes of $500 on offer for Homebrew and Emulators for the Wii and Gamecube, The hope is that through this contest an exploit will be released that will allow full homebrew on the Nintendo Wii without a Modchip. Gamecube Homebrew is already on the Wii with a host of systems emulated such as Snes, Genesis, Gameboy and Neogeo."
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Nintendo Wii Homebrew Contest 2007 More

Nintendo Wii Homebrew Contest 2007

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  • Good (Score:1)

    by bulio ( 884542 )
    This money would be a great incentive to get homebrew running on the Wii, (which is lacking due to the availability of modchips). The wii is an excellent console, and I'm looking forward to being able to do more with it.
    • Perhaps I'm just thinking greedy here, but $500 does not seem all that appealing to me. I mean, sure it's great incentive and a good gesture for advancement, but I'm sure people probably wouldn't get all stoked to try with a mere $500 reward.

      Personally, I can't wait till Wii homebrew gets more widespread. I really wish it were as easy as the old first generation Dreamcast days.

  • Other solutions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Sunday June 10, 2007 @10:17AM (#19458123) Homepage Journal
    I recently managed to get myself a Wii and from playing around with it, I feel there is a lot of untapped potential. Much of this could be accelerated if they made it easier for individual developers to add new channels. Although the Wii does not have a huge amount of processing power, when compared to a home PC, some of the stuff that I could see being added to it:
        - MP3 Player, accessing music from SD card or a media server such as iTunes. Currently the only MP3 player is part of the slide show.
        - Ability to play MPEG and MPEG4 movies, using codecs other than Motion-JPEG, from SD or a media server
        - Support for Bonjour, for discovering services on you local home network.

    I know that the Wii is meant to be a games machine, but once you have explored the weather, news and internet channels you realise it could be so much more. This price also makes it very attractive.

    On the game front this kind of competition could foster more imagination, than some game companies are will to provide, especially when it comes to using the controller.

    BTW you can play Flash based games with the help of Opera.
     

    • Developers, developers, developers! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TodMinuit ( 1026042 ) <todminuit@NospaM.gmail.com> on Sunday June 10, 2007 @10:33AM (#19458207)
      Allowing anyone to develop a Wii Channel -- even if it's only restricted access through something like RSS -- would only have a positive effect on the console.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by s13g3 ( 110658 )
        TodMinuit wrote:
        Allowing anyone to develop a Wii Channel -- even if it's only restricted access through something like RSS -- would only have a positive effect on the console.

        That is, until people start to find and exploit flaws in it, allowing them to bypass copy protections and/or distribute malicious code via said rss feeds, or cheats that work in multi-player games, for that matter.

        Personally, I don't want to have to waste any of the rather finite amount of CPU cycles available on my Wii to anti-virus /

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Dwedit ( 232252 )
      And Flash is 100 times slower than QBasic.

    • Re:Other solutions (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Excors ( 807434 ) on Sunday June 10, 2007 @11:39AM (#19458609)

      As well as Flash, you can do HTML and JavaScript and graphics in <canvas> – I experimented with an FPS engine [lazyilluminati.com] a while ago, and developed it just with desktop versions of Opera and Firefox, and reportedly it actually works on the Wii too. (Recent nightly builds of Safari also support it – it's nice when browser interoperability works.)

      It's quite horrifically inefficient doing all this in a web browser rather than C++, but there's still a lot you can manage that's within the bounds of feasibility, if you use some imagination to simplify what you need the technology to do for you.

      Incidentally, I like the idea of supporting open standards like <canvas> and <video> [w3.org] rather than proprietary platforms like Flash, particularly given that everyone using the Wii browser has to (indirectly) pay for licensing the Flash player from Adobe.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by aldheorte ( 162967 )
        That is one of the most horrific things I have ever seen in modern technology. That's like goatse.cz for browsers. Impressive you got it to work, but what possessed you to do such a thing?

