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Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

I've been following the development of Cemu (http://cemu.info/), the Wii U emulator that I'd consider the equivalent of Dolphin if it were closed-source.

One big difference I've noticed is regressions. While Dolphin has an insanely strong regression suite and plenty of people testing for regressions, Cemu seems to randomly go back and forth on support for games.

If you look at this unoffical "change report" you see a lot of comments mentioning that: https://www.reddit.com/r/cemu/comments/6d3nwc/180_megathread...

Part of it is probably how early in the game it is compared to Dolphin, but part of me wonders if being closed source means it's development won't ever reach Dolphin levels of quality

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I'm not sure this is a symptom of a closed-source vs. open source debate, although it can surely be cast that way. Dolphin is a role model for open source projects: many active and talented contributors, excellent project organization and discipline, and a focused community rallying behind one project rather than dozens. (Dolphin is the only GC/Wii emulator worth anything and therefore attracts all GC/Wii emulator contributors. Compare that to the impossibly fractured GBA emulator scene, or to a lesser extent N64).

Measuring Cemu against this holy grail is a fool's errand. Cemu is so early and so immature that it's impossible to tell where it will go. But we do know this: Cemu is, for now, very well funded[1] and so far Nintendo has turned a blind eye. As long as customers keep paying in and getting meaningful progress back out, I see a long and successful future ahead of it. Hell, Cemu is doing better as a business (despite not being one) than some actual companies I've worked at.

As far as the future of Cemu and the capabilities of Wii U emulation in the long term? I encourage you to read the Dolphin wikipedia article[2] and notice that Dolphin's origins are shockingly similar to Cemu's. Will it follow a similar path? Who knows? The reality is Dolphin didn't have the benefit of Patreon in 2008, and Cemu devs must be making good money...

[1] https://www.patreon.com/cemu [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(emulator)

I totally chalk up most of it to where Cemu is in development, my point is more if Cemu can ever reach:

"many active and talented contributors, excellent project organization and discipline, and a focused community rallying behind one project"

The one project part is probably going to stick due to the high barrier of entry (some whispers have said that the reason CEMU is closed source is they used parts of the Wii U SDK that were under NDA to bootstrap development).

But the many talented contributors may be limited due to the closed source nature, and the culture of excellent organization and discipline might have trouble developing if the community is comprised of a few very talented developers focused on an emulator. Open source work allows people of varying quality to contribute, which can be a curse (if the overhead of filtering low quality contributions is too high), or a blessing, because people end up contributing to house keeping tasks that the core devs otherwise wouldn't have time for.

(and of course, this is all assuming it's not open sourced in the future)

Ah, to speak specifically to that question, I think that Dolphin's history proves it can go from closed-source pile of hacks to model citizen, but I suspect the allure of money and the reluctance to split it will keep Cemu to be a closed source project, even if the resolve any potential legal issues and are in all other ways capable of being a community project.

> "some whispers have said that the reason CEMU is closed source is they used parts of the Wii U SDK that were under NDA to bootstrap development"

I would bet money on that. I am not am emu dev myself, nor am I an expert at reverse engineering game consoles, but the progress that Cemu is making is blazing. Even for hacky HLE. Cemu is running circles around it's open source alternative. If they really cared about moving WiiU emulation forward, they could at least release the source code and not let others contribute. It's not like the emulation community is competing for money here ...right?

Who knows. Maybe the Cemu team will wait for more information to surface, maybe for some better documentation from the reverse engineering community, or some leaked documents from other sources. Then open up their code and play it off like it was always a level playing field.

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