Help with Emulating with Wii/Retroarch

Video Games
1

I set up my Wii with retroarch and some ROMS last night. I’m mostly interested in emulation of 8-bit and 16-bit consoles.

I’m having troubles with two things:

  1. Input Lag/controllers

I have my Wiimotes, Wii classic controllers, and GameCube controllers.

GameCube controllers are great, but they are terrible for SNES due to the button layout.

Wiimotes are pretty poor all around. I get noticeable input lag due to the wireless connection coupled with emulation, and only two face buttons makes it pretty worthless for most systems.

Wii classic controllers are perfect in size, button layout and comfort. The only problem is noticeable input lag, since they plug into the wiimote.

I can enable run ahead in retroarch, but it only seems to work nicely on the SMS. NES, SNES, Genesis, and TG16 all have sound issues or frame dropping… Probably due to the Wii not being powerful enough.

What latency settings do you guys use? Do you use run ahead? What controller do you use?

  1. Screen resolution

I’m running this out component video to an SD Trinitron. With the 8-bit systems and 16-bit systems, there’s a range of resolutions that the games run at. Retroarch only seems to allow me to set one resolution for the entire system, and won’t adapt per system, or per game. Is there a way to make sure the video is nice and sharp at the game’s resolution? I’ve fiddled around with different resolutions, different aspect ratios, and integer scaling. I get it looking amazing with one system, but it seems off when I load up a different system.

Any ideas on what would be the best course of action?

2

You might want to try out individual emulators on Wii. I usually use Genesis Plus GX’s Wii version for Genesis, Master System and Sega CD. It works great for all of them, I played through Snatcher a while back without any issues or noticeable input lag with my classic controller.

I’m sorry that I can’t help more, I’ve only really used RetroArch on PC and Wii U.

3

Just a little update after a little more fiddling…

TG16 works wonderfully with the mednafen_pce_fast_libretro_wii core. I can enable 2 frames of run ahead, with the wii classic controller, and it works beautifully. I still have to adjust aspect ratio and resolution to get the picture to look right.

NES works just as nice as TG16, with the fixnes_libretro_wii core.

4

I may try that for genesis, as it seems kind of intermittent through retroarch. Sometimes it works fine, other times it hangs when loading a ROM.

5

Another vote for standalone emulators. I love RA on PC but with the Homebrew Channel acting as a front-end, and the standalone versions of SNES9x and GensPlusGX working so well I never worried about it on Wii. Of course, with the leaner RA cores you can probably cut lag down a bit over standalone emulation but you may give it a shot and see how they stack up.

As for controllers, the best thing to do is to get a Classic Controller>Gamecube adapter from Raphnet. A little Steep but it allows for Classic controllers or SNES Classic pads to be used.

6

That’s a great idea… I’ll have to do that.

7

As far as I know I think Retroarch needs the resolution configured every time unfortunately. I only really used Retroarch Wii for the FBA and MAME cores because the only standalone Wii arcade emulator runs in 480i only.

Some pointers for Wii emulation. If you have a Wii U and own a Wii U pro controller, the controller can be paired to the Wii and used with the current versions of most Wii homebrew emulators, it’s up to the homebrew developer to add support for the Wii U Pro Controller in an update but so far most of the “GX” emulators have them as well as Not64 and WiiSX.

Lastly, not a lot of people know that it is possible to output N64 emulation from the Wii at native 240p using Not64, there is no option in the settings menu through the app, the .ini settings file of the app on the SD card has to be set to a certain option, unfortunately the same can’t be said for WiiSX