BennuGD Wii port

Jonsul · November 03, 2010, 07:27:59 AM

What would it take to make a native version for the wii, not just for homebrew? Wii dev kit?

josebita · November 03, 2010, 08:09:47 AM

It probably wouldn't be legally possible because the NDA they make you sign is incompatible with Bennu's GPL·

Anyway, the version is native; it's just not signed by Nintendo and thus cannot be run "normally" in your Wii. Installing the homebrew channel is very easy and requires no hardware changes though.

Jonsul · November 03, 2010, 10:12:35 AM

Well it's not really what I needed, I'm going to college soon for game design and think I'll be using Bennu a lot. I think I may go into indie development and open my own studio. Eventually I'd like to develop for wiiware, even though that's far off, so the wii version appealed to me. I have to say the system compatibility is the leading factor for me, I love how I can develop a game and sell it on so many systems.

Anyways, say in the future I could get my hands on a wii dev kit, would I be able to run this without the homebrew channel? Getting Nintendo to allow it shouldn't be to hard I think, I've heard of other people getting like licensed stuff to work and published on the wii.

josebita · November 03, 2010, 11:35:22 AM

Getting the devkit for Wii is neither very expensive (~2000€ for a small studio) nor difficult, but as I said, they make you sign an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) that forbids you from sharing any info on the SDK to the outside world. As BennuGD is GPL, you'd have to share the binaries along with any games you made, so you'd be violating either their NDA by sharing the source code or the GPL by not sharing it.

Anyway, I believe it's a good idea to start with bennu, and once you get confidence and expertise with your coding jump to some other engine for wiiware code.

If Splinter ever got rid of the Fenix code from Bennu, you could license a version of Bennu with proprietary terms for him, and you'd be able to use that.

Jonsul · November 04, 2010, 08:24:59 PM

Well when the time comes I'll figure something out. A wii version that could be used to make wiiware titles would be really good for Bennu I think. I'd like it to be available to other people. It wouldn't be to hard I think if we just had one that could have optimizations for wii hardware as open source, which I guess is what this version is. But then have official wii libraries or modules under a different license. Would that seem like a good way to go about it.
I know what you're saying, I probably will be doing a lot of work in other languages eventually, but I have strong feelings on trying to give something back to open source communities when I use their technology.

josebita · January 04, 2011, 09:33:39 PM

Beta 3 launched with proper Wii Balance Board support, amongst other changes:
http://bennugd-wii.blogspot.com/2011/01/beta-3-released.html

FreeYourMind · January 04, 2011, 09:41:12 PM

Papaaaaaranoooouuuuu, papaaaaaranoooouuuuu, chiribiki let's go

josebita · January 04, 2011, 10:03:53 PM

Aham... :D

josebita · February 18, 2011, 09:17:49 PM

Now that I finished my exams, I've finally worked a bit on the modules. Now I don't need to patch them just to be able to create a monolithic build (thanks to DCelso for the idea), making the port much more manageable. Also, I updated all the code to match the latest BennuGD revision.

josebita · February 26, 2011, 11:50:13 AM

Release candidate 1 launched:
http://bennugd-wii.blogspot.com/2011/02/bennugd-for-wii-rc1.html

Moogster · February 26, 2011, 04:54:02 PM

Very good news! Is it still mandatory to compile on the Wii itself? And as this is the monolithic-bennu project does this also mean that a new version of the PSP port is in the works? I just got myself a PSP today so a new version of that would be a real bonus. :-)

Thanks!

josebita · February 26, 2011, 05:11:11 PM

Hi Moogster. Unfortunately, you still have to compile your dcbs on the wii. Be sure to check out the Getting started page on the bennugd-monolithic wiki. If you cannot get it to work, please let me know (by PM, perhaps) and I can try to help you do it. I believe that once you get it working you'll find it's easier than it looks. Also, it helps a lot to have your Wii connected to the same Wifi your computer is on.

As for the PSP... I don't own one myself and that makes the porting much more difficult to mantain. I'd suggest you contact DCelso, who has produced working binaries. I'll try to integrate his latest changes into the SVN tree myself and even try to produce binaries but, as I don't own a PSP, I cannot guarantee they'll work.

DCelso · February 27, 2011, 11:10:58 AM

Quote from: josebita on February 26, 2011, 05:11:11 PM
Hi Moogster. Unfortunately, you still have to compile your dcbs on the wii. Be sure to check out the Getting started page on the bennugd-monolithic wiki. If you cannot get it to work, please let me know (by PM, perhaps) and I can try to help you do it. I believe that once you get it working you'll find it's easier than it looks. Also, it helps a lot to have your Wii connected to the same Wifi your computer is on.

As for the PSP... I don't own one myself and that makes the porting much more difficult to mantain. I'd suggest you contact DCelso, who has produced working binaries. I'll try to integrate his latest changes into the SVN tree myself and even try to produce binaries but, as I don't own a PSP, I cannot guarantee they'll work.

Great notice.

Moogster · February 27, 2011, 12:17:25 PM

I used to have a Wii to try things on but I had to return it to the owner some time ago :-( So it's just the PSP for me now. What do you mean by 'Great notice'? I would be very interested to know the state of things on the PSP port and expected course of events. If testing is a problem I wouldn't mind helping out.

Just being curious I checked out the SVN last night and tried to run the PSP makefile, but it wouldn't give me a binary. Is there a specific location for the PSPSDK toolchain or the source tree that is causing it giving me a psp-gcc: CreateProcess: File not found error? I'm just running the make.bat file in the bgdi folder, and have changed the PSPSDK path in that file to suit my install. I am using the MinPspSDK toolchain package, maybe that is what's causing it? Something like a wiki page on how to get things on the road would be very helpful?

Any information is greatly appreciated!

DCelso · February 27, 2011, 02:01:32 PM

The GN is the notice to integrate the changes of psp in the monolithic svn version.

And if you can test the bennu psp version I will be glad.

In the psp post I will tell you what can you do to test it.