Classic Controller (and PRO) calibration test data wanted

July 15th, 2010 by emukidid

In an effort to fix the classic controller pro analog stick ranges in WiiSX and Wii64, we’d like users to run this DOL and report back their findings via the comments button on this post. All values should be posted back here that are on screen, both calibrated and from moving the sticks, oh and don’t forget to mention the type of controller the data is for!

Thanks to everyone in advance :)

WiiSX Beta 2.1 Release

July 11th, 2010 by emukidid

Without further adieu, we would like to present a quick bug-fix release for WiiSX and CubeSX - Beta 2.1 :)

Get it now!

This release mainly addresses the issues to do with games resetting to their title screens and having unresponsive controls as well as a few other minor bugs. Save states made in the previous version will no longer work in this version as a result of some changes made to save audio state.

For more detailed changes on what’s new in WiiSX Beta 2.1:
* Fixed issues where saving was not actually saving
* Many input plugin improvements
* Added “Home” button as a menu combo for CC
* Fixed inverted Y-axis for nunchuk and classic controllers
* Fixed rumble and added “disable rumble” setting
* SMB correction to allow anonymous user and password
* Threaded network init and proper error messages when it fails
* Audio state saved/loaded for save states

We’d like to thank the quick and responsive users which have reported the issues we’ve addressed above.

Enjoy WiiSX Beta 2.1, and if you feel like donating to support our projects, please feel free to visit our Donations page :)

WiiSX Beta 2 Release

July 3rd, 2010 by emukidid

We’re proud to announce WiiSX Beta 2.

Get it now

June 2010 Progress Update

June 10th, 2010 by emukidid

It’s been a while since we’ve said much about what’s going on behind the scenes in terms of general progress and development, so here we are, filling you all in on what we’ve been working on.

In terms of WiiSX progress, we’re nearing the beta 2 milestone we have had in mind for a few months now. The majority of features and bug fixes we have had planned are nearing completion. To be specific, WiiSX beta 2 will encompass a feature rich graphical user interface much like that seen in Wii64 and in the preview video posted below. Some other important features to note include newly ported CDR, Sound and input plugins, boasting features such as dual shock, configurable controllers, clear crisp audio and a good range of CD image support, including subchannel data. Most of the features have been implemented, but we are currently ironing out some show stopping bugs such as seen in certain Capcom fighter games.

On the Wii64 front, we managed to finish migrating the private SVN commits to the public googlecode repository up to Beta 1.1 Honey, so now you can see all of the individual commits and work that went into the last version. Since the last release, we’ve made some progress with bugfixes in the code, but we have larger plans ahead of us for the next beta in order to increase speed and compatibility. Once WiiSX beta 2 is out, we are looking forward to giving Wii64 some more of the TLC it deserves. :)

Here’s one last juicy tidbit for you all… There’s yet another emulator that the Wii64Team has been longing to see on the GC/Wii, so we’ve started working on a port in our spare time, and we’re hoping that it will arrive in all of your Homebrew Channels later this year. Kudos to anyone who can guess the platform (although we’re not promising to confirm if you’re right…) ;)

WiiSX Beta 2 Preview

May 18th, 2010 by sepp256

We’re nearing the WiiSX beta 2 release, so we decided that it’s time to show a preview video of the current state of the emulator and tell you about our progress.  Last summer, we released a beta of WiiSX so that we could put it on the back burner for a while and focus on Wii64.  We weren’t too happy with WiiSX beta 1 because it lacked a proper gui and suffered from stuttering audio and other bugs.  So, we’ve focused the past few weeks on adding a gui to WiiSX and improving the sound, pad plugin, and other various parts of the emulator.  While there will still be plenty of work left for the future, we feel that this release will greatly improve the emulator’s playability and polish.  Look forward to the release, but for now please enjoy the preview.

Wii64 Beta 1.1 “Honey” Release

February 23rd, 2010 by sepp256

It’s out!
Downloads are available for Wii64, Cube64, and the source.

We were planning on releasing this baby last week, but Cube64 was broken! Anyway, good things come to those who wait because we made huge progress on the emulator this past week (see video). We’ll be sharing more technical details later, but for now we hope you enjoy Beta Version 1.1 “Honey”!

If you appreciate our work, or just feel like helping us out, please feel free to something to show your appreciation. Donations are what keep this website alive, so they’re very much appreciated.

