Slashdot Mirror
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.
I especially like how this article and its twin are back to back on the main games.slashdot.org page.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/17/1919236
Deja vu all over again.
--A2K
or you can smell dejavu?
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
OH sweet! Who needs more then 7fps anyway?
is obviously fake
Swany http://www.monkeyreview.co.uk/
What do you mean not playable? I played through Quake II at 8 fps (software rendering on a Cyrix)...
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.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Maybe with a NES emulator I could get my Battletoads for the fucking Wii while I wait for Gamestop to stop being bitches and hoarding the new Wii version.
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......
Epic. Just epic.
On the topic of "no$Psp":
Ugh! Rather than discuss how obviously fake this is, I am going to address the fact that this even made it onto the front page of Slashdot. It seems like many of the replies (on all the various sites reporting this) pointing out how fake this is loose credibility by sounding stupid, as in "Come on this is so fake just get a life stupid dude I don't know how to use punctuation," although there is one good one on DCEmu that sums up why this is a (poorly constructed) hoax. It seems as though no one, not even the editors (here, engadget, and elsewhere), RTFA's anymore. In fact, I'm seriously considering producing a fake _video_ of the same "quality" (that is, with all the same giveaways) as this picture, just to see if everyone still argues about whether it's real. I think it's so funny how people think that a video automatically means "real" and a picture is usually faked.
On the topic of the new firmware, though, great job devs! I had read a little bit about how this might be possible without damaging the original firmware a few days ago, so I'm glad to see it has been put to use so quickly!
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 controler for the Wii.
One of the main reasons I still have my DreamCast around. Freakin easy to homebrew.
To me that is just stupid! Why would you want to emulate a PSP @ only 4 and 8 frames per second. I at least have to give them some props for TRYING. Who knows, next they will probably try to create an Wii emulator for PSP, witch will be even DUMBER!
THERE_IS_N0_SiG
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.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
classic example of a "emo kid trying to grow his e-penus" Throughout the years as a admin at NGemu, I have witnessed the birth of PS1, N64, and PS2 emulation. There is always a common characteristic between fake emulator of then and now: An unknown author claiming the extraordinary without any previous debug release that can play homebrew games. Also, they always seem to post 1 image claiming their amazing accomplishments.... I don't think anyone can tell me, with a straight face, that the image is 100% authentic
... going to make something other then emulators and ports of Doom/Quake/Etc?
--- What?
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?
... as usual.
Let's set a few things straight:
We released a legal open source firmware patcher 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). 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.
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/
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I'd be happy if I can play my old MegaCD games on it, if only so I can do it without needing 4kg of power bricks.
Maybe with a NES emulator I could get my Battletoads for the fucking Wii while I wait for Gamestop to stop being bitches and hoarding the new Wii version.
It's not GameStop that's being a bitch; it's Microsoft. Like RC Pro-Am for NES, Jeopardy!, and Banjo-Kazooie, the Battletoads games were developed by Rare, which is now part of Microsoft. At this point, it's a toss-up whether the game will show up on Xbox Live Arcade or on Virtual Console.
[When are homebrew developers] going to make something other then emulators and ports of Doom/Quake/Etc?
Probably once you help with creating models, textures, etc. under a free license suitable for use in free video games. The free non-software works movement isn't as mature as the free software movement yet.
Recently, we actually did figure out a way of reading DVD-Rs without a modchip.
Does this include DVD-ROM, DVD-R, and DVD+R discs? If so, then I'd guess Nintendo has no excuse not to make a "DVD-Video Channel" and sell it in WiiWare for 2000 points to cover the price of DVD format (MPEG-2, AC-3, CSS) licensing. That's what Microsoft did for the original Xbox: sell a copy of the DVD decoder software on a memory card and bundle it with a remote.