gc-forever - Gamecube/Wii Forums

I couldn't help but notice that the WAD for Super Mario Bros is 12.9 MB, while the original rom is 40KB. infact, all WAD files are much larger than the rom of the same game. Which brings me to my actual question. Did Nintendo make an emulator for each console, or did they make one emulator and then convert all the games to the same format? If neither of these are correct, then why the huge size difference? It just seems wasteful.

I also noticed while playing Super Bomberman 2 on snes9x and Snes9x GX that it lags just as much as it does on my SNES. If the Wii is much more powerful than the SNES, then shouldn't it be able to play SNES games laglessly? I know it's possible, because I bought a game called Gradius III and IV for the PS2, a port of the arcade versions of Gradius III and Gradius IV, and the wikipedia page for Gradius III specifically states that Gradius III will not lag because the PS2 is more powerful than the original arcade cabinets. Or does the emulator itself need to be more powerful? Did the developers simply decide that they were satisfied when they got their emulators to be on par with the original console?

I found this website claiming to host WADs but I can't find any of the links to them. Could someone please tell me where they are?

http://www.pleasedontlinktowarezsites.com/

And the same goes for this site too:

http://www.pleasedontlinktowarezsites.com

It claims to have Wii homebrew emulators but I can't actually find any of them. Although most of them can be found elsewhere, there is one that's particular interesting. It is called exp-N64. Up until now, I thought that Wii64 and Not64 were the only N64 emulators in development for the Wii. But of course there doesn't seem to be a link. But maybe I'm not looking in the right place. I've tried locating this emulator through google and have come up empty. Not only can I not find any download links, I can't even find sites where exp-N64 has come up in conversation. It's almost as if it doesn't exist...

Please dont request/link to warez sites.

Afaik every VC game has an "own emulator" which was designed specially for that rom.

WAD is a proprietary archive format and is not just a ROM or ROM+emulator package.

You have to understand that it'll contain at least:
Banner
Music
Instruction Manual
Emulator
ROM

Also, with regards to your "less lag" concern .. the answer is, no it will not lag any less than the SNES.
In fact, it will lag exactly the same as the SNES since they are emulating the SNES hardware and they haven't ported the game to run natively on the Wii hardware.

So there's absolutely no way that they can just make the emulator a "more powerful" version of the SNES? They would actually have to alter roms themselves to make them perform better?

And each WAD having an emulator that was specifically designed for it still seems wasteful. I wonder why there couldn't have just been one type of emulator per console (and that emulator should've been in the Wii instead of having to be in each and every WAD file). I mean, all the original roms were made to be playable on the same system, so they couldn't make all the WADs use the same emulator? It's just that I can't help but think that if the "rom2WAD" process were easier for companies that maybe we would have a larger VC library. Did they make any changes to the actual roms to port them to the Wii, or are they the exact same roms?

They release an emulator with each ROM I assume because there might be some fine tuning required per game. Also with their N64 emulator, parts that aren't required for the bundled ROM to work are stripped out to save space and memory.

It depends on the game if you try to clock up the SNES emulator then it might run too fast or not run at all. You have to remember that most SNES games were written in 100% assembly code that would be dependent on squeezing out performance on almost every CPU cycle. If you go and change the amount of cycles/etc, you're potentially breaking a lot.

emu_kidid wrote:They release an emulator with each ROM I assume because there might be some fine tuning required per game.

That's what I meant with "own emulator" =)

yeah, they should know best how their games are coded and perform

I wonder how good exp-N64 is.

exp-N64 is the N64 emulator used in the Zelda collectors edition discs which emulated Zelda Ocarina of Time and Zelda Majoras Mask. There are two versions, version two added expansion pak support for Majoras Mask. The "exp" is just the name of the team who ripped the N64 emulator out of the disc, I believe it's "Experience" or some such.

The compatibility is very limited and you can probably find packs of ROM injected .gcm files - please don't ask for them here though. The reason the compatibility is very low is because Nintendo only added in the bare minimum they needed to emulate a handful of games (Zelda, Mario, Mario Kart, etc). If any other games work on it, it's only cause they use similar gfx ucodes etc.

If people can rip roms why can't the same be done for consoles? How come they can just copy the games to the computer but the emulator has to be built from scratch?

wasnt this explained already??

I'm not a programmer, I don't know how that stuff works. I know that if it were possible to rip consoles as well as roms it would've happened years ago. I just find these thing interesting so I ask lots of questions. You'll have to forgive me.

Think of a ROM as a series of instructions that will tell the hardware what to do and graphical/music data to be displayed/used. The console is nothing without a ROM as it isn't told "what to do". So you cannot "rip a console", but you can emulate the behaviour of hardware when the ROM tells it to do things. I can't dumb it down anymore :\