      • Re:Other solutions (Score:4, Informative)

        by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Sunday June 10, 2007 @02:34PM (#19459699) Homepage Journal

        As well as Flash, you can do HTML and JavaScript and graphics in <canvas> - I experimented with an FPS engine [lazyilluminati.com] a while ago, and developed it just with desktop versions of Opera and Firefox, and reportedly it actually works on the Wii too.

        It doesn't work on the Wii - I just tried.

        Even if it did, you wouldn't be able to play it because there's no way to generate keyboard events with the Wii. The only events you do get are mouse motion events and the left mouse button.

        The Opera-powered Wii browser is still a very capable browser, but it doesn't quite work for things like that.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by FleaPlus ( 6935 )
          Even if it did, you wouldn't be able to play it because there's no way to generate keyboard events with the Wii. The only events you do get are mouse motion events and the left mouse button.

          Actually, all the buttons on the Wii remote are accessible:

          http://www.wiicade.com/api.aspx [wiicade.com]

          • Actually, all the buttons on the Wii remote are accessible
            The WiiCade API works only on SWF pages accessed through wiicade.com. It does not work on games made with JavaScript and <canvas>, so I'd need to get a second job to afford Flash ($700). Nor does it work on SWF pages being tested on a private server on the local domain.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Dwedit ( 232252 )
              You can make flash games entirely in actionscript using open source SWF creation tools. Only need flash if you want to have any vector animation which is not part of the code.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by tepples ( 727027 )

                You can make flash games entirely in actionscript using open source SWF creation tools.

                Which tools do you recommend? And how would one go about, say, making something like "He's Back, He's Here, He's Mario" (the U.S. Super Mario All-Stars commercial) or the similar "Miko Miko Nurse" animutation as a game's opening cut scene using these tools?

                Only need flash if you want to have any vector animation which is not part of the code.

                So are there any examples of making vector animation with code?

    • Apparently it's possible to stream your iTunes library to Wii:
      http://hackaddict.blogspot.com/2007/06/tutorial-it unes-on-wii-for-free.html [blogspot.com]

      Haven't tried it yet though.
    • I just discovered Red Kawa [redkawa.com]. Which has a combination video/music/whatever server that you can access via the Wii Opera Browser. They also have video converter that converts the videos to flash (flv) so you can watch them in the browser. The video quality isn't that great, but it gets the job done. There's also converters for motion jpeg which I imagine would allow you to play videos from the SD slot, although I haven't had the time to try this out yet. I've tried orb [orb.com] which is another app that does the sa

  • Wii homebrew without a modchip? read again. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Superken7 ( 893292 ) on Sunday June 10, 2007 @10:39AM (#19458235) Journal
    From FTA:

    This Coding Competition will hopefully ignite a mass of interest for creating homebrew and emulators on the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Gamecube.


    The article does not encourage homebrew developers to find a new way to run homebrew on the gamecube, far less on the wii itself (in wii-mode). As far as i can tell from the news post, it is just a GC homebrew competition which does not limit the loader to known methods.

    It would be far more interesting if someone already 'known' to the homebrew scene would create a bounty for the first person who is able to run homebrew on the wii (in wii mode, that is).
    Something similar to what StoneCypher did with the dswifi library, which was done by sgstair(thanks!).

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by BoUgS ( 1113739 )

      It would be far more interesting if someone already 'known' to the homebrew scene would create a bounty for the first person who is able to run homebrew on the wii (in wii mode, that is).
      They already have that, and the bounty is currently running. http://www.wiili.org/index.php/Wii_Linux_bounty [wiili.org]

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Superken7 ( 893292 )
        Unfortunately that is not exactly the kind of thing i was talking about.
        That bounty is for getting linux to run (which requires homebrew running, yes, but that should be different goals/projects).

