Wii output is fixed. Hooray!

[Deleted member 42501]

New version of USBloader GX turns off the flicker filter and framebuffer. Anyone tried it out yet along with this 480p switcher?

https://gbatemp.net/threads/wiiu-video-mode-changer.490721/page-2#post-9480282

 

[muniryka]

New version of USBloader GX turns off the flicker filter and framebuffer. Anyone tried it out yet along with this 480p switcher?

https://gbatemp.net/threads/wiiu-video-mode-changer.490721/page-2#post-9480282

I was planning to try it out! Will do right now, also it's just sad that we can't do this to WII Injections on the WII U Menu

 

[Deleted member 42501]

Let me know how it looks please. I'm just glad someone is still working on things like this and it seems like it could fix a lot of the issues.

Also try it with 480p to see if that helps. Apparently there are more options in USBloader GX now as well. I do wonder if pulling from the framebuffer has any issues with effects or transparencies or if its just a cleaner signal.

If we can work on the Wii U hardware side with its graphical interpretation thats baked into the chip I detailed in another post that would make it perfect but this is a huge development.

 

[orangy57]

the people in the Possible to Disable The Wii's (De)Flicker Filter? thread might like this, its like the meeting of the minds over there they've been using Gecko codes and hex edits to try to disable each filter one by one

 

[duwen]

Yeah, it works great... but this update's been out since January I think.

 

[blackb0x]

but this update's been out since January I think

It's had deflicker filter settings since August 2021, but it went under the radar for a lot of people because I didn't upload my releases to GitHub and it didn't have the "official" label at the time.

I'd recommend checking out the changelog, since a lot was added and fixed in r1280/r1281

 

[duwen]

It's had deflicker filter settings since August 2021, but it went under the radar for a lot of people because I didn't upload my releases to GitHub and it didn't have the "official" label at the time.

I'd recommend checking out the changelog, since a lot was added and fixed in r1280/r1281

That's the one I'm using
It coincidentally released a day or two before I relented and switched from CBHC to Tiramisu and updated all my homebrew

 

[CheatFreak47]

Did some tests with my capture card using Framebuffer + Deflicker on vWii and I think vWii is still pretty bad overall, but this does make it significantly better at least.

I really wish someone could figure out the chroma shift problem with vWii.

 

[Deleted member 42501]

The DMCU needs to tweaked for the best results on Wii U:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/fixing-vwii-mode.573265/page-6#post-9759133

It should be entirely possible but no one has looked yet. Lots of info in the thread and Nintendo themselves have updated it before so it can be fixed.

 

[Vague Rant]

Personally, I don't think this trade-off is worth it for most users*.

Yesterday, I did a write up of several things that affect the way the Wii's picture looks. It includes a section on the viWidth, which is the main thing being discussed in that video.

Summarizing, the Wii's picture is often stretched from its native internal resolution for good reasons: accounting for the pixel aspect ratio and filling up the screen better. This particular scale is done with 8× super-sampling. If I was a diving judge I'd give it a 9.5/10, it's a nice quality scale that has very little negative impact on the final picture, but a substantial positive one.

Ultimately, there's far more substantive things you can do to improve the Wii's image quality (switching to 4:3 and disabling the "deflicker" filter are the two main ones) rather than removing this step, which looks the nicest out of everything that happens to the Wii image and provides obvious benefits.

I'll also note that this video is a bit confused about aspect ratios, saying Resident Evil 4 isn't really widescreen and renders in 4:3. This is literally just how widescreen works on the Wii, like ... all the time. All widescreen games do that. The System Menu does that. It's called anamorphic widescreen and it's completely normal. It's why 4:3 looks a little bit sharper than widescreen: because it is (link to the same document as before).

Spoiler: *

I said "most users", the exceptions would be if you're performing video capture or using an external upscaler device with your Wii, like an OSSC. In pure picture quality terms, you're probably better off getting the pixels as "raw" as you can and correcting the aspect ratio later, but there is a convenience cost there.

 

[CheatFreak47]

Personally, I don't think this trade-off is worth it for most users*.

Yesterday, I did a write up of several things that affect the way the Wii's picture looks. It includes a section on the viWidth, which is the main thing being discussed in that video.

Summarizing, the Wii's picture is often stretched from its native internal resolution for good reasons: accounting for the pixel aspect ratio and filling up the screen better. This particular scale is done with 8× super-sampling. If I was a diving judge I'd give it a 9.5/10, it's a nice quality scale that has very little negative impact on the final picture, but a substantial positive one.

Ultimately, there's far more substantive things you can do to improve the Wii's image quality (switching to 4:3 and disabling the "deflicker" filter are the two main ones) rather than removing this step, which looks the nicest out of everything that happens to the Wii image and provides obvious benefits.

I'll also note that this video is a bit confused about aspect ratios, saying Resident Evil 4 isn't really widescreen and renders in 4:3. This is literally just how widescreen works on the Wii, like ... all the time. All widescreen games do that. The System Menu does that. It's called anamorphic widescreen and it's completely normal. It's why 4:3 looks a little bit sharper than widescreen: because it is (link to the same document as before).

