
Mastering Motion: The Journey to Emulate MotionPlus - bdz
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2019/04/26/mastering-motion/
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saagarjha
> 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?

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tinco
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.

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

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Vogtinator
It has neither a decompiler nor PowerPC support.

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

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dmitripopov
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.

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mebo
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?

~~~
saagarjha
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.

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

