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Emulating New Super Mario Bros. Wii At 1080p
KingofGnG writes "An impressive confirmation of the Dolphin Wii emulator's capabilities comes from a YouTube video, which shows off recently-added video clips of New Super Mario Bros. Wii in full HD. It demonstrates the growing compatibility of Dolphin with the latest games published for the Nintendo console."
This is a great start. The advantage of the Wii to the emulator community is that it is greatly underpowered compared to 360 and PS3. I don't mean underpowered in that it can't play games, but that the requirements to emulate it are much lower. Since people have already hacked the Wiimote to work as a mouse then there is no reason why the emulator community would not be able to incorporate this to use the real controllers.
The benefit to Nintendo is that they would still be able to sell their hardware add-ons to the emulator world. The downside is that this will act as a modded Wii and so people will probably just download the Wii games, which will still mean that Nintendo will try to shut them down eventually.
Perhaps by the time this emulator works with enough games to make it viable, they will have already come up with the Wii2 and then they won't care so much about people emulating the old system.
I think that Nintedo should have preempted this. The best solution for them would have been to release their own PC version of the Wii which can run the legit games and use the official peripherals. The pressure for other people to write an emulator would have reduced.
I stopped buying games for my PC when copy protection got intrusive and sometimes destructive. These days, I don't trust any games that insists on running as administrator and I always research the copy protection system. If Nintendo created a software Wii that sandboxed itself from the rest of the computer, I would happily play the games knowing that my system would be (mostly) safe.
A lot of these 2D games for these Wii seem to look great at 1080 (well, by a lot I mean this and Muramasa; The Demon Blade). I wonder if this is proof that there may be in fact a Wii HD in the works. I thought they were just the normal fanboy rumors but perhaps Nintendo is already planning on it? Between the motion controls on the other two machines (especially the PS3's) it seems like the 3 major consoles are reaching for parity with each other.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Nice to see that all the game's resources aren't suffering from being upscaled. The model and texture data are meant for 480p but look just lovely at 1080p.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I have an issue with the last sentence. A mostly 2d game, that requires very few resources demonstrates the emulators prowess?
I don't quite understand. I mean, sure, you *can* play pirated games on it, but you can play them on a real Wii as well.
Nintendo wouldn't put in extra large textures because they don't have the RAM to load them into. Even if they did put them in, they wouldn't load them because loading the extra large textures would make load times worse to absolutely no advantage on the Wii.
You're seeing a few items that look good because at times they are viewed zoomed in. And the rest of the stuff is just stretched and it still looks pretty good because cartoony graphics are very amenable to stretching. And then some other stuff (like the coins) still don't look that good.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear Nintendo did plan ahead and draw their textures in higher res for future HD use. But I would be surprised to hear the put them on the disc, let alone loaded them in.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
About a year or two ago, before Dolphin was open sourced, it was a buggy, slow emulator that couldn't run games very well. After it was open sourced, improvements were made extremely rapidly, and even though the rate of increase has designed slightly recently, it's still progressing at a very fast rate. I've been following the project since it was open sourced, and I have to say props to the Dolphin team
Since the OP apparently didn't think a link to Dolphin's site would be nice, here it is: http://www.dolphin-emu.com/news.php
Perhaps by the time this emulator works with enough games to make it viable, they will have already come up with the Wii2 and then they won't care so much about people emulating the old system.
Nintendo has already come up with the Super NES, N64, GameCube, and Wii, yet it still cares about use of its copyrighted games in Free emulators because it competes unfairly[1] with Virtual Console.
The best solution for them would have been to release their own PC version of the Wii which can run the legit games and use the official peripherals.
They did: it's called a Wii console connected to a TV-in card.
I stopped buying games for my PC when copy protection got intrusive and sometimes destructive.
Do you still buy indie games, whose copy protection is far less intrusive? Nintendo is proudly unfriendly to small-time developers.
[1] "Unfairly" as decided by legislators elected by voters throughout the developed world.
More to the point you can also play non-pirated games on it. Not all of us want to buy a Wii for the couple games on it that are actually worthwhile. If the emulator can do a decent 720p on 3d games I'll be buying a couple Wii RPG's.
But, last time I can think of, not many games out there require Administrator rights to run.
Unlike retail Wii games, most retail PC games don't run directly from the disc, even though a lot of newer PCs have enough RAM to hold a DVD game's "minimal install". The installer needs administrative privileges; otherwise, it can't even write to Program Files. It's like on Linux: ordinary users can't write to /usr/bin, but root can (and thus so can anyone who can sudo). Where should a user without administrative privileges install the game?
Maybe you have Windows Vista?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you implying that Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.6, and Ubuntu Karmic are any better than Windows Vista at this?
