Wii U emulators

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Revision as of 01:53, 17 May 2022 by WebMint (talk | contribs)
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Nintendo Wii U
Wii U.png
Developer Nintendo
Type Home video game console
Generation Eighth generation
Release date 2012
Discontinued 2017
Predecessor Wii
Successor Nintendo Switch
Emulated

The Wii U is an eighth-generation console released by Nintendo on November 18, 2012 at $349.99. It has a Tri-Core IBM PowerPC CPU at 1.24 GHz with 2GB of RAM. It has an AMD Radeon GPU. It is the first console by Nintendo to output high definition (HD) resolutions, such as 720p and 1080p. It includes a tablet-like controller, known as the Wii U GamePad, to provide certain additional gameplay. Notably, it can play all Wii games as well as support the Wii Remote controllers for native Wii U games.

Emulators

Name Platform(s) Latest Version Accuracy FLOSS Active Recommended
PC / x86
Cemu Windows 2.0 Medium
Decaf Windows Linux git Low
Kinnay Linux git Low

Comparisons

Cemu (compatibility)
A closed-source Wii U emulator created in October 2015 and is regularly updated every 2 to 5 weeks. It can run a sizeable amount of games, with 13% of the tested ones (Which is about 55% of the known games for the system) listed as perfect and 37% as playable (With varying degrees of glitches), which amounts to 50% of the tested ones.
Decaf
An open-source research project for Wii U emulation. It's able to boot some commercial games.
Kinnay
This emulates the Wii U processors and hardware at the lowest level. It's able to emulate all the way through boot1, IOSU, and Cafe OS up to the Wii U menu. Written by the main Decaf developers exjam and kinnay.

Dolphin

You might have read about an unofficial branch of Dolphin with Wii U support — but don't get your hopes up. While the PowerPC architecture family in the Wii U is the same as the Wii and GameCube (this fact alone was the reason why Wii emulation was added to Dolphin, originally GameCube-only), this support is nothing more than the file viewer features (region, internal name, various info, list of files and folders inside ISO and a way to extract them) being expanded to Wii U disc images. Nothing has been done on the actual emulation front as far as Dolphin is concerned, and the Dolphin developers have said that they are not interested in adding Wii U support to Dolphin.