First off, the April 1st Tiizer video is actual gameplay using a recent dev build of Wii64. As you can tell, tehpola has made tremendous progress in debugging and optimizing the dynamic recompiling core. However, there are still a handful of showstopping bugs that we need to work through before we can make a public release. Also, you should be aware that not all of your favorite games will run on the initial release because of a variety of reasons. We are not planning on initially supporting the Expansion Pak because of memory limitations. After further optimizations, tweaks, and profiling to reduce our memory consumption, then we hope to add Expansion Pak support. We may not initially support games that execute code directly from the cart or that use virtual memory (i.e. Goldeneye) because this requires more investigation and significant code changes in the dynarec to implement. Also, some graphics microcodes aren’t supported in glN64, so a few games such as Conkers BFD won’t work just yet. But, sit tight and we’ll continue to work on more features for Wii64 after the initial release.
A complete re-code of the Wii64 gui is underway, so you’ll be able to enjoy using the wii-mote for navigation and also some sleek new graphics. We’ll have a new look for the initial release, but we also plan on adding more features to the gui over time for your enjoyment.
If you have watched any of the recent gameplay videos, then you know that the accuracy of the glN64 port has increased substantially since the Wii64 Tiizer release we made for the Homebrew Channel. Because GX is not 1:1 with openGL, there was a lot of investigation and tweaking required for me to get the behavior on GC/Wii close to what glN64 looks like on PC. There are still a variety of bugs for different games, so don’t expect everything to look perfect, yet. Emu_kidid is a great tester, and he is maintaining an internal graphical issue list to work on. I hope to add a couple more features to glN64 prior to release, including glN64’s primitive framebuffer texture support as well as 2xSaI scaling for textures. The plan is, of course, to continue hunting down bugs and adding features after the upcoming release.
As for the other graphics plugins, glN64_GX is much faster than both soft_gfx and GX_gfx, so we may only release a build with glN64_GX. The only drawback is that currently glN64_GX won’t render graphics for demos that only directly manipulate the framebuffer with the CPU. However, when I have time I’ll add a feature into glN64_GX that will allow it to render the N64’s framebuffer rather than rendering primitives passed through the N64’s graphics pipeline. Then, you can just flip an option in the menu when you are running homebrew N64 games and demos that write directly to the framebuffer. Also, I have already done some work on porting Rice’s video plugin to Wii64. Rice supports more microcodes than glN64, including the one that Conkers BFD uses, and it should be faster than glN64. We have a vision of supporting custom texture packs in Wii64, so we will implement that feature as well. We hope that you, our users, will contribute your creative talents in developing texture packs to share with the Wii64 community. We can’t say when custom texture pack support will be finished, but expect it sometime in the future.
Some of you have been asking for an update on WiiSX. We are planning on working on a release of WiiSX after the upcoming Wii64 release. The reason we have not done a release yet is because there were some serious bugs in SVN last fall, and we also wanted to focus on completing Wii64. We have since resolved some WiiSX issues, internally, and so once Wii64 is out the door, we feel that we can also follow up with a WiiSX release relatively soon afterwards.
Finally, we’d continue to ask that if you enjoy using Wii64 when it’s out that you consider donating to the project. Right now, most of the donations we receive go toward hosting costs. However, there are also some small accessories like component cables and classic controllers that we are considering purchasing with donation funds to aid in development.