        Note that wiili adds a LOT of requisites appart from running homebrew AND booting linux, such as 'Wiimote, keyboard, mouse, dvd drive, sd-card and network support.', (which is not to be taken lightly)
        They even add the requisite of not voiding the warranty :P . I think they took a slightly different goal. That

  • Not even $500 cash (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Joreallean ( 969424 )
    It's not even for real money. It's $300 store credit to some junk store that sells crappy handheld knock offs.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by the linux geek ( 799780 )
      I don't think anybody who actually has any experience with the GP2X would call it a "crappy knockoff handheld." It's a completely open Linux system with dual ARMs and emulators for many, many past consoles, plus native ports of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, etc...

      • Re:Not even $500 cash (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Sparr0 ( 451780 ) <sparr0@gmail.com> on Sunday June 10, 2007 @12:12PM (#19458855) Homepage Journal
        Sadly, most people just ignore any console that doesnt have at least a 10% marketshare. Sometimes that is a good thing *cough*ngage*cough*, but other times you get imbeciles posting about great consoles like the GP2x (which i owned, and developed for, until mine was stolen).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

          Oh! So that's what happened to you! I wished you were still around back when I was trying to work some stuff out with fixed point arithmetic. Anyways, why don't you buy another GP2X? You were a valuable community member and anyways if you participate to such contests [gbax.com] you could consider that an investment ;-). Plus the price has dropped, I believe.

          -A_SN

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Sparr0 ( 451780 )
            Haven't had the cash to spare lately. Also I am hoping I can hold out for another hardware revision, if the Mk3 is ever coming...

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

              Oh, well, I wouldn't hold my breath for a MK3. Knowing GPH, if it ever comes it won't be before a year.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by EggyToast ( 858951 )
        So it's not a knockoff handheld, but most everything you list involves it just playing old games originally created for other systems. I'm not knocking the hardware, but most of the interest in the system is from people who just want to play old ROMs on the go.

  • Why don't they PROMOTE home game creation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Sunday June 10, 2007 @10:56AM (#19458335)
    The marketting divisions of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony seem to be exceedingly blinkered when it comes to home games production on their consoles. It worked for the Amiga, which because of direct support from Commodore (docs and tools) saw the emergence of a huge and extremely buoyant community with legions of Amiga supporters worldwide. And that's only one example.

    There is really no reason for NOT supporting private developers, because every console that is purchased will also lead to commercial games sales as well, it's totally inevitable. Some people have suggested that the manufacturers are afraid of competition from the amateur sector, but that is just totally unsubstantiated. After all, all those years of game development and millions spent in asset production cannot easily be rivalled at home.

    While there will always be some people who simply cannot afford commercial games, in general the existence of a successful amateur sector would be *additional* to the success of commercial products, and it wouldn't replace them. The argument that the console manufacturers want their cut from licensing games doesn't stand up either, because they will continue to get their cut from those commercial games. If the sectors are additive, then that income is not reduced.

    Of course, if the multi-million dollar games are so crap that people prefer the amateur products instead, then there would indeed be an effect, but that's not likely to happen in the general case. Even if the commercial investments are highly inefficient and tied to games with poor/boring gameplay, they still provide *gloss* at least, and so people will still buy them.

    I put it down to the truism that "marketting is clueless", as always. Which is a big pity here.
    • Read up on Microsoft's XNA. I put it down to the truism that "most people don't know what they're posting about," as always. Which is a big pity here.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Devkits and licenses (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all want to sell development kits and licenses to use them. Officially allowing homebrew would mean commercial developers could make their own devkits, thus depriving the console makers of that revenue stream.
    • XNA [wikipedia.org]

      • XNA
        Congratulations. Now an Xbox 360 costs $894: $399 for the console and $99 per year for a five-year XNA Creators Club subscription. It'd be cheaper to buy a Mac Mini and connect it to the TV.

    • The argument that the console manufacturers want their cut from licensing games doesn't stand up either, because they will continue to get their cut from those commercial games. If the sectors are additive, then that income is not reduced.
      Unless each copy of Lockjaw [pineight.com] means that Microsoft doesn't get its cut from a copy of Tetris [tetris.com].

