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.

Comments

Excellent article

[eln]

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

Re:The PSP "emulator"

[p0tat03]

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]

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: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.

Hmm...

[Tpl2000]

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: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.

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.