Wii64 Beta 1.1 “Honey” Official Trailer

February 9th, 2010 by emukidid

Coming soon!

Merry Christmas ‘09

December 24th, 2009 by emukidid

The Wii64Team would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas.

We have been quite busy working on our upcoming Wii64 and WiiSX betas in the little time we can find in between our real lives and other work.

Rest assured we’re all still alive and kicking, and working on your favorite emulators, with many surprises in store.

Happy Holidays!

SVN migration finished and other news

November 15th, 2009 by sepp256

This is a quick update to let you all know what we’ve been up to.  For those who have been monitoring the googlecode project, we’ve finally finished migrating all of our code changes to the public svn!  That means the beta1 tagged code is the same code that was used to compile the Wii64/Cube64 Beta 1 release version.  We thought the migration process would go much quicker, but the length of time for the migration testifies to the amount of effort put in to get the emulator ready for a beta release!

We’re in the process of preparing Beta 1.1, which will have some exciting improvements.  We thought that we would push out a minor revision very quickly, but our wishlist for the revision grew, and we have a couple important things to add to it that are holding up the release.  Don’t worry though, as it will be worth the wait.

In parallel we’ve been making significant changes to WiiSX/CubeSX.  There is still a lot of work to be done in re-organizing and cleaning up the PCSX code base.  We are hoping that as we tidy things up we’ll be able to fix bugs in the emulator.  We’re not sure when the next release will be, yet, but look forward to major improvements when you see it.

Developers’ Retrospective Part 2: tehpola’s Musings

October 12th, 2009 by tehpola

It was probably around two years ago that I first got a recompiler working that could actually recompile something. I had written some MIPS assembly code in a computer architecture course which would compute factorials. I fed my MIPS code into my recompiler and it computed factorials on the Wii. At the time, that was really exciting for me, but the recompiler was very far from doing much useful. Over the two years, a lot of the original recompiler was overhauled, and I made a couple attempts at rewriting the recompiler more or less from scratch; however, in the end, I came back to the once-reworked original code, and continued to improve on it. After a while I was starting to run more than carefully crafted demos, and after a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, we have a dynamic recompiler which will stably run several games at full speed. This is the first release with a working dynarec. It generates native code for almost all of the N64 instructions; it has, as far as I’ve seen, an accurate cycle count (as relative as mupen64, anyways); and already several optimizations have gone into it. Its still not perfect, several games won’t run at all, and not all games that do run are full speed, but we’re working on improving on that for subsequent releases. For more technical details on the dynarec, see Wii64 Dynarec Part 1 and Part 2 (I’m still planning on continuing the series when I have a chance).
Also, due to sound quality issues with the RSP plugin we were using (rsp_hle-ppc), we’ve begun fixing mupen64’s rsp_hle to be endian agnostic. I believe that rsp_hle-ppc was derived from an early version of the RSP plugin which would later become the rsp_hle in mupen64. Unfortunately, whoever had done all the significant improvements to it since had neglected to maintain endian-neutrality. So, we had to either use the dated, but working, rsp_hle-ppc or work to fix rsp_hle, with all its improvements, so that it would work on the big-endian systems. Up until this release we’ve been using rsp_hle-ppc which has resulted in some sound quality issues, and some games’ sound just didn’t work (StarFox 64, for example). With Beta 1, we’ve fixed up many rsp_hle endian issues and hope to get those changes upstream to other projects so that people can enjoy better sound on other big endian systems. There are still issues, but overall, the sound quality has improved, and certain games which previously had garbled sound (Starfox 64) now sound excellent.
Working on this emulator has been a huge learning experience for me, and I hope everyone is excited about the Beta 1 release as I am.
Since the release we’ve started updating the google code SVN with all the commits we had made to our private repository. We made sure to include a source archive with the binary, but felt that having the whole source history publicly accessible would give more insight into our code and motivations and allow others to see the progression in our work. It will take some time before all the code has been migrated because we’re checking to make sure we don’t have any conflicts, but hopefully it will be appreciated.
In the not-too-distant future, we’re planning on releasing a Beta 1.1 version which will improve some minor changes which were brought to our attention after the Beta 1 release. Hopefully, although these will only be small changes, they will address some of the larger annoyances people have reported.