Armagetron Wii

[sjs<>sb]

I'm on wii internet right now and I think it would be cool to play tron on the wii. could it work?

[Z-Man]

It could, but chances it'll actually get done are slim. There are rumours that Nintendo is going to give away development systems for a low price (still around 1000$, so don't put your hopes too high one of us is going to get one just for fun, and a lot of work would be needed to adapt it to the native programming interfaces of the Wii) and there also are efforts underway to get Linux running on the Wii (it's unlikely that hardware accelerated 3d will be available) which would make AA supported relatively easily. Your chances would be a bit higher with a PS3, which already has Linux and may get half-decent 3d support for it in the near future.

[Lacrymosa]

Just use the Wii Remote with your PC and you can play AA with it.

[sjs<>sb]

i was thinking you could play tron off the website. if the wii came out with a hard drive it would work, but i don't know

[Z-Man]

That certainly won't work, Nintendo does not support downloading and executing arbitrary programs, some hacking would be required in either case. A port to flash may work off the website, but nobody is going to do that.

[DrJoeTr0n]

i was thinking you could play tron off the website. if the wii came out with a hard drive it would work, but i don't know

The Wii has a 512mb flash memory hard drive. not to mention you put in SD cards to expand it.

But like everyone else has said. Use the wii remote on your pc, its not very difficult to get working... You'll think its cool for about an hour and then never do it again.

[sjs<>sb]

I'm not interested in using the wii mote, but in being able to play it off the wii in case the computer is not available for instance.Also, the wii does not have a hard drive for this quote in game informer says " We are getting more expecting of hard drives in our systems, but the wii is fine nonetheless." it has a 512 "memory base". But, if no one would decide to make tron playable off the site, the only hope is that nintendo would come out with a way to make it so you could download things on to a "desktop channel" perhaps and you could play tron like on any other computer.

[philippeqc]

.. But, if no one would decide to make tron playable off the site...

I dont think it is that no one is interested to make tron playable off the Wii.

I think it is a bit more "No one has 1000 USD* to put on a Nintendo development license and enough money left in bank to allow himself to take 3 to 6 month leave from work to convert the source code of AA to run on the Wii."

Sadly, that is the reality of gaming platforms. The development license is usually what will kill off any possible port of an open source game to be distributed for free. It is not to say it is impossible. Nintendo (and/or the other gaming console companies) could decide to lower the entry bar for non-commercial projects and give access to their live download service. Or one could find people willing to put down the money for the project .

It is not impossible, merely improbable. The type of person that are attracted to open source project are rarely the type of person with generous bank account, so it is injust to expect them to spontenaously not only give their free time, but money they dont have.

Now our main problem seems to be monetary. If some people decided that having AA on the Wii is really important for them, they could attempt to assemble it.

-ph

* unknown value. I dont know how much cost development license for gaming platform. I have the vague notion that it should be somewhere in the ball park of tens of thousand dollars per developer.

EDIT:
Removed condecending part ;) I always have the feeling I'm condecending. I hate that feeling, and the notion that I could be. Many appologies.

[ivantis]

there is a certain type of binary that the wii can handle, for the virtual console games.
people can already use firefoxes client switcher add-on to download the wii binaries for virtual console. some inspection of them could lead to something like armagetron.
if you setup your router so that when the wii tries to access the wii shop channel, it goes to a different site with the downloads on them, it could work.
but programming them sounds really hard.

and dont tell me that this is old news, i just got my wii for christmas (well, that is a while ago)

[Z-Man]

So this weekend, I succumbed to my inner Nintendo fanboy (well, that, and all the really interesting games for the other consoles seem to find their way to the PC sooner or later, so I don't quite see the point of getting one of those, although XNA was a tempting reason for an XBox and almost got me) and bought a used Wii and spent a fortune on accessories

All that without checking recent events in homebrew development for it. I did that now. Looks like for about half a year, native code execution in Wii mode is possible, and there's a development system out with ports of SDL+SDL_Image and OpenGL, our core libraries. Needless to say, as soon as I get the last ingredient (Zelda), I'll give it a shot. Don't expect anything usable or even working too soon; as far as I can tell, there's no support for the wireless network adapter available yet, so no way to get network play. And libxml2 and all the extra library dependencies introduced on the trunk are unavailable, here's hoping they're universal enough to compile just fine.

And yeah, virtual console binaries could work, but the best you'd get there would be a N64 emulation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that one didn't even have a network adapter.

[voodoo]

There was several post recently about porting arma to console or embedded devices. I've checked several toolchains around and many have SDL and opengles available (symbian os, psp, ps3, nintendo ds, iphone, ...). It seems the wii toolchain include opengles 2.0 as well.
There's many opengl functions which are unavailable under opengles including display lists, ...2f and ...3f functions, ...

That would be a nice start to add support for opengles.

[Z-Man]

That may be a good idea in general, but from looking at the headers, the Wii homebrew OpenGL is a full OpenGL derived from Mesa and not OpenGL ES.

[Z-Man]

Progress report: No Twilight Hack here yet, but I started working on getting the beast to compile, starting with 0.2.8 because there are less libraries to worry about. Things are looking good so far; the OpenGL and SDL code goes through verbatim. Network code, too, amazingly; there are semi-BSD-Socket compatible functions available (kind of like Winsock), and it's possible to map it to look like true BSD sockets with minimal wrappers. Of course, I don't know whether they actually work, but the Homebrew channel appears to be able to receive programs to execute from the network, so there is hope they'll work even with the wireless adapter.

Minor problems: Directory parsing is unavailable; we're not using it, but have functions for it. Also, some other directory related stuff needs adapting, like getting the home folder to store data in. Apart from that and the network code, things are pretty much Unix.

Major problem: libxml2 and especially nanohttp. libxml2 may be easy to port, nanohttp not so. Rewriting our parsers to use the xml library that is available sounds like a ton of work, too. For starters and to test the rest, I'll fall back to regular boring square arenas only.

[Z-Man]

Awwww Everything compiled just fine (including libxml2, that including nanohttp), but it appears some things are a bit incomplete. Especially, the OpenGL version is missing all the non-3f function variants and matrix, texture, and display list manipulation. Looks like we'd need to help them finish that project first.

Edit: Ah, it's not so bad. Most missing functions are minor problems, either easy to write in terms of the other functions or the native GX functions, or they have little effect anyway. Texture management will need to be actually written (it's broken), our beloved glu function that generates mipmaps on the go needs to be implemented (or we just get rid of it in arma's source), and I need to find out how the matrix stuff is supposed to work. Yay for function names like GX_LoadTexMtxImm.

A warning in advance: if this gets anywhere, performance is not going to be stellar. Most of the work is done in glEnd(), which sets lights and other parameters every time again.

[ivantis]

so right now you can compile things for the wii in C++, but you need a way to get it on the wii (with like the homebrew channel or whatever)? i ought to get Zelda and the twilight hack, but i have never been a big fan of 3D zelda (well you cant even jump!), although i do have Super paper mario, it is a great game.
anyway, back to before, what compiler are you using? sorry if you said that in all of those words up there, i just dont feel like reading today