January news (Patreon)

Cemu 1.11.4 is scheduled to release on Tuesday, 30th January for 5$+ Patrons and a week later for everyone else.

Additional to the usual bugfixes and tweaks, here is what's new:

Progress with Wii U system software

We have made some overall progress with running Wii U system software. Most noteworthy, it's now possible to get into the Wii U menu. You can find a short video demonstration here. Even though it runs, the functionality is very limited right now as several necessary features, like title management, aren't emulated yet. 

The other system title that now boots is the Friend List. Like the menu, it's only booting and not much of the actual friend list functionality is working yet. That said, friend list support is quite high on our priority list, so you can expect it to arrive soon. As usual, using the optional online features will require that you own a legitimate Wii U and have dumped the necessary files.

Other compatibility improvements

Mario Party 10 now boots and even goes ingame! Here is a video. It's not playable yet due to some audio issues and a tendency to crash occasionally. It also heavily relies on Wii-Remotes which are not supported by Cemu yet.

Another title that now boots is Wii Party U. But like Mario Party 10 it requires Wii-Remote support so it's not really playable.

Speaking of compatibility, if you happen to have some lesser known Wii U games, then we would appreciate it if you can take the time to test them in Cemu and submit your results to the compatibility list.

'No workarounds'-mode for newer Intel GPUs 

Even though the Cemu website says that Intel Integrated Graphics are not officially supported, we have always made some effort to make Cemu run on them. Over the past two years we added quite a few Intel-specific code paths with workarounds. Some of these workarounds are quite aggressive, in the sense that they disable parts of Cemu's render backend in order to avoid crashing on some Intel GPUs. (It's better to have graphic glitches then to have Cemu crash.)

Nowadays, Intel has caught up quite a bit. Their OpenGL drivers for recent GPUs are stable enough to run most Cemu games without crashing and the general OpenGL 4.5+ feature support is also good.

In 1.11.4 we therefore added an experimental command line option to disable all legacy Intel workarounds. Here is a comparison of Super Mario 3D World from my Intel HD Graphics 630. The performance is still lacking a bit (40-55 FPS), but that can be fixed with a downscaling graphic pack.

Slight RAM usage reduction

We overhauled some parts of the code to require less memory and we even found and fixed a memory leak. Overall, 1.11.4 should use up to 10% less RAM compared to the previous release.