AndrewPiroli / ironic

Research emulator for the ARM9 core in the Nintendo Wii

ironic

Research emulator for the ARM9 core in the Nintendo Wii.

Credit is due to the following projects and resources that have guided the implementation since the beginning:

• Team Twiizers' fork of Skyeye
• MINI
• Wiibrew
• YAGCD
• libogc
• archshift/llama
• MerryMage/dynarmic
• All of the folks who still work on Wii/GC homebrew

Quick Roadmap

• Execution through the boot ROM
• Execution through IOS first-stage bootloader
• Execution through IOS second-stage bootloader
• Execution in the IOS kernel
• Broadway/PowerPC-world HLE
• Emulated SDHC (SD card) support?
• Emulated USB support?
• Emulated WLAN functionality?
• Write a bunch of tests
• Guest debugging functionality (perhaps via GDB, or some UI?)
• Go fast (performance optimizations, i.e. a JIT backend, etc)
• Tools for fuzzing guest code
• Other related tools?

ironic is primarily developed on Linux and macOS (x86-64 and AArch64). Support for Windows is provided on best-effort basis. For technical reasons, minimum support is at Windows 10 1809 and Server 2019.

Contributing

I am not interested in accepting contributions to this project and I will probably work on it alone; at least, for now. When I get around to deciding on a license, it will probably be as permissive as possible.

Building

I use Nightly by default, so you may have to do something like this:

$ git clone https://github.com/eigenform/ironic && cd ironic/
...
$ rustup toolchain install nightly
$ rustup override set nightly
$ cargo build --release

Usage

In order to boot, ironic expects the following files to live in the project directory:

• boot0.bin - The Wii boot ROM dumped from your console
• nand.bin - The NAND flash data dumped from your console
• otp.bin - The associated OTP/fused memory dumped from your console
• seeprom.bin - The associated SEEPROM memory dumped from your console

The included script create_binfiles_from_nand.sh will generate otp.bin and seeprom.bin for you using your nand.bin

You can run the emulator with the interpreter backend like this:

$ cargo run --release

Like skyeye-starlet, the ironic-tui target includes a server for PPC HLE. Tools for interacting with the server and representing processes on the PowerPC-side of the machine can be found in pyronic/.