Hackinformer Your device needs to transform, we are here to inform
It’s been a month since we presented you Exzap’s “world’s first Wii U emulator capable of running and rendering commercial games” (it really sounds cool). It’s time to have a look at what changed during that 1 month and what the current situation is.
One month after release, Cemu has been updated 2 times. The current version is 1.0.2 released on November 2. Cemu’s website say that “new updates will be released approximately every two weeks”, so there might be a new update really soon. Or not.
Next update’s possible content is unknown, but my guess is that it will be improving Cemu’s performance on AMD (see bellow).
Changelogs are can be found here.
Official sources of new information:
There are actually 2 now. The first one is an official website cemu.info. The second one is a subreddit /r/cemu.
Requirements:
You still need at least Windows 7 (x64) and OpenGL 3.3, nothing new here. Exzap himself says that Linux support is planned, but making the emulator useable on Windows is priority for now.
Moving to graphic cards. NVIDIA is still the best one for running Cemu. It runs alright on Intel if you get over visual glitches. A solution for running Cemu on AMD is being worked on.
Open/closed-source:
Cemu is still a closed-source project, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon. Exzap explains it in detail on the official Cemu subreddit. The main reasons he mentions are:
- belief that a small team of long-term, dedicated and skilled team members is better than a big team of temporary contributors.
- fear of focusing on a direction which is not favorable to the original intentions of the emulator. (Example: “Focus on hacky solutions to get games into playable state earlier.”)
- fear of losing control over the project.
- messages saying that the emulator is doomed unless it goes open-source. (He wants to prove these people otherwise.)
At the end, Exzap adds that “if development on Cemu gets stuck for a long period of time or if it is abandoned, the source code will be released anyway.” You can read the full statement here.
Does Cemu support:
- Audio? – No.
- LAN/Online play – No.
- Controller input configuration – No. Not yet. GamePad is the only supported controller at the moment.
Usability, compatibility:
The emulator itself is still in an experimental phase though, and it’s not intended for daily use. As Audio is not supported yet. As for the development, Exzap says that “since Cemu is in such an early state it is more sensible to focus on accuracy and then, once that’s nailed down, start work on optimizations.”
Compatibility is slowly improving. There is no official compatibility list. Best 2 unofficial ones are on reddit (for version 1.0.0) and GBATemp (also for 1.0.0). I’m not sure if it’s not too soon for compatibility lists.
This should give you an idea of current situation of the top of Wii U emulation. There’s no other working Wii U emulator. I think that Exzap and his team are doing a good job, I hope they will keep it up.
DOWNLOAD Cemu version 1.0.2
You can help Cemu’s development with a donation via Bitcoin or PayPal.
Very nice. I wonder if we’ll see full speed emulation for a fair amount of titles within a year or two. Looks like it’s doing rather well for only a month of work.
Year or two would be great. I think the project is in good hands.