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 )

      The marketting divisions of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony seem to be exceedingly blinkered when it comes to home games production on their consoles. It worked for the Amiga, which because of direct support from Commodore (docs and tools) saw the emergence of a huge and extremely buoyant community with legions of Amiga supporters worldwide. And that's only one example.

      There's a subtle difference between the Amiga and the game consoles. The Amiga itself was sold to make money, whereas game consoles sell games

      • Too closed is probably as bad as too open though, think Mac vs PC or Beta vs VHS. The technically inferior but more ecosystem friendly system ended up with a much bigger market share.

        The current fashion for user created content makes me think that sooner or later the terms for XNA Creator's club will ease up a bit. In fact, I think it's only because the PS3 is doing rather badly compared to previous Playstations that the terms are as tough as they are. I think commercial and user created games are actually
    • Microsoft does support Home brewing 360 games. The XNA framework, and their game creator club has really opened up new doors for home brew developers. I mean, for a company to do more than releasing a thin wrapper on OpenGL is really cool. Yeah...they charge the creators a $100 yearly fee to use their service, but you get access to a huge amount of guides and art content for your games to go along with whatever you create. Which, being a hobbyist game developer is a real killer for a project. Because m

    • Piracy (Score:2)

      by LKM ( 227954 )

      It worked for the Amiga

      Actually, it's part of what killed the Amiga. During the end of the Amiga's life cycle, many game devs stopped support for the Amiga and moved to the Genesis and SNES instead, because piracy on the Amiga was so rampant.

      Turrican III, for example, one of the archetypical Amiga games, came out for the Genesis first, and was only later ported back to the Amiga. Factor 5 quoted piracy as the reason why the franchise moved to the Genesis.

  • Mythical Wii dev kits (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Purity Of Essence ( 1007601 ) on Sunday June 10, 2007 @11:14AM (#19458447)
    Where are the inexpensive dev kits you promised last year, Nintendo? Sony and Microsoft are actually supporting homebrew, Nintendo is dragging their feet. I hope I can look forward to interesting and exciting news at E3 with regard to homebrew, dev kits, and VC originals ... but I'm not holding my breath. Please live up to your promises, Nintendo, don't turn this into another GameCube broadband adapter.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by edwdig ( 47888 )
      Nintendo promised cheaper dev kits to licensed developers. They never said anything about the general public.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sparr0 ( 451780 )
        I recall reading, and it was almost certainly pure rumor, that the entire process of licensing and acquiring a dev kit would cost as little as $2000. Right here on slashdot, actually, and I replied that I would go for that price in a heartbeat. It wasn't official, but it was a popular rumor.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by yanos ( 633109 )
          The dev kits are about 2000$. It's just that they're not available to the general public.
        • The problem is that you would have to be a serious coder AND be serious about developing a game that people would want to pay for (even if it's cheap). The thing that always depresses me about homebrew is that it's literally overflowing with emulators and ROMs. If 5% of the homebrew population makes a stink about making it easier for people to load homebrew, and the other 95% is only interested in playing old SNES games, why would a company make the cost of entry any cheaper?

          Most of the games I see for

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            While interesting, it seems that most gamers who want to code a game would rather just code it for a desktop OS.
            Xbox 360, Wii, and PLAYSTATION 3, on the other hand, can support four gamepads per TV. Desktop PCs are limited to two gamepads per system due to the smaller physical size of the display. Set-top PCs appear to be so rare that no studio bothers customizing its games for them. So which system should an amateur code a four-player game for?
            • I think we're getting to the point where multiplayer games are more network-code with multiple-console support, rather than split screen. I personally love getting people together for a 4player game, since I have a large enough TV for it, and I've even gotten 8 people on it (4 player split screen with a vertical split-screen on the tv itself, with a pair of Xbox or GameCubes running it). A lot of fun, but I don't know how much focus there is for amateurs to code multiplayer games in general, let alone "pa

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by tepples ( 727027 )

                I think we're getting to the point where multiplayer games are more network-code with multiple-console support, rather than split screen.
                A lot of people's reaction to network multiplayer: I own one PC or one console, and I have friends over. Now I have to buy three more PCs or three more consoles!?

