EasyRPG Player for WiiU

Our last homebrew port of EasyRPG Player was 6 years ago for the Nintendo Switch. Now there’s finally a new one for its predecessor: we’re releasing EasyRPG Player for the WiiU. You can get the wuhb file in our download section (under Continuous builds → Other).

Compatibility is better than on the Wii because the WiiU has more memory (2 GB instead of only 64 MB) and most crash reports we get for the Wii are related to running out of memory because the games are too demanding (and load too many assets).

Please do not get the version available in the Homebrew App Store. This version is outdated and does not work.

Unfortunately, compared to the Wii and Switch, there is very little homebrew available for the WiiU. Except for RetroArch there is a lack of emulators and engine reimplementations (in our case it is the latter) for this platform. Therefore: Port your software to the WiiU! Developing for this platform works really well. Thanks to Aroma, Homebrew is also perfectly integrated into the system menu and several iterations of your homebrew can be tested quickly via FTP.

The game Ipomoea by Cachi Córdova running on the WiiU. This game uses the Maniac patch with a custom widescreen resolution. That’s why it has no black bars.

Authors

The initial port was done by carstene1ns but he was unable to test it due to lacking a WiiU. Ghabry has dusted off his WiiU to finish the port.

As this is not an external contribution: For the authors please simply state EasyRPG Team.

Installation

For running homebrew on the WiiU you need the Aroma environment. We do not support any older environments such as Tiramisu.

We recommend that you put the wuhb file from our download section (under Continuous builds → Other) into a subdirectory of /wiiu/apps on your SD card.

Place the games (valid games have a RPG_RT.ldb file) in directories right next to the wuhb file. Besides game folders we also support games inside ZIP archives and LZH archives. The LZH support is new and was added after the 0.8 release. LZH is popular for RPG Maker 2000/2003 games because the editor can create game bundles using this format.

The RTP (RPG Maker 2000/2003 Runtime Package), which is a collection of common assets used by games, is searched for in /wiiu/data/easyrpg-player/rtp/2000 and /2003.

The game ゆめにっき (Yume Nikki) running on the WiiU. To get rid of the black bars the widescreen hack available in the EasyRPG Player settings was enabled.

Technology

The porting was made quite easy because there is a port of SDL2 for the WiiU. SDL2 is an abstraction layer for things such as video, audio and game controllers. So you can run a program (with minor modifications) on any platform that has a port of SDL2.

The Wii port uses SDL1, but there is now an SDL2 port for the Wii. We already played around with and the results were really promising. There will probably soon be an improved Wii port with much better image quality and more features.

Performance issues resolved

For the WiiU port we noticed that it has awful loading times. This is a longstanding problem we have in many of our homebrew ports. The good news: We finally fixed it. We do our own caching now when doing file IO (input/output) on the homebrew platforms. This means the IO performance was also improved on 3DS, Wii, PS Vita and the Switch.

Known issues

The WiiU crashes when launching Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき) from a ZIP archive. We have no idea why that happens and the game works fine when extracted. Note that the game is more than 2 GB in size by now. If you want to play it, attach the WiU’s SD card to your PC and transfer it this way. Sending it via FTP takes several hours!

Splash screen shown on the WiiU gamepad when starting EasyRPG Player. It shows various characters from our OpenRTP project (assets by VictorSena (CC-BY), splash created by Jetrotal)

Reporting bugs

We provide official support for this port. If you think you found a bug please also check the official versions (e.g. in the continuous build of Windows or Linux). Afterwards please report an issue and state whether the bug is WiiU exclusive or a general EasyRPG Player bug.

When can we expect a new EasyRPG Player release?

The last official release of EasyRPG Player was in April 2023. The Player is still under active development, we just have not prepared any official release since then. To enjoy all the new features added since then, you can use our continuous build. The blog post for the new release is currently being prepared. Depending on our free time the release will happen in December or in January but hopefully not later…