Isolation of a .wad emulator

OK. First off, I don't quite know where to put this since it is a sort of homebrew suggestion, but it is a just a question I would like answered.

Q: Because the VC .wad files come with an emulator and a ROM to run on said emulator, would it be possible to isolate the emulator of the .wad file and use it to create a sort of Wii channel for that particular console which the emulator emulates.

exp: Take the Sin & Punishment .wad. Remove the ROM file and replace with a code that instructs the system to dig into the SD card in search of a ROM in a certain folder(exp: SD/64/ROM). After selecting a ROM to insert into the emulator it then produces an emulation of said ROM file.

Basically, this is like the .wad injector app for the comp., but this is just an emulator specifically designed for the Wii, running on the Wii, that can choose to emulate other ROMs.

Maybe its illegal, but the idea sounded plausible in my head.

Just give me some feedback if you want

well each vc .wad has the specific emulator for that game, for example the emulator for super mario 64 won't work as well with any other game. Thats why injecting roms doesn't always work.

awww, bummer thought it was worth a shot

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bg4545
well each vc .wad has the specific emulator for that game

Afaik that is only true for N64 games.
All other systems only use one emulator per system.

All of our emulators (other than wii 64, but that's blatantly obvious) work much better than Nintendo's emulators. Therefore, there is no point in this.

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daniel_c_w
Afaik that is only true for N64 games.
All other systems only use one emulator per system.

No, then all the injected games that are not N64 would work, which they don't.
For example, Super Mario RPG for the SNES could not be injected to any .wads.

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bg4545
For example, Super Mario RPG for the SNES could not be injected to any .wads.

How does that show, that all wads have an emulator?

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daniel_c_w
How does that show, that all wads have an emulator?

You said that all other systems only use one emulator per system, but if that were true, you could inject any rom into any game
I'm just saying Super Mario RPG had its own emulator because of the SA-1(?) chip

How come I couldn't inject Zero Wing into another any Sega WADs, if those emulators work for any rom? How come I couldn't inject Super Mario Allstars into any SNES roms?

Nintendo sucks at emulation



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/08/2008 07:30PM by strongfan.

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strongfan
Nintendo sucks at emulation

Hmmm, are Nintendo writing the emulators? I'm pretty sure Commodore Gaming wrote the C64 one. Anyway, they do the purpose they have been designed for, so you can't call them bad.

As for injecting, I can cite several reasons why they might not work:
1. Nintendo and/or the authors of the emulators explicitly added something to the emulator to break on loading a different ROM (wouldn't be too hard to add a checksum on the game content into the emulator)
2. The original game required some slight tweaks to the emulator in order to run, but as a consequence, breaks other games
3. You injected the ROM incorrectly.
4. Maybe your ROM still has some sort of header attached that the game doesn't require and hence loads in the wrong place and fails.

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whodares
As for injecting, I can cite several reasons why they might not work:
1. Nintendo and/or the authors of the emulators explicitly added something to the emulator to break on loading a different ROM (wouldn't be too hard to add a checksum on the game content into the emulator)
2. The original game required some slight tweaks to the emulator in order to run, but as a consequence, breaks other games
3. You injected the ROM incorrectly.
4. Maybe your ROM still has some sort of header attached that the game doesn't require and hence loads in the wrong place and fails.

Those may be true, but then that still means you could not get an emulator to run all (most) games well.

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bg4545

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daniel_c_w
How does that show, that all wads have an emulator?

You said that all other systems only use one emulator per system, but if that were true, you could inject any rom into any game

No! Beyond the reasons that whodares already stated:

I am saying that all games use one emulator (per system, except the N64) - I am not saying that one emulator supports all games (per system). You just reversed what I said.
You can assume, that the SNES emulator did not support Super Mario RPG, but is updated, when you downlaod a game that requires an updated emulator.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/08/2008 11:25PM by daniel_c_w.

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daniel_c_w
I am saying that all games use one emulator (per system, except the N64) - I am not saying that one emulator supports all games (per system). You just reversed what I said.
You can assume, that the SNES emulator did not support Super Mario RPG, but is updated, when you downlaod a game that requires an updated emulator.

so you mean that every game uses the same emulator, but with something like specific settings for that game?
i thought you meant each one is the same, no matter what game it is.

May I suggest a little experiment for you to try?

1. Grab a copy of FS Browser from [www.wiibrew.org]
2. Navigate to the /title/00010001 folder
3. Identify your VC games against this list - [www.wiibrew.org] (Update this list if you have some games which aren't already on there).
4. Go into your game folders, and use the 1 button to copy the game's contents to your SD card
5. Between each game, reboot the Wii and copy the files you copied to your PC (All VC games will have the same filenames, and will overwrite each other, hence why you need to copy them off between games)
6. Use a hex viewer to open the files to try and identify which file contains the emulator binary (probably 00000001.app)
7. Use a file comparison tool (Windows has a command line one called "fc", use with the /b option to compare binary) to see if there are any differences between the files.

Just remember that the emulator binary will be different for different platforms (ie. between SNES and Megadrive)., but if you keep aware that the first byte of the game folders from point 2 declares the platform, this will let you identify your SNES games etc.

Well for once I did the above comparison for c64 emulators in two different c64 vc games, as far as I remember they were slightly different... take it as tweaking the emulator options to the specific game since vc games don't have the usual configuration stuff in them unlike the regular emulators so they are being different is actually normal but of course they are possibly built off the same codebase with some tweaking in the source...

Also, c64 vc emulator's snapshot format is very similar to the frodo's (maybe it's a frodo actually), a few months ago I did a special frodo version to produce snapshots that wii c64 vc emulator accepts...

more info below...
[gbatemp.net]

even people made cool looking banners for giana sisters (which possibly will never get released on wii vc) and such :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/09/2008 03:16AM by WiiCrazy.

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bg4545
so you mean that every game uses the same emulator, but with something like specific settings for that game?

Yes, but not in the form of different emulators, but with different "settings".

Anyway: it looks like WiiCrazy prrofed that my theorie and knowledge is wrong (at least in the case of the c64)
I will do what Whodares suggested on my SNES games.