Cemu Wii U emulator 1.0.2 released & Cemu gets its own website

Just a few months ago the Wii U emulator was announced and release to the public for download. Well, today Cemu has its own website and a new update for Cemu. Now Cemu is still in it beta stages and is not recommend for daily use.

The new update 1.02 change log.

v1.0.2

• Improved accuracy of shader emulation (again).
• Improved the emulation of color and depth buffers.
• Implemented support for: Vertex shader textures, depth samplers and instanced rendering.
• Fixed a bug causing texture unit updates to be ignored
• Some attempts to get the emulator running on AMD graphic cards (but we are not quite there yet)
• If GLSL shader compilation fails the error is now logged to log.txt
• Lots of other small changes and bugfixes.

Download: Cemu V1.0.2

So why isn’t Cemu open source yet? Well here is what they had to say about it.

I have a very strong vision on how the future of Cemu should look like. This includes potential contributors with whom I am already in talks with. I believe that for speedy progress, a small team of long-term, dedicated and skilled team members is better than a big team of temporary contributors. Why? Because every contributor first has to acquire the necessary knowledge about the emulated system. More knowledge means more effective emulator development since a lot of time can be saved by 1) fixing bugs faster 2) implementing features correctly on first attempt. For this approach open-source is simply not necessary. In fact, it is easier to get talented developers to join long-term when their name will have more meaning in the credits. I have also considered donation-driven development. It works very well for artists and comic authors, and I see it as a great incentive for emulator development too. But it would be problematic for a open-source project.

But of course there are other concerns as well, like development suddenly 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. I can see this happen in a open-source environment more likely, because piracy can become the main source for development motivation. Another example: Splatoon is moving towards playability fast, but online features are of low priority to avoid people using the emulator to cheat in online-play and ruin the experience for everyone. With open-source code there is no easy way to steer the development focus away.

Needless to say there are personal reasons as well. Like not wanting to lose control over the project and being slightly reluctant to share the code with people who have no respect for the effort and time it took to get this far. Not to mention the 1000 messages I received along the lines of “This emulator is doomed when it doesn’t go open-source”. It makes me want to prove them otherwise.

Oh and as I already stated, if development on Cemu gets stuck for a long period of time or if it is abandoned, the source code will be released anyway. I agree with the sentiment that the knowledge should not go to waste.

You can check out their new site here