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Hacking Wii U support in Dolphin

 
 

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Chad
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I started adding Wii U support to the Dolphin emulator.
Currently it can recognize your Wii U games (in addition to your GameCube and Wii games) in either WUD or ISO format, recognize what region it is, what size it is, get the game ID, and most importantly read the file system and extract files for all partitions except the game partition. Also it lets you open RPX files, although they don't load correctly.
It can only find the partitions and read the file system for games where the title key has been released. Don't ask me how to rip your games from your WiiU, because I don't know, but some people seem to manage it.

Currently this is only useful for hackers who want to examine the update partition (I heard some exploit authors wanted binaries), or collectors who want to show off their list of games, or people who are curious what's on those discs, or people who want to work on emulating the Wii U.
IT DOES NOT PLAY WII U GAMES YET.

The source code is here on github (requires Visual Studio 2013, or if you are on linux you may need to modify the build system to include the extra files in the DiscIO module):
https://github.com/CarlKenner/dolphin/tree/WiiU

There is a bug with at least 3 of the file names on SM3DW, where the names are not read correctly, which I believe is caused by the filenames being split across the cluster boundary. Which means there is probably also a bug which corrupts some of the contents of other files where that happens. So don't rely on files being 100% accurate. The files whose formats I can understand, like app.xml or update.inf.USA, seem to be working perfectly (which is an especially good sign because those files are actually garbled when you decrypt the entire disc image with OpenSSL, at least on SM3DW).

I hope this will provide a starting point for other people who want to work on adding Wii U support to Dolphin. I believe the next step should be to try to get RPX files to load and to be viewable in Dolphin's debugger (use the command line option -d I think). Then we can work on getting simple hello world rpx files to work with high level emulation of SDK functions.

EDIT: I should point out that this is not in the official dolphin builds, just in my unofficial branch that I posted above.

EDIT: Screenshot
 
 

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