Games, more than most any other software on your computer, should have no issues running in userspace
Sure, they run in user space like any other executable. But a few major-label retail PC games need the use of some privileges traditionally assigned to the "Administrators" group. Major-label retail PC games that don't require Internet activation tend to hack deep into the system to determine whether the copy of the game is authentic. One system involves precisely correlating the timing of reads to determine the skew from one part of a disc to next, which differs between original and CD-R copies. And some of this copy authentication needs a kernel module to make the timing more accurate.
Consoles are perceived not to have as much of a problem with copy authentication because the console maker chooses one method and sticks with it, and the system menu (not the app) performs this check. For the GameCube and Wii, this involves a slightly different physical sector format (analogous to the difference between CD-ROM Mode 1 and Mode 2 form 1) as well as burning six evenly spaced pinholes into the disc's lead-in and recording the exact locations of these pinholes in the Burst Cutting Area.
This video will be flagged because Nintendo doesn't like emulation videos.
however interesting this is, there was another slashdot story of a video of SSBB played in 1080p. That was news. (this story is more salt in a cut that is the powerPC let go. do you know how much faster this would go if it was virtualized instead of emulated! the wii has a PPC in it
Does it runs in linux? yes, it does
The Nintendo console is quite cheap anyway.
Games might have both high and low res textures on the disc, and which ones are loaded depends on the hardware you play it on.
How can it be a valid assumption that people don't already have a computer?
I assume people already have an office computer, not a games computer. Also, a sufficiently old games computer becomes an office computer due to system requirements creep.
Let me state it plainly. 99.999% of people who get a Wii emulator already have a computer on which to play it.
A years-old used computer or even a brand-new computer with Intel graphics isn't going to be able to emulate a Wii at anywhere near 60 frames per second.
That is about average for a games computer these days.
The fact that you had to specify "games computer" tells a lot. There is no "games Wii" vs. "office Wii"; if you have a Wii, you know you can play games carrying the Wii logo. This isn't true of PCs, which often come with Intel GMA graphic chipsets. As I understand it, Intel GMA 950 and the like compare to a Voodoo3-era video card in that both lack hardware vertex processing. They're fine for browsing the web and watching (non-interactive) videos but grossly underpowered for 3D video games. Or does the second core in a dual-core CPU adequately handle T&L?
If you don't one that fast then maybe buying a Wii is cheaper
So we agree.
I recently fired up super Mario 64 on the PC in an emulator on 1920x1200 which is higher than full hd, and the game looked gorgeous, it simply looked amazing like a new version. Why Nintendo does not even use upscaling on the Wii in any of the emulated games is beyound me.
Especially the N64 games with their blurry textures scale up really well given the fact that they rely more on shading than textures.
Now back to the Wii, Nintendos emulators on the wii are desastrous, they try to emulate the original modes as correct as possible which means they shoot out many owners of LCDs trying to play the older games via component cables. Now even worse instead of just installing an emu, every game has the emu integrated. While they patched a handful of games so that it runs in a different mode, they did not for most other games. Now if your wii is hacked and you play the roms on emulators, not only the games look better thanks to scaling, but also all of them run as expected.
This is so typical Nintendo, they simply do not recognize the potential of every technology they have in their hands until 5 years after it is too late.
Oh and using it as a development environment for homebrew, I guess.
GBA and DS homebrew were welcome because PDAs sucked for gaming at the time. (Apple has since introduced a competent gaming PDA with semi-open development following Microsoft's XNA model.) But the Wii isn't a handheld. So what's the advantage of Wii homebrew over simply developing for PC? For the price of a Wii, I could buy a Wii-sized Acer Aspire Revo and connect it to the same LCD TV, and I'd get a preinstalled copy of Windows without any sort of lockout hassles. I see no reason why indie games can't be designed for such nettops.
Not all of us want to buy a Wii for the couple games on it that are actually worthwhile.
It's ok, you don't have to diss the Wii to be cool any more. Or do you not even know what games are available? Every single one of the games in that top 10 list is fantastic and worth owning. To be fair, if you have Metroid Prime Trilogy then you don't need MP3, but there are more games than just those that are good, and many of them aren't available on any other platform. And if good games aren't enough, you should also buy the Wii for its homebrew scene, which is much better than what's available for the PS3 and 360. Playing the original Quake with the wiimote is awesome.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Why Nintendo does not even use upscaling on the Wii in any of the emulated games is beyound me.
Actually they do on the N64 games.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Someone might want to mention that New Super Mario Bros. doesn't work with the precompiled Dolphin, you've gotta compile the latest build for this game to make it past the title screen. So there, I mentioned it.
only one everything
The copyright laws (such as the DMCA) and enforcement actions against emulators long predate the existence of the wii and it's Virtual Console
Fair use in a given country may be broader for out-of-print works than for in-print works. When a copyright owner takes a work out of print, that action says something about the copyright owner's own assessment of "the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" (17 USC 107). In fact, I remember reading that some countries include out-of-print status explicitly in their counterparts to the effect on market test.