A Mesa (OpenGL) Driver For The Nintendo Wii?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Mesa (OpenGL) Driver For The Nintendo Wii?

There is now talk on the Mesa 3D development list about the possibility of having a Mesa driver for the Nintendo Wii. Those working on developing custom games for this console platform have already experienced some success in bringing OpenGL to the Wii through the use of Mesa.Nintendo has its own graphics API (GX) for the Wii, which is resemblant of OpenGL but still different enough that some work is required to get OpenGL running...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzAyMA

[ethana2]

I'm confused. How does Nintendo's API matter AT ALL here? It's just an ATi gpu. The console has been owned.

[Chewi]

I was thinking the same thing.

[NeoBrain]

I'm confused. How does Nintendo's API matter AT ALL here? It's just an ATi gpu. The console has been owned.

The goal here is to make it possible to run Wii games under an open system. As most comercial Wii games (well, all) use Nintendo's API we need to implement that API too, rather than only the GPU driver.

[bridgman]

The other point, I guess, is that we are only planning to provide programming information for PC graphics processors, not for the custom console GPUs. As a result, having the OpenGL driver run over the existing console API's makes a lot of sense.

If you look in the Mesa source tree you will see that Mesa has already been ported to run over a surprising munber of other APIs.

[MostAwesomeDude]

The GX API is rather hard-coded. I was comparing it to Glide for a number of reasons.

I only mentioned the possibility. While I think that it would be the Right Thing to just do a driver in src/mesa/drivers/gx or src/gallium/drivers/gx and src/gallium/winsys/gx, I have neither time nor inclination to write any GX code right now, so it's up to those guys, and to be honest I'm not really sure how far they'll go.

~ C.

[curaga]

If this bears fruit, will things work on the Gamecube too?

It also uses the GX api, but I'm unsure if it has an older version. The GPU should be pretty close, just slower than in the Wii.

[MostAwesomeDude]

If this bears fruit, will things work on the Gamecube too?

It also uses the GX api, but I'm unsure if it has an older version. The GPU should be pretty close, just slower than in the Wii.

It should, yes. An aware programmer would set up the driver so it can detect the GX version and disable features if it's on a GC instead of a Wii.