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wiiu/ — the Wii U port tree

Everything specific to the Nintendo Wii U lives here. The upstream game code under ../planetblupi-master/ is kept pristine; the only edits made there are small, #ifdef __WIIU__-guarded blocks, so upstream stays easy to diff.

This tree is licensed under GPLv3+, same as the rest of the repository — see the root LICENSE.

Layout

Path Purpose
build-wiiu.sh Docker build wrapper (devkitPPC/WUT); configure / clean / shell
CMakeLists.txt Out-of-tree build: globs ../planetblupi-master/src/*.cxx for devkitPPC
cmake/wiiu-devkitpro.cmake Toolchain file
compat/libintl.h Stub for gettext/libintl (the port is English-only)
src/platform_wiiu.cxx Frame loop + VPAD touchscreen → SDL mouse + left-stick map scroll
src/movie_wiiu.cxx FMV backend (demux + playback), replaces movie_stub.cxx
src/cinepak.c / .h Self-contained Cinepak ("cvid") video decoder
src/movie_stub.cxx No-op FMV backend (kept for reference; not compiled)
assets/movie/ FMV transcoded to Cinepak .avi + Ogg .ogg, embedded in the romfs

How the build works

build-wiiu.sh mounts the whole project into the official devkitpro/devkitppc Docker image and runs CMake + make there, so the host only needs Docker and bash. The wiiu/CMakeLists.txt compiles the upstream .cxx sources together with the src/ backends above and links the wiiu SDL2 / SDL2_image / SDL2_mixer / SDL2_ttf portlibs, producing a self-contained build-wiiu/planetblupi.wuhb with all freeware assets baked into the romfs.

./build-wiiu.sh            # configure + build + package
./build-wiiu.sh configure  # configure only
./build-wiiu.sh clean      # rm -rf build-wiiu/
./build-wiiu.sh shell      # interactive container shell

Environment overrides: DOCKER, IMAGE, BUILDDIR, JOBS (see the script header).

Notable technical points

These are the non-obvious things that made the port work; the code comments at each site go into more detail.

  • Touch input is read directly from VPAD. The devkitPro SDL2 wiiu backend does not deliver the GamePad touchscreen as SDL mouse or finger events, so platform_wiiu.cxx reads VPADGetTPCalibratedPointEx (in VPAD_TP_854X480 space) and synthesises SDL mouse events itself. VPAD is polled once per frame tick (polling every loop spin is very slow under emulation).

  • Frame loop is self-paced. The upstream loop is driven by an SDL_AddTimer callback that does not fire on this backend, so the wiiu Platform::run pushes EV_UPDATE manually from SDL_GetTicks.

  • Big-endian save format. The .blp level/demo/save files are little-endian on disk; on the PowerPC Wii U every multi-byte header/field is byte-swapped via SDL_SwapLE* after reading and before writing (see decio.cxx and the demo helpers in event.cxx, both upstream files under #ifdef __WIIU__).

  • TTF glyph cache disabled on wiiu. A shared_ptr/unordered_map teardown crashed on this GX2/libstdc++ combo, so text is rendered per frame and the textures freed with a one-frame defer (GX2 is async — freeing immediately caused a use-after-free glitch on multi-line labels).

  • FMV is offline-transcoded. The desktop uses SDL_kitchensink/ffmpeg on .mkv (Cinepak + MSVideo1 + Vorbis). All clips are transcoded to a single codec (Cinepak .avi + separate Ogg) so only one small decoder (cinepak.c) is needed on-device.

  • No GPU pixel readback. SDL_RenderReadPixels from a render target does not work on the GX2 backend (returns 0). Blupi hit-testing was fixed to sample the source surface kept in RAM instead — this also fixed selecting a Blupi by tapping its head during normal play.