Mastering Motion: The Journey to Emulate MotionPlus | Hacker News Reader

Mastering Motion: The Journey to Emulate MotionPlus

dolphin-emu.org

73 pointsbdz12 comments

> Just a year later, Nintendo announced their newest edition to the Zelda series, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword as a MotionPlus exclusive.

I believe this should be Wii Sports Resort? The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword came out quite late in the Wii's lifecycle, in 2011.

> In a bit of good fortune, while developers were analyzing the calibration data, the NSA released a reverse engineering tool called "Ghidra". This tool helped Billiard more easily examine the calibration data and see how the games were using it. With Ghidra, it only took a few days to determine what all of the data meant, and give Dolphin the ability to generate perfect calibration data.

I am curious how Ghidra helped here. Does the Dolphin team not have access to IDA Pro or other similar reverse-engineering software?

Have you seen the IDA pro license fee? It is obscenely expensive. At least it was when I was last interested in reverse engineering which is admittedly over a decade ago.

It's currently at 1200$ for a pro license

IDA 7.0 is free for non-commercial use, so I think Dolphin developers could've used it.

It has neither a decompiler nor PowerPC support.

I mean, I doubt everyone working on Dolphin has a 100% legitimate IDA license ;)

The announcement for Skyward Sword was in 2009 - though at that point the name wasn't released. The fact that it relied on the new MotionPlus technology was part of the announcement.

The fr mirror worked for me as the original server is overloaded... https://fr.dolphin-emu.org/blog/2019/04/26/mastering-motion/

I just wonder how people behind this emulator do that enormous amount of work for free. I mean it takes a lot of time from your regular job and your family to do an in-depth research like this, not to mention writing quality emulator code. They must be angels. Or demons. Or both.

Everyone needs a hobby - for a lot of people, doing this kind of research and development is just plain fun, especially if it involves working with video games you enjoy or collaborative work with a lot of people that share the same interests. I guess it's a bit like an online hackerspace?

Emulators in particular seem to attract a lot of extremely talented programmers, since they often demand advanced or novel techniques in reverse engineering, compilers, graphics, etc. and I guess serve as a nice "challenge" for those who are good at these things.

It's great to see Ghidra being put to good use

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