Wii U Cemu Emulator can now run Super Mario Maker

Wii U Cemu Emulator now runs Mario Kart 8

Wii U Cemu Emulator now runs Mario Kart 8

 

Over the past few months the Wii U’s Cemu Emulator has evolved a great deal, moving from just a buggy and almost non-functional start up to a emulator that can actually play the games of a current gen console. 

The First game to be made entirely playable by the emulator was Shovel Knight, a game which is not terribly graphically intensive, but an impressive feat for such a new a emulator regardless. Since then the Emulator has been made to play better with AMD GPUS and has moved to a state where a several popular titles, which includes Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario Maker are fairly playable.  

 

Below are the patch notes for the latest versions of CEMU, from when we covered the emulator last with update 1.1.2.

 

v1.3.0 | 2016-01-13

  • Added support for GPU7 geometry shaders
  • Improved support for 2D texture arrays and cubemaps
  • Generally improved shader emulation
  • New debug option: Dump textures and shaders

 v1.2.0 | 2015-12-26

  • Added basic audio support
  • Added support for GX2 stencil buffers
  • Improved controller options
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes and small improvements

 v1.1.2b | 2015-12-13

  • Fixed rendering issues on AMD graphic cards
  • Minor changes and bug fixes

 v1.1.2 | 2015-12-11

  • Added controller options
  • Added support for OSCoroutine API
  • Improved shader emulation
  • Improved texture/depth/color buffer management
  • Improved CPU timing and thread synchronization
  • Synchronous file operations no longer block CPU execution (reduces frame stutter)

 

Graphics Card Compatibility;

NVIDIA GPU: Runs as expected on most recent driver.
AMD GPU: Runs as expected on most recent driver.
Intel GPU: Visual glitches but runs if OpenGL version is supported.

 

 

Below are the specifications of the PC that was used to record this gameplay. While the games are not completely playable at this time at least it is not crashing on startup or has too many visual artifacts.

We also must remember how weak this system is compared to the highest end systems of today, so those using stronger CPUs and faster RAM may be able to play the game with a lot less slowdown. 

PC Specs:

FX 6300 3.5Ghz (4.1Ghz Turbo)
12GB DDR3 1333 Mhz Kingston HyperX
Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2
Zotac GTX 960 2GB 
Windows 10 Pro x64

 

While the emulator is still far from usable it has been improved significantly over its relatively few small amount of development time. Hopefully the emulator will continue to improve and become more stable as further updates are made. 

 

You can join the discussion on the Wii U Cemu Emulator on the OC3D Forums. 

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