Spoiler: *

I said "most users", the exceptions would be if you're performing video capture or using an external upscaler device with your Wii, like an OSSC. In pure picture quality terms, you're probably better off getting the pixels as "raw" as you can and correcting the aspect ratio later, but there is a convenience cost there.

Yeah not patching viWidth to match framebuffer but still patching out deflicker is my currently preferred solution as well, but if @blackb0x can figure out setting entirely custom widths as we do with Nintendont, that'd be pretty awesome, as we could set all games to use the exact same settings if we wanted, which is nice for our fancy consistent digital displays and such.

 

[Deleted member 42501]

Personally, I don't think this trade-off is worth it for most users*.

Yesterday, I did a write up of several things that affect the way the Wii's picture looks. It includes a section on the viWidth, which is the main thing being discussed in that video.

Summarizing, the Wii's picture is often stretched from its native internal resolution for good reasons: accounting for the pixel aspect ratio and filling up the screen better. This particular scale is done with 8× super-sampling. If I was a diving judge I'd give it a 9.5/10, it's a nice quality scale that has very little negative impact on the final picture, but a substantial positive one.

Ultimately, there's far more substantive things you can do to improve the Wii's image quality (switching to 4:3 and disabling the "deflicker" filter are the two main ones) rather than removing this step, which looks the nicest out of everything that happens to the Wii image and provides obvious benefits.

I'll also note that this video is a bit confused about aspect ratios, saying Resident Evil 4 isn't really widescreen and renders in 4:3. This is literally just how widescreen works on the Wii, like ... all the time. All widescreen games do that. The System Menu does that. It's called anamorphic widescreen and it's completely normal. It's why 4:3 looks a little bit sharper than widescreen: because it is (link to the same document as before).

Spoiler: *

I said "most users", the exceptions would be if you're performing video capture or using an external upscaler device with your Wii, like an OSSC. In pure picture quality terms, you're probably better off getting the pixels as "raw" as you can and correcting the aspect ratio later, but there is a convenience cost there.

Interesting write up.

Have you looked into the DMCU on Wii U? From what I've read that is the key to getting the best image quality.

Personally I'd rather have a smaller picture that looks crisper, the filters @Sono made for the 3/DS make the image look amazing compared to Nintendo standard. Before it was a blurry mess and I hope this generates a similar leap.

I first mentioned that using the 480p output and letting the TV scale the signal gets a far better image but that depends on your set I guess. Some people disagree but for me it looks far better that way so am hoping this adds to that once I give it a go.

 

[godfantomas]

Sorry for a long rant but I just got into modding wiiU yesterday since i saw this video for possibly trying out the deflicker method and USBLoaderGX is giving me loads of issues. It launches the games fine from disc (and with deflicker it looks amazing) but it freezes my WiiU on poweroff (or when trying to exit to home). It wont launch games from sd card too. I tried every possible fix i could find on the internet (switching “Return to” menus, different sd cards, different Ios installs and slots, loader settings, game settings, boot settings, loadergx versions). Seems nothing helps with vWii and nobody is using it for launching discs like i do, so maybe my issue is unique. Anyway it freezes my wiiU on game exit and its not even possible to shut it off by holding a power button for 20+ seconds. I have to unplug the power cord. I maybe did that 30 times trying to fix the issue. I am reluctant to use USBLoaderGX because i don’t wan’t to pull out a power cord everytime i want to quit the game.

Solution (maybe it will help somebody if they want to enjoy their original Wii disc games with better graphics through wiiU like i do):
I switched to WiiFlow Lite and it works flawlessly with no issues, launches games from sd and disc. It also has 480p pixel fix and deflicker + framebuffer thing. It looks identical to the USBLoaderGX deflicker. Possibly never looking back.

 

[CheatFreak47]

Sorry for a long rant but I just got into modding wiiU yesterday since i saw this video for possibly trying out the deflicker method and USBLoaderGX is giving me loads of issues. It launches the games fine from disc (and with deflicker it looks amazing) but it freezes my WiiU on poweroff (or when trying to exit to home). It wont launch games from sd card too. I tried every possible fix i could find on the internet (switching “Return to” menus, different sd cards, different Ios installs and slots, loader settings, game settings, boot settings, loadergx versions). Seems nothing helps with vWii and nobody is using it for launching discs like i do, so maybe my issue is unique. Anyway it freezes my wiiU on game exit and its not even possible to shut it off by holding a power button for 20+ seconds. I have to unplug the power cord. I maybe did that 30 times trying to fix the issue. I am reluctant to use USBLoaderGX because i don’t wan’t to pull out a power cord everytime i want to quit the game.

Solution (maybe it will help somebody if they want to enjoy their original Wii disc games with better graphics through wiiU like i do):
I switched to WiiFlow Lite and it works flawlessly with no issues, launches games from sd and disc. It also has 480p pixel fix and deflicker + framebuffer thing. It looks identical to the USBLoaderGX deflicker. Possibly never looking back.

