I just learned about developing applications on Wii 3 days ago. I was wondering what application should I make, and I noticed that there was no Apple II emulator for Wii yet. Apple IIe was my first computer, so I thought it will be fun to be able to emulate it on my Wii. AppleWin is a good Apple emulator, but it is very windows specific, fortunately someone already ported it to Linux using SDL, and the name is LinApple.
Someone already made an early SDL port to Wii, but it is missing threading support (which is needed by the emulator). After reading things at wiibrew.org and devkitpro.org, I decided to complete the threading part. The next problem is the input. I want to be able to write BASIC applications, so I decided that the SDL port must support keyboard input, someone already made LibWiikeyboard, so I can just plug it in SDL (actually this is a hack, to correctly handle SDL requirements, there are some things that needs to be changed, in LibWiikeyboard and in the SDL gamecube implementation).
Next part is the porting process itself. The difficult part is making sure all the endiannes conversion of 6502 (Apple II CPU) to Wii’s PowerPC is done correctly, because I don’t have a USB gecko to debug it. Currently the port works, but don’t expect too much from this first release. I can already play some games, but I haven’t tested many other things. Sound is not yet now supported.
Here are some screenshots (made using tvtime, captured through my USB TV Box)
This is the application that you can extract to your SD Card
http://tinyhack.com/wii/wiiapple/wiiapple.zip
Note: Latest version is available at: http://code.google.com/p/wiiapple
The plan is: Everytime I update the application, I will still use the same file name, you can look at http://tinyhack.com/wii/wiiapple/ to look for older releases.
You will need to install Homebrew Channel to use it.
And the source codes are available at:
http://tinyhack.com/wii/wiiapple/
Note: Latest source code is available at: http://code.google.com/p/wiiapple
Update:
version 0.0.2:
– Fixed text overlay
– Disable saving options (dangerous for now, because you might overwrite your files)
version 0.0.3:
– Sound support
– Fix joypad problem
– Invalid disk image will not freeze the emulator (in case of invalid disk, Master.dsk will be reloaded)
January 6, 2009 (0.0.4)
– new keyboard driver, now work with most USB keyboards
Note: I am still working on the keyboard issue (some USB keyboard still doesn’t work). I think this is because the limitation of Libwiikeyboard that can only do control transfer instead of interrupt transfer. Now I have rewritten the SDL keyboard part with my own code (part was based on the code from Guitar Fun).
January 6, 2009 (0.0.5)
– Support Gamecube controller (Wiimote support is planned for next version)
– updated some bug in keyboard handling
January 7, 2009 (0.0.6)
– Increased gamecube joystick sensitivity
– Fixed (most) crashing issue
January 8, 2009 (0.0.7)
– Support Wiimote as Joystick (Press A button in Gamecube controller to switch to gamecube joypad)
note: Mac USB keyboard works.