Dusting off the Wii with Emulation!

[S1500]

So I bought a Wii almost a year ago. It has pretty much gathered dust since. Then I finally got off my butt & tried out emulation. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually worked. I had mixed results with the rPi(controller woes) & Android(mushy USB controller response), but so far so good on the Wii.

 

The Homebrew Browser makes getting emulators going a real snap. You just pick what you want & copy the ROMs on afterward. With an hour I was playing Centipede on the 2600. The only holdup I had was a dead SD card. Popped in a 8 gig micro SD + adapter, and I was in business.

 

I neglected my Wii so long, I forgot it had USB ports in the back. Going to find an extension cable & give the keyboard a try. Haven't even tried the GameCube & classic Wii controller with it.

 

 

So far, I've been impressed with Wii homebrew for the few hours I tried it. Mind you, trying to navigate buttons in Stella is weird, but that's almost a trademark of that emulator.

[Keatah]

Pretty slick, yes?

[ComputerSpaceFan]

I love the various emulators for the Wii, great stuff. I just wish there was a decent Saturn emulator for it and from what I hear MAME is a bit spotty.

 

What's the best C64 emulator on Wii? I've tried a couple and had mixed results.

[Silverfleet]

The Wii is fantastic for emulation! It's easy to get going, for the most part. Right now, I have the following systems running on it:

 

-Atari 2600

-Atari 7800

-Colecovision

-NES

-SNES

-Game Boy/GBC/GBA

-Sega SG1000

-Sega Master System

-Sega Genesis

-Sega CD

-Sega Game Gear

-Turbo Grafx 16/PC Engine

-Some MAME games

 

I've been trying to get N64, Neo Geo, and Turbo CD/ PCE CD working, but I'm having trouble running those. I really want to get the Turbo CD going, but I can't get the games to load... yet. But overall, it's absolutely awesome!

[Shannon]

When it comes to emulation the Wii is second best (next to the original xbox). But in some areas it actually stands out above the original xbox. Don't let the homebrew browser fool you. Some stuff on there are dated versions and in some cases not even available. So if you browse around on the intranets you can find some stuff that is not in the browser.

[S1500]

When it comes to emulation the Wii is second best (next to the original xbox). But in some areas it actually stands out above the original xbox. Don't let the homebrew browser fool you. Some stuff on there are dated versions and in some cases not even available. So if you browse around on the intranets you can find some stuff that is not in the browser.

 

I noticed several of the emulators haven't been updated in a while, but so far I've been lucky running what I have downloaded. The fact the browser exists makes getting emulation running a lot easier. It's easier than RetroPie by a long shot. But manually adding an emulator isn't difficult either.

[TPA5]

I've been thinking about grabbing a used Wii on the cheap for emulation duties. I'm getting kind of sick of futzing around constantly with emulation PC's hooked up to my TV and the like. Plus I could use it as a device to play Netflix on as well so that's 2 birds with one stone.

[Keatah]

Personally I believe the PC is the premier platform for emulation. It also takes some effort to get it rolling.

 

I suppose it's ideal to have two or even 3 different platforms to experience the best "Emulation" has to offer. The PC + R Pi + (XBox or Wii). Something like that.

[S1500]

Personally I believe the PC is the premier platform for emulation. It also takes some effort to get it rolling.

 

I suppose it's ideal to have two or even 3 different platforms to experience the best "Emulation" has to offer. The PC + R Pi + (XBox or Wii). Something like that.

 

The PC is the swiss army knife for entertainment(emulators, etc), but it's a fun individual challenge getting a used console I bought for $40 who's title library consists of mostly games for toddlers to play the classics.

 

I think I have spent more time getting/configuring/tweaking emulators on various things than actually playing the games with them. And that's alright.

[Keatah]

Rarely does an emulator work 100% optimized out of the box. They usually ship with conservative settings to at least show something on all hardware configurations.

 

I suppose I may spend between 5-10 hours setting up any one individual emulator. More if I'm trying to solve a problem which turns out to be a bug that can only be fixed my modding the source and recompiling. But. Once that's done I'm good to go! And I'll rarely tweak anything after that. Maybe a setting here or there to observe or induce a curiosity.

 

The time spent dick'n with controls and options and settings and stuff allows me to learn the lay of the land. I figure it's the virtual equivalent of PM and setup you might do for physical hardware. And updates are like mods to your physical console. Acquiring roms is like going on a weekend hunt for real cartridges.. It all averages out. Maybe even in emulation's favor. All depends on your approach.

[Nutsy Doodleheimer]

I like the emulation the Wii brings. For mine it has these following emulators.

 

NES (FCE Ultra GX)

Atari 7800 (Wii7800)

Super Nintendo (Snes 9x GX)

Genesis (Genesis Plus GX)

Nintendo 64 (Wii64)

Game Boy Advance (Visual Boy Advance GX)

MAME

 

And I have about close to 200 Wii games burned onto my hard drive. I have a few great Super Mario Wii games. Hellboy Edition is an excellent one. I have a couple modded xboxes and that is my favorite for console emulation.

[S1500]

Dumb question: I found an SD card with double the storage. Can I just directly copy the contents from my in-use one to the bigger one without any problems? I know I'm going to need more space & want to use the smaller one for my digital camera.

[Shawn]

Dumb question: I found an SD card with double the storage. Can I just directly copy the contents from my in-use one to the bigger one without any problems? I know I'm going to need more space & want to use the smaller one for my digital camera.

yes.

[S1500]

On the sms/genesis/segacd/sg1000, I can't get a game started(Atomic Robo-Kid). The interface is acting really weird. I hover my pointer over over one of the tiles, and it rapidly flutters back & forth. Any way around this?

[philyso]

On the sms/genesis/segacd/sg1000, I can't get a game started(Atomic Robo-Kid). The interface is acting really weird. I hover my pointer over over one of the tiles, and it rapidly flutters back & forth. Any way around this?

 

You are not forced to use the pointer, you can also use the remote sideways and d-pad to navigate in wii emulators.

 

As for your problem, try to recalibrate your remote in the emulator settings, some emulators let you do that I think... or reset all configured settings by deleting the .ini file on your SD card.

[TPA5]

Personally I believe the PC is the premier platform for emulation. It also takes some effort to get it rolling.

 

I suppose it's ideal to have two or even 3 different platforms to experience the best "Emulation" has to offer. The PC + R Pi + (XBox or Wii). Something like that.

 

 

While I agree PC is king for emulation, sometimes you get tired of tweaking and just want to sit back and play classic games. My problem is I can't seem to stop tweaking and enjoy the games. I spend vastly more time setting crap up then I actually do playing the games.

[Keatah]

I won't argue with that. There are some emulators that are a real pain in the ass - their menu options, how they're presented, how one setting affects another, and where & how they're stored is just terrible. There's like 5 different places to put configuration files. None of them are consistent either, each emulator author does things in his own way. And since emulators are still in development (no one can be considered complete), not all options are present across the board or are in a state of flux if you update at every version. Some front ends try to fix this, but they themselves add a whole additional layer of complexity. And they don't address every setting.

 

I would tend to think that console emulators running on consoles would be the most simplistic and trouble-free way to go because the emulator has to be polished enough to work with a limited user interface.

 

Consoles I believe make bad emulators for computers, there's simply too many hardware configs, memory, drives, cpu, keyboard, additional peripherals, and more, that can be adjusted or set up. Like virtually adding 320K memory to Atari 8-bit machines, connecting 2 disk drives, changing out firmware. Even video cards (of the emulated system) can be swapped like on WinUAE or PC Emulator.

Classic computers are different enough from one another that you need a custom menu for each. Like with the Apple II, you have slots, and 3 or 4 major rom revisions to be accounted for. Whereas on the C64 you have different SID's or versions of the VIC-II chip. SIO on the Atari rigs is a big deal, on the Apple II it is one card in one slot, all the options are controlled natively in-emulation by the card's emulated ROM program.

 

And with that bastardized AppleWin, you can only control some of the memory expansion options through the command-line, no GUI equivalent. Don't get me started on the MAME/MESS software list thing..

 

I also tend to like a dedicated emulation rig, so that once everything is set up it stays that way, no OS updates, no unplanned restarts, no background tasks. Nothing to get in the way.

 

I rather look upon all this as the virtual equivalent of preventative maintenance and periodic repairs, and even cartridge hunting. Either way you still have to pay off Mr. Time.

[cybercylon]

Since I inherited a Wii system, I decided to see how things would go (don't want to risk the Wii U). So far so good. I guess is this any better than a softmodding an original Xbox? I guess one advantage is you can stick a big USB thumb drive in one of the USB ports.

 

My only major complaint is that games in MAME are stretched beyond the borders of the screen (using a cheap Insignia flat panel that serves as a secondary monitor under normal use). Changing the aspect ratios on the TV and with the Wii do not fix this. There was something about setting the safearea=0.9 or something like that in the ini file for MAME. That wasn't there in the first place and adding it does nothing.

[Shannon]

Wii emulation is pretty equivalent with the xbox. Xbox has more uniformity between emulators.

[omegadot]

I rather like the Wii Mote for NES emulation. I found it handy that the Wii had some first party controllers in the Mote and Classic Controller Pro that did a good job in emulation. I recently hooked my Wii back up to a monitor in the game room to use the Homebrew Channel. It's a nice no-nonsense setup. I have no clue how it stacks up to the OG Xbox as I never had one.

[the4thman]

Just found this old thread... I wish the Wii had a better C64 emulator. There's one on the PS Vita from a few years ago that is fantastic. It's a shame that can't make it over to the Wii.