I'm running the latest USB Loader GX on a vWii and everything seems to work perfectly fine, something about your setup is likely to blame, but it's tough to troubleshoot these issues over forum posts, unfortunately.

I have two guesses based on your description and the first guess is maybe you have a weirdly formatted SD Card or something.
If you want to troubleshoot it, feel free to send me a PM, I wouldn't mind trying to hash it out outside of this public thread. (don't wanna flood the thread with irrelevant discussion)

 

[Vague Rant]

Interesting write up.

Have you looked into the DMCU on Wii U? From what I've read that is the key to getting the best image quality.

Personally I'd rather have a smaller picture that looks crisper, the filters @Sono made for the 3/DS make the image look amazing compared to Nintendo standard. Before it was a blurry mess and I hope this generates a similar leap.

I don't personally have the reverse-engineering knowledge to do any kind of work like that, but there is ongoing research into the DMCU hardware that's looking promising. Some preliminary technical documentation of the DMCU has been forming on WiiUBrew over the last couple of weeks. Fingers crossed.

 

[huma_dawii]

Personally, I don't think this trade-off is worth it for most users*.

Yesterday, I did a write up of several things that affect the way the Wii's picture looks. It includes a section on the viWidth, which is the main thing being discussed in that video.

Summarizing, the Wii's picture is often stretched from its native internal resolution for good reasons: accounting for the pixel aspect ratio and filling up the screen better. This particular scale is done with 8× super-sampling. If I was a diving judge I'd give it a 9.5/10, it's a nice quality scale that has very little negative impact on the final picture, but a substantial positive one.

Ultimately, there's far more substantive things you can do to improve the Wii's image quality (switching to 4:3 and disabling the "deflicker" filter are the two main ones) rather than removing this step, which looks the nicest out of everything that happens to the Wii image and provides obvious benefits.

I'll also note that this video is a bit confused about aspect ratios, saying Resident Evil 4 isn't really widescreen and renders in 4:3. This is literally just how widescreen works on the Wii, like ... all the time. All widescreen games do that. The System Menu does that. It's called anamorphic widescreen and it's completely normal. It's why 4:3 looks a little bit sharper than widescreen: because it is (link to the same document as before).

Spoiler: *

I said "most users", the exceptions would be if you're performing video capture or using an external upscaler device with your Wii, like an OSSC. In pure picture quality terms, you're probably better off getting the pixels as "raw" as you can and correcting the aspect ratio later, but there is a convenience cost there.

This is interesting read, I am going to try it out to see if I notice any difference

 

[blackb0x]

Personally, I don't think this trade-off is worth it for most users*.

The video width setting was added with GCVideo in mind, since that allows you to output only the visible area to give you a pixel perfect image. So without the hardware I wouldn't recommend using it.

Yeah not patching viWidth to match framebuffer but still patching out deflicker is my currently preferred solution as well, but if @blackb0x can figure out setting entirely custom widths as we do with Nintendont, that'd be pretty awesome, as we could set all games to use the exact same settings if we wanted, which is nice for our fancy consistent digital displays and such.

If I can get it to work reliably for most games then I'll eventually add custom widths.

 

[Clector]

Did some tests with my capture card using Framebuffer + Deflicker on vWii and I think vWii is still pretty bad overall, but this does make it significantly better at least.

I really wish someone could figure out the chroma shift problem with vWii.

I already mentioned some of these things on another thread, but I have screenshots of this game uploaded, so may as well share in this thread that's specifically for this.

The Wii U always has chroma shift, but it seems to vary on two levels, sometimes being alright-ish and sometimes worse, this may be yet again another bug of the VI emulation (among various other bugs). The worst chroma shift level on the Wii U seems to also cut a bit of the software's output frame on the right vertical side...

480p is actually the blurriest as well since the console is still scaling and zooming the image with the 480p setting and as such has the most loss of detail as is zooming and scaling the image within the 480p frame (specially noticiable when a game uses the deflicker filter).

Personally I don't recommend to use the Wii U's Wii mode for anyone wanting a clean and/or sharp image, but that's just my own recommendation.

Wii (this is from an RVL-CPU-01):

Spoiler

Wii U with the less worse chromas shift level:

Spoiler

-480p:

-720p:

-1080p:

----
EDIT: Note about the Wii U not powering down by holding the power down button if the console crashes, that's normal. It seems to be only controlled by software on Wii mode, so disconnecting it from the power is necessary if it crashes on Wii mode.

 

[Deleted member 42501]

This looks wonderfully crisp in 480p. Better than native Wii.

@Vague Rant have you tried out yourself on a Wii U? 8x super sampling sounds nice but why doesn't it produce as clean results as deflicker/framebuffer?

 

[GaryOderNichts]

As @Vague Rant already teased, I've spent the past few weeks reverse engineering the DMCU firmware and trying to fix some of the issues mentioned with vWii mode.
This resulted in the following Aroma plugin which can apply DMCU patches to achieve a custom viewport and maybe more things in the future: https://github.com/GaryOderNichts/evwii
Note that I'm definitely not a video quality enthusiast so any feedback would be appreciated : P
Also thanks to @Vague Rant who helped a lot with this!