
Myth Debugging: Is the Wii More Demanding to Emulate Than the GameCube? - chx
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/07/21/myth-debugging-wii-more-demanding-emulate-gamecube/
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malux85
I really find articles like this fascinating, and have a great respect for the
pure engineering effort that goes into emulating these other devices.

Having been a web dev for 10 years and now Deep Learning / ML, I've never even
dabbled in emulators or even read their code, and I find it inspiring that
there's entire fields of programming that I know little about and can explore
later.

Our field is truly amazing!

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knodi123
> Having been a web dev for 10 years and now Deep Learning / ML

As a 15-year web dev- was that transition a natural one? Relatively easy?
Profitable?

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colordrops
Finding a job or project that involves both web dev and another discipline and
slowly sliding into the other discipline is a good way to transition,
especially if you are older or with less free time.

I was able to transition from web dev to aerospace software while taking care
of a family.

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cwyers
> Wii games don't have to do any of this - they have full access to the 64MB
> of MEM2. This means that Dolphin doesn't have to worry about MMU emulation
> in general. As with any great rule, there are some exceptions, such as games
> that are purposefully trying to break Dolphin. Those games will be covered
> in another article as they seem to particular target Dolphin's weaknesses
> and thus some of their behaviors doesn't actually make sense for the source
> hardware.

Boy I want to read that article

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phant0mas
Where these games actually developed with this purpose? Did doplhin existed
back during the game's dev cycle and the developers say "we don't want our
game on the dolphin emulator"? Or it just happens that they use an approach
that is problematic to begin with?

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wtallis
Since Dolphin emulates two generations of console, it definitely was around
and well-known for the development cycle of later games. The first version of
Dolphin was released in 2003, and the Wii was released in 2006.

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bertman
I'm a simple man, I see a new dolphin-emu.org article, I click it, read it, am
fascinated by it and feel slightly smarter afterwards.

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cowboysauce
I would have thought that the GameCube would be the last Nintendo console to
use a fixed-function GPU. I was very surprised to see that the Wii used one as
well.

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monocasa
Not only were they both fixed function; they were in some very real ways the
same GPU. Like bug for bug compatible. Like in a lot of the official Nintendo
docs, they didn't even bother to sed s/Dolphin/Revolution.

Honestly a Wii really is an upclocked GC with a coprocessor stapled on the
side handling new (and a lot of old) I/O.

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Tharkun
Can we please fix the weird caps in the title? I spent way too much time
wondering what a 'Wii More' was.

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kolderman
Great read. I wish I had the time to mess with this sort of stuff as a hobby.

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j1elo
I wonder why so many exclamations in the article. It's like they want to
emphasize too! many! phrases!, a lot of them not really merited!

I guess it's just a byproduct of too much WhatsApp / IM in general, which
introduces bad practices for long form writing, and also a lack of editing
review.

That's a minor, minuscule annoyance in an otherwise very interesting article
:)