        • I recall reading, and it was almost certainly pure rumor, that the entire process of licensing and acquiring a dev kit would cost as little as $2000.
          Including the cost of forming an LLC and leasing office space? Warioworld.com states that Nintendo doesn't deal with sole proprietorships, nor does it deal with businesses run out of a home office.
    • Not only have I never found a store with the Wii in stock, I've never even seen one with a demo unit.

      I'm starting to suspect it's all just a giant myth...

    • Re:Mythical Wii dev kits (Score:5, Informative)

      by reybrujo ( 177253 ) on Sunday June 10, 2007 @01:33PM (#19459345) Homepage
      Oh, they are availabe here [warioworld.com], and should be under USD 2000 (according to some old gaming articles), but apparently you need solid plan and backing [warioworld.com] to get them :-(
  • ...as if you could get one to play around with in the first place.
  • The one thing that truly bugs me is the lack of support for Wii import games by both chips and loaders. Currently you have to buy a Japanese console to play them. I would love to give Naruto Shippuuden: Gekitou Ninja Taisen EX for the Wii a try. It is supposed to be the best Naruto game yet. The imported Naruto fighting games on the Gamecube are amazing. Japanese released Naruto: Gekitou Ninja Taisen! 3 and 4 (which are not available in the US) are much better than the previous versions. I am very gla
  • Microsoft has the semi-right idea with letting people use the XNA stuff to create games for the 360. Sure it is pretty locked down, but it is still is doable and well documented. The real hard part is that coming up with the idea for a 360 game is HARD, not to mention people expect "next-gen" graphics and sound for 360 games which is almost impossible without a large team. On the other hand, anyone who picks up a Wii controller immediately can come up with 10-50 ideas along the line of a Wii Sports or other
  • I'd pay to be able to play Lunar: The Silver Star and Dark Wizard on my Wii. Anyone else?

    Of course, that assumes that the drive is capable of reading standard CD-ROMs, which the Sega CD used.
    • I would pay DEARLY to play (what I consider to be) the greatest console RPG of all time, L:TSS.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by muridae ( 966931 )
        It is available as a GBA cart, usually pretty cheap if you don't mind getting a used copy. Granted, it is GBA quality, not VGA and redbook audio.
    • If they could get Sonic CD emulated on a cube/ps2, i have a feeling they can get any Sega CD game running on anything if they wanted.
  • It'd be nice if they'd admit that it's actually a GameCube and emulator contest, since nobody can load homebrew Wii code yet. It'd be even nicer if they focussed their efforts on helping load homebrew onto the Wii, instead of getting emulators developed for a system that doesn't have homebrew at all; some people find that worrisome. DCEmu means well, I guess, but their priorities could sure use a reinvestigation.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday June 10, 2007 @07:27PM (#19461263)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Why homebrew? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Kent Simon ( 760127 ) on Monday June 11, 2007 @08:15AM (#19464289) Homepage
      Interesting idea, but in practice this is impossible. I wanted to develop for the Wii, so I emailed and inquired about the process of getting a Dev Kit. After reading my email, it was forwarded to the VC dept, because I hadn't had any AAA titles published. At the VC dept level, the email was sat on and I haven't heard from them again. Turns out you have to have a brick and mortar company to be able to develop for the Wii. Not a company you run out of your house, and certainly not a hobbyist developer. This is a major oversight by nintendo, as third party support really matters this time around. And I would love to develop for it.

      P.S. Unmodded all of my moderated posts so that I could say that.

  • I thought that the only thing running on Wii was gamecube code. I haven't heard of any actual homebrew that can make use of the wiimote. Did I miss something big here? I hope so because that would be awesome!

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