Wii64/Cube64 WIP News - Developers’ Retrospective Part 2: tehpola’s Musings

Wii64/Cube64 WIP News - Developers’ Retrospective Part 2: tehpola’s Musings

October 13th, 2009, 03:29 Posted By: wraggster

Tehpola has posted some wip info of the N64 emulator for Wii/Gamecube:

It was probably around two years ago that I first got a recompiler working that could actually recompile something. I had written some MIPS assembly code in a computer architecture course which would compute factorials. I fed my MIPS code into my recompiler and it computed factorials on the Wii. At the time, that was really exciting for me, but the recompiler was very far from doing much useful. Over the two years, a lot of the original recompiler was overhauled, and I made a couple attempts at rewriting the recompiler more or less from scratch; however, in the end, I came back to the once-reworked original code, and continued to improve on it. After a while I was starting to run more than carefully crafted demos, and after a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, we have a dynamic recompiler which will stably run several games at full speed. This is the first release with a working dynarec. It generates native code for almost all of the N64 instructions; it has, as far as I’ve seen, an accurate cycle count (as relative as mupen64, anyways); and already several optimizations have gone into it. Its still not perfect, several games won’t run at all, and not all games that do run are full speed, but we’re working on improving on that for subsequent releases. For more technical details on the dynarec, see Wii64 Dynarec Part 1 and Part 2 (I’m still planning on continuing the series when I have a chance).
Also, due to sound quality issues with the RSP plugin we were using (rsp_hle-ppc), we’ve begun fixing mupen64’s rsp_hle to be endian agnostic. I believe that rsp_hle-ppc was derived from an early version of the RSP plugin which would later become the rsp_hle in mupen64. Unfortunately, whoever had done all the significant improvements to it since had neglected to maintain endian-neutrality. So, we had to either use the dated, but working, rsp_hle-ppc or work to fix rsp_hle, with all its improvements, so that it would work on the big-endian systems. Up until this release we’ve been using rsp_hle-ppc which has resulted in some sound quality issues, and some games’ sound just didn’t work (StarFox 64, for example). With Beta 1, we’ve fixed up many rsp_hle endian issues and hope to get those changes upstream to other projects so that people can enjoy better sound on other big endian systems. There are still issues, but overall, the sound quality has improved, and certain games which previously had garbled sound (Starfox 64) now sound excellent.
Working on this emulator has been a huge learning experience for me, and I hope everyone is excited about the Beta 1 release as I am.
Since the release we’ve started updating the google code SVN with all the commits we had made to our private repository. We made sure to include a source archive with the binary, but felt that having the whole source history publicly accessible would give more insight into our code and motivations and allow others to see the progression in our work. It will take some time before all the code has been migrated because we’re checking to make sure we don’t have any conflicts, but hopefully it will be appreciated.
In the not-too-distant future, we’re planning on releasing a Beta 1.1 version which will improve some minor changes which were brought to our attention after the Beta 1 release. Hopefully, although these will only be small changes, they will address some of the larger annoyances people have reported.

For more information and downloads, click here!