Wii U emulators

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Revision as of 02:17, 26 October 2015 by 72.231.206.143 (talk) (Version bump)
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The Nintendo Wii U

The Wii U is an eighth-generation console released by Nintendo in 2012. It is the first console by Nintendo to output to 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 supporting the Wii Remote controllers for native Wii U games.

Emulators

Name Operating System(s) Latest Version Active Recommended
Cemu Windows 1.0.1 ?
decaf-emu Windows N/A

Comparisons

  • Cemu can launch and play commercial titles, but is at an extremely early stage of development, having no performance optimization, no audio emulation, numerous bugs, and very little stability. It is also closed source.
  • decaf-emu is a research project for Wii U emulation. It cannot play any commercial games. That said, it's on track and development is pretty fast, and basic rendering with even some texture implementation is already there. This emulator is, however, open source.

Emulation Issues

The disc dump format needs to be uncompressed for current builds. However the method to make these dumps hasn't been made public yet outside of a few developer circles.

Dolphin

You might have read about an unofficial branch of Dolphin with Wii U support - don't get your hopes up. While the PowerPC architecture family in the WiiU is the same as the Wii and GC (this fact alone was the reason why Wii emulation was added to Dolphin, originally GC-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're not going to add Wii U support to Dolphin.