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Emulating New Super Mario Bros. Wii At 1080p

Posted by Soulskill on from the super-high-def-mario dept.

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."

13 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Good start by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Good start by Kagura · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Interesting idea, especially since specialized hardware hasn't really been needed for console gaming/emulation since the early 2000s. I would pay half the price of the console for an official Nintendo/Xbox/PS emulator, and I would also pay money for controllers.

      Too bad. :(

    2. Re:Good start by denmarkw00t · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      Wait what? Let us start at "Nintendo should have preempted this." Nevermind. "PC version of the Wii" - I gather what you mean is "Software for computers capable of running Wii games." While not at all a bad idea, and one I've wanted for a long time to be official from Nintendo for things such as NES, SNES and 64 games, its not going to happen...probably. Considering that one of the Wii's competitors is owned by the company most known for having a stranglehold on the OS market, I don't know that Nintendo would like this. Suddenly, they lose profit on hardware in exchange for adding to their competitor's gaming market share? Nah, though MS would probably welcome the idea with open arms. You can sell a Wii for a lot more than you can software that emulates (and not always predictably accurate) said software, whats the point? You don't want to invest in a console rollout so that you can bleed out of every chopped off limb by running your software on PCs.

      "The pressure for other people to write an emulator would have reduced." - Kind of backwards - its much easier to pirate something that already runs on your target system. Granted, piracy isn't emulation per se, you stand to lose way more by allowing your games to be run natively on systems you don't own, service, upgrade and control. Demand for emulation would obviously drop, but demand for piracy of games and software to run them would skyrocket.

      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.

      I'll be honest, I haven't gamed on a computer in a while - at least not on a PC and mostly OSS games. But, last time I can think of, not many games out there require Administrator rights to run. Maybe you have Windows Vista? And you're thinking of the installation process? And even then I don't know if I believe you. Games, more than most any other software on your computer, should have no issues running in userspace, and companies like MS probably see it in their interests to give average users access to DirectX-related hardware.

    3. Re:Good start by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Suddenly, they lose profit on hardware in exchange for adding to their competitor's gaming market share?

      You are assuming that people haven't already got a computer and paid money to Microsoft.

      It's a valid assumption considering Microsoft's lead over Apple in the market for desktop computer operating systems.

      You are also assuming that Nintendo couldn't make their emulator work on the Mac as well. This would not really add anything to Microsoft's market share.

      Both Microsoft and Apple are "their competitor" in video gaming: Xbox 360 in video game consoles and iPod Touch in handhelds, especially with Apple's recent ad campaigns promoting it as a DS replacement.

      They can still charge for the software

      Not once pirates thoroughly crack the emulator to play ripped copies. If you've been following gbatemp or maxconsole, you know how easy it became for a PC to run pirated DS games. It's still a bit more work to run pirated games on a Wii than on a PC.

      People write an emulator so they can run a Wii game on their PC.

      Does the emulator run well on the $300 entry-level PC from Dell? If not, the PC needs an upgrade. Think of how much it would cost to upgrade the PC with a faster CPU and a non-Intel video card and then add on a Wii Remote ($40) and a Nunchuk ($20). Now compare that to the retail price of a Wii ($200). Besides, you still need the Wii in order to dump your game discs, which use a slightly rearranged format for physical sectors that PC DVD-ROM drives' firmware can't recognize.

    4. Re:Good start by hufman · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think that a $200 Wii is much much cheaper than any x86 hardware capable of running Dolphin at full speed, without any glitches.

    5. Re:Good start by icebraining · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you divide the price for the number of games (not only Wii games) that it can run, the x86 is *much* cheaper.

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
    6. Re:Good start by Gwala · · Score: 2, Informative

      > What video game caused damage to your system and what copy protection system was in act? I bet with a simple Google search I could probably find an answer to your problem or maybe that you were the one who caused it, not the game.

      Starforce. It sent commands to the DVD drives in question directly; in a manner which was not supposed to be done (to read some sectors outside the normal range). Some DVD drives apparently ended up with a mechanical failure as a result.

      --
      #!/bin/csh cat $0
  2. A Trend, Perhaps? by dancingmad · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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)
  3. Re:WTF? by eqisow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. No. by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:No. by marcansoft · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm pretty sure the routinely draw stuff in high-res anyway, for promotional material. However, the versions on the disc are always downsampled to more reasonable levels, to save disc space and RAM.

  5. Dolphin has come a long way. by qazadex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  6. Why should I use this and not by a Wii instead? by master_p · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Nintendo console is quite cheap anyway.