51–60 of 69 posts
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Dolphin can't play Wii U games, but it can play games released on Wii U's Virtual Console platform, which is the case here
I never knew that! This project is just so well done. Always amazing to find out new features.
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I'm not sure how it works technically under the hood. I got Paper Mario as a ".wad" file instead of the normal .iso that you see for GC/Wii/WiiU games, and Dolphin was able to load the .wad file.
Shall I assume you didn't copy it from your Wii U console? if you downloaded it from somewhere, it probably was the original Wii version.
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It might be instructive to flip the question around: what would Nintendo sue for? For which works of authorship is Dolphin infringing the copyrights? Which Nintendo patents or trademarks does Dolphin infringe? If the angle is contributory infringement based on users running illegally copied games, how does Dolphin fail to pass the "substantial non-infringing uses" test? The only emulator project I know of that was ap…
And yet, so many amazing emulator projects have been sued out of existence. Remember Bleem, the Windows program that played contemporary Playstation games? Bleem actually won the court case, but the legal costs forced them out of business. And then there was the time Sony sued Connectix for their emulator. Sony got an injuction, and while Connectix won in appeal, they also ran out of money and closed. Nintendo, on th…
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No / yes / only once. It's just an mprotect(2) call to change the page from R+W to R+X. It needs to happen between the JIT being done creating a hunk of code and the first execution. Basically: allocate a page, write generated machine code to the page, change page to executable, patch page in (so the code gets invoked instead of either interpretation or a baseline compiler). I'm sure you can be smarter about it and i…
On m1 switch RX to RW and back does not require a syscall The mprotect call will fail as that isn’t a valid mechanism to toggle rw/rx
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I don’t really understand how they consider an effect to be ‘undefined’; did Nintendo ever release documentation for this hardware?
There is (was) extensive developer documentation. I don’t know if it’s ever been made openly public.
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To elaborate a bit more on the GPU peak FP32 perf: > VideoCore VI @ 500MHz: 500 [MHz] x 2 [slice] x 4 [qpu/slice] x 4 [processor] x 2 [op/clock] = 32 Gflop/s which is the RPi4 config. compared to a Snapdragon 800: 147.9Gflops FP32, and that's still a very old part. And about the Wii itself: > With the Wii, Nintendo opted to go with an innovative control scheme, rather than to focus on processing power. It offered 12…
Ok, sounds like the Pi’s VideoCore VI is a lot less performant than I thought. I’d imagined it’d be closer to other mobile GPUs.
How has Dolphin avoided getting sued by Nintendo? They seem very uptight about controlling their IPs
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Not only am I always impressed by Dolphin, but by how interesting and detailed their blog posts are! If only other software projects could do the same. I don't even really play games much anymore, especially Nintendo games, but somehow I always come away with delight when I read the Dolphin progress updates and so on.
When I read of Dolphin or MAME updates I feel like the world is a better place.
Why is this?
It seems bigger than just the joy of knowing old games will be preserved forever.
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Yes, Gamecube (and Wii) games are upscaled right up to 4K and they look great. Many games work in 16:9 widescreen also (Gamecube was originally 4:3). For many games there are even community high-def texture packs that you can add to make them look even better. [ Edit: Sorry, was talking about Dolphin here, not Wii U!]
> Many games work in 16:9 widescreen also (Gamecube was originally 4:3). There are a handful of GameCube titles that were 16:9 native widescreen on the original console. The one that comes to mind for me is Serious Sam: The Next Encounter
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On m1 switch RX to RW and back does not require a syscall The mprotect call will fail as that isn’t a valid mechanism to toggle rw/rx
Can you give a citation that mprotect will fail? Yes there's the new, faster mechanism, but I'm surprised that they broke mprotect.
I don't have an M1 Mac to test myself, but the "faster" mechanism doesn't involve anything in the pagetables, so I think toggling pagetable walks into the existing restrictions on RWX allocations.