Hacking Possible to Disable the Wii's (De)Flicker Filter?

[Maeson]

Running uninstalled WADS sounds pretty useful, although nowadays you have Emunand and Neek to run pretty much everything.

About forcing things into WADS, I remember blackbox fixed forcing video settings onto digital titles on one of the later versions of USB Loader GX, although it may be more specifically for Progressive Scan, I don't remember.

My first idea was to make patches for the WADs, but they end up always being larger than the WAD itself, so that's pointless.

I agree on having all of this written on a single place. Maybe we could create a Wiki here. MANY useful things hidden on these forums...

About 8:7 GC games, it's the first time I hear about it. I know about 8:7 VS 4:3 in older systems (NES, SNES, PC-Engine, part of the library of the Mega Drive, etc) and I wholeheartedly sit on the 8:7 camp there, but for systems after that I thought 320x224 was the usual thing for 5th gen systems and 640x480 for GC, Dreamcast and Xbox (PS2 is very often a weird 512x448, but PS2 is a bit of a mess from what I've read and experienced myself).

There's an option for width on Nintendont but I've never touched it, it has been siting on "640" for the entire time I've used it.

About HDMi solutions on the Wii, I only tried a generic Wii2HDMI which didn't end up being the horror stories other people find, and of course it just outputs 480p, it doesn't "upscale" like some other fancier peripherals. Slightly brighter picture but everything else was fine, but since then I've been using components to the OSSC.

I'm on the look for a good component cable too, but whenever I read opinions on the more popular ones I always come out unsure of what to do.

 

[NoobletCheese]

are we keeping the info that we've gathered so far in a wiki of any kind?

https://gbatemp.net/threads/possibl...de-flicker-filter.477163/page-20#post-9514246

disabling deflicker/dark filter/patching video modes in WAD-based software (VC/WiiWare) is currently only possible on a computer, right? As in, you extract the .app file, patch it, pack it up and install the WAD then? (more or less so, I may have missed a few steps such as decompressing stuff/identifying what to patch/how to patch in terms of restoring proper brightness without clipping etc).

@blackb0x has implemented ULGX's patching of deflicker filter in such a way that it will patch everything, even compressed WADs. The only games it could not patch are games which launch other games, like when Metroid Prime Trilogy's menu launches one of the games, so you'd have to patch those ones manually by editing their dols.

Blackbox also improved the video mode patching and it should work for most games. If it doesn't, make sure you enable all the video patches in loader settings (DOL video patch, VIDTV patch, SNEEK video patch). All my games are NTSC so I've never really needed to use it.

The epilepsy (dark) filter patching still must be done manually.

Speaking of that, has anyone here had issues with 3D GameCube games outputting at 8:7 instead of 4:3? Especially in games that don't support forcing video modes. Narrow Simpsons: Hit and Run is driving me a little mad at this point, so I'm trying to get up to speed on viWidth and such.

The GameCube video width situation is a bit of a mess imo. It seems that some developers didn't realise 640x480 internal res was going to be displayed in non-square NTSC pixels and a lot of games are horizontally squished, circles are ovals etc. You can correct it by setting a custom video width in Nintendont, but only if you know the internal res and pixel aspect ratio of the game. Here is a spreadsheet for calculating the "correct" width setting for a game if you know the values.

ETA - Has anyone tried comparing Mayflash's Wii 2 HDMI solution to the Hyperkin cable? I have the Hyperkin, and it seems OK. Not too noisy, maybe some very faint horizontal bars present, but nothing egregious. Color balance is mostly okay, but white balance is every so slightly off. Audio's OK. Not sure if I'd benefit from getting the