Homebrew The Nintendo Complete

[Rockout]

It would be hard to imagine a completely backwards compatable video game console, but with the hard work of a LOT of coders out there, we are on the verge of the next best thing. No you can't just jam your old NES copy of Mike Tyson's Punch-out into the disk slot on your wii, but your fceugx will play the rom just fine. Recently I learned of Arikato's work (along with some others) to port a DS emulator to the wii and the project seems to be progessing nicely. I also just learned that in his spare time, he is beginning work on a Virtualboy emulator as well. Props for that! The DS was the last console nintendo released before releasing the wii. With those two emulators, the wii will play any game produced for a nintendo console. (I know, not really any/every game- emulation is tricky business)

Well, almost. The "pokemon mini" was tecnically a nintendo "console", but I think it may have sufferred a fate worse than the virtualboy in that most people have actually heard of the virtualboy, or maybe even seen or played one.

Nevertheless, soon your wii will play games for: Wii, GameCube, N64, SNES and NES- all nintendo's home console units
And also play games for: DS, GBA, GBColor, VirtualBoy and GameBoy- all nintendo's portable consoles(barring the pokimon mini).
The DSi and DSXL were released after the wii, but the majority of thier software library (at least the cartriges) are compatible with the DS anyway.

That's 10 systems in total. 8 more than the wii came with out of the box. Incredable! and those are only the nintendo systems. Including the Sega systems emulated would increase that even more (are all the sega systems emulated on the wii?), not to mention all the other kick ass emulators. So all in all, the wii is the nintendinest nintendo yet, and then some.

Thanks to everyone that put in hard hours trying to make all these great emulators for us wii fans. We appreciate it to the fullest- Thanks and keep it up.

 

[Arm73]

I appreciate the thought, but for emulation , I'd stick to my PC.
One thing is play virtual console games ( heavily optimized to work perfectly just like on the real hardware ) , one thing is to play on homebrew emulators.
Anything above the Snes ( and that includes the GBA ) is somehow plagued by unsteady framerate, compatibility issues or sound problems.
As much as I love my Wii, I find that my PC does a much better job.
We should wait for the next system to find out if we can truly play those games the way they were meant to.

 

[Tobynator]

Its great, that so many emulators came out for the Wii. I´m a retro gaming fan and love to play games like the old Super Mario Bros.
But an all in 1 Emulator would be a dream.
In the look of the Wiiflow, one row of gametitels for one system.
And if you press up or down you just change the row and the emulation system....

Yeah, I´m dreaming...

 

[nikeymikey]

That could be done with a frontend gui, after you have selected a game, the gui would load the correct emu and then autoboot the game. Maybe possible but not by me lol

 

[gameguy95]

or me

 

[SuperMarioMaster]

How would Virtual Boy work on the Wii? Would you wear 3D Glasses IRL?

 

[Potticus]

How would Virtual Boy work on the Wii? Would you wear 3D Glasses IRL?

3d tv
lulz

 

[SuperMarioMaster]

True, I never thought about that one...

 

[oiraMoiraM]

What exactly should be the problem? The Virtualboy emulator for the PC gives you the option of simple 2D output, or to to produce a stereoscopic image via anaglyph. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_image

Same is doable on the TV screen.

 

[machjas]

The closest I've come to a seamless frontend for multiple emulators is GameEx when I built my arcade machine. It has absolutely everything running on it, from Atari 2600 and MAME to N64, PSX, and if my machine was big enough, it'd do PS2 just fine. It also supports network streaming of movies and music and karaoke if it were appropriate for an arcade machine to do so...

It functions almost flawlessly, but it's not very pretty. Maybe if someone were to port that over and modify the GUI.. It's all based on file structure, config files, and emulator command switches for tweaking, but I'm not a programmer so couldn't say for sure what it might entail from that point =P

 

[boondoklife]

While I do appreciate the power of PCs and some games may indeed run better than other on the Wii, I still would rather have all my gaming needs in my Wii. Besides most people don't have a HTPC, and I like my couch better than my desk when it comes to gaming.

I think the idea of a universal ROM loader would be awsome, but is it doable?

 

[XFlak]

Universal Rom Loader --- not likely

I don't think it would be possible, but if any1 can do it, it would probably be tantric (since he's the author of fceugx, vbagx and snes9x).

Just based on size limitations, I don't think it will ever work. The size of the dol's for all the different emu's combined are massive, and afaik there is no way to load a dol that is too large like that.

It may be possible for Tantric create a 3-in-1 emulator for fceugx, vbagx and snes9x... since all 3 apps share common code the size increase in the dol could be minimal (don't know that for sure). But afaik there is no way adding another emu (like Wii64) would work (due to size limitations, and wii64 is relatively massive)

Even if it were possible, all the different devs behind the different emu's would have to be okay with their work being combined... and usually devs don't like to coorperate to the nth degree like that.

 

[geegee]

Maybe it wouldn't need to be one large rom loader. There was the All-in-1 Emuloader that came out a couple years ago. It was just a menu that loads the emulators. It's really out of date now and very few features but maybe something like that could be made.

 

[oneleggedjack]

You could compile them all together... but that is a stupid idea. I'm pretty sure a frontend would be better. Something that loads the specified rom with the specified emulator. Like Maximus Arcade, it would basically end up being a homebrew launcher with a nice GUI. If you look on *snipped* you can find emulators that load a specific rom, get something bare bones like that and it should decrease in size. Just purely speculation of course....

 

[Wack0]

I'll just wait for a bochs or qemu port. :-)