Dolphin Progress Report: February, March, and April 2022 | Hacker News Reader

Dolphin Progress Report: February, March, and April 2022

dolphin-emu.org

129 pointssoopurman28 comments

There's a really interesting gem in technical planning for games on the memory-mapping logic for Disney Games[1]. Or, what was assumed to be an antipiracy measure was in fact attempting to rescue a game that didn't do any planning for memory budgets.

[1] https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-disney-trio-of-destruc...

Never seen the domain name with this sign "TM". Typing TM doesnt work.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_symbol

I'm being pedantic here, but the trademark symbol is actually a part of the path, not the domain name.

> It's an impressive effect for the time, as the lighting on the ridges will shift and match the sun's angle even as the suns dynamically move through the sky. Bump mapping like this wouldn't become common until the next console generation, and here it is in a GameCube launch title from 2001!

It's always fun when a Factor 5 game appears in one of these. These people were wizards.

Bump mapping was supposed to be a selling point of the Gamecube hardware, so it wouldn't surprise me if Nintendo specifically asked or told Factor 5 to incorporate it.

IIRC, it was used in the Zelda Spaceworld 2000 demo. I remember magazines at the time noting the bump mapping on Ganondorf's sword:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvE3yJv3fm0

Slightly longer video of just the Zelda segment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIa79bTDuV4

Why did they drop that selling point? Did it hog too much performance for most games?

I think the article itself probably explains it well: you didn't get it for free.

>However, there was a reason this effect didn't take off until years later. The DirectX9 and newer forms of bump mapping are painless - developers can use them with very little setup and they are very, very cheap to run. Devs don't even need to think about it. But with this older type of bump mapping, developers had to build the effect themselves. And it was not cheap. For something that just adds a bit of visual flare, most GameCube and Wii developers decided it was not worth it and passed it by.

So again, Nintendo themselves probably coded it into the tech demo because they wanted to show off what was possible with the hardware, even if it wasn't practical (I believe there was a Dreamcast tech demo that bragged about how many polygons they had put into rendering a bowl of fruit).[0] And it is known that Nintendo worked with Factor 5 directly to provide them with prototype Gamecube hardware before the console was ready so that F5 could release a "killer app" launch title. It wouldn't surprise me, then, that F5 similarly threw in all the bells and whistles they could think of.

[0]https://imgur.com/HvQqYjT

At the time, hardware bumpmapping was an inconsistent mess, and despite lofty promises, they didn't end up delivering what was promised. It wasn't until the "bump map" was torn down and replaced with the "normal map" in 1999 by Kilgard that the stage was set for the future. I suspect that they stopped talking about it to distance themselves from that association. The specific hardware feature in the GameCube was also getting retooled, and the "bump texture" unit eventually turned into the much more powerful "indirect texture" unit, and that thing is a beast. It was used everywhere, as it should have been. If you've seen my video on displacement maps [0], the indirect texture unit was what powered that.

Nintendo reused bumpmapping in a few places in Luigi's Mansion, but their primary trick was spherical-mapped environment mapping, which they basically mastered the art of. They also later developed a way of using the indirect texture unit to do normal mapping on the Wii, though I believe that tech was only used in a few places in Wii Sports Resort.

[0] Should I feel shame for plugging this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k

About the update servers: why don't they just host their own copy of the required update files? I thought maybe because of copyright issues, but when the current solution is running their own intermediary server it seems kind of equivalent.

The update data is not redistributable, but there is nothing copyrightable in what the "fake update server" returns (30 lines of PHP serving some trivial static XML files).

Ah I see, thanks! I thought the fake update server would be returning the actual data files itself. What a precarious situation to be in though, that's unfortunate.

Maybe the "fake update server" could have a "cache" for "reliability"?

Nintendo's lawyers are very aggressive with anything IP related, and I'm sure they would love an excuse like that to shut down the dolphin project.

> but when the current solution is running their own intermediary server it seems kind of equivalent.

My impression is that they aren't hosting or relaying any of the update files -- they're running a web service which provides Dolphin users with URLs of files which are hosted by Nintendo.

This software is fantastic. I have greatest respect for the Dolphin Team.

Recently installed Dolphin to play some coop games with my family. - Using the origional Wii Remotes (I purchased a 4th one from Ebay) and the Mayflash sensor bar which I've had for a few years. - It works great, much better the the origional Wii - I will need to further explore the GameCube / Wii U games.

> The creatively named “Windows.Gaming.Input” (WGI) is the newest input API for Windows.

For now! The Windows.Gaming.Input API is the Xbox One API, and has been around since Windows 8 for UWP and the Xbox One SDK. The new one is GameInput [0], which is used on the Xbox One X by Microsoft's new gaming SDK, the GDK. It's not yet on Windows, but it is, ostensibly, coming soon...

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/inpu...

Could Dolphin ever add support for WiiU/3DS? I realize there are existing emulators for those platforms, but Dolphin rocks.

It wouldn't make any technical sense to do so. 3DS is completely different hardware, Wii U has some hardware similarities but the environment in which games run is completely different (there's an OS, a bunch of dynamic linking, etc.).

Yeah, Dolphin was a Gamecube emulator and since the Wii was basically two GameCubes taped together it was very easy for it to begin supporting Wii titles.

The Wii U is significantly different, I think.

The Wii U could run Wii games thanks to dedicated chips on the MoBo. That's why it has to switch into Wii mode. Most Nintendo backwards compatibility depends on dedicated hardware to operate. Wii and GameCube are the exception. The Super Nintendo was going to be backwards compatible with the NES but Nintendo found it too expensive.

Pedantically, I'm not sure if there are any extra physical chips on the Wii U for backwards compatibility, at least for the major bits. On the CPU side, the Wii U uses a weird triple core PowerPC 750 (aka G3) setup, even though the 750 was a) ancient and b) not designed for SMP, in order that it could be used for backwards compatibility with the previous 750 powered units. On the GPU side it does still have the old GC / Wii "GX" GPU as a separate unit, but it's just on the same chip as the modern GPU.

Rodrigo Copetti has a great article detailing the Wii architecture and how similar it is to the GCN - https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/wii/ - Really looking forward to his Wii U article.

Does the Wii not have an OS? Or do you mean Wii U titles are far more integrated into its OS?

The Wii U titles appear to be far more integrated into the OS. On the Wii it appears that games were run at a pretty low level [0]. Also, on the Wii, although there is an updatable system menu capable of downloading and running some small apps, the menu shown when you press the home button while in a game was included with each game as part of the SDK, not as part of the OS [1]. (The Korean version of Mario Kart Wii was found to have unused files for a Chinese home menu [2].) Meanwhile on the Wii U it is possible to launch an entire web browser and certain other apps from the home menu and still return to your running game afterwards.

[0]: https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2013/espresso/

[1]: https://wiibrew.org/wiki/HOME_Menu

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gfFDAXNMj8

Wii boots into a shell but when a game starts, it completely takes over. The menu you see when pressing the home button is not from the OS, it is called by the game into a linked library provided by Nintendo. Even shutting down the console by pressing the power off button had to be implemented by developers in order to be allowed to release.

Wii is pretty simple. If you pay attention, when you launch a game, tge

He controller lights flash. This is because it's reinitializing Bluetooth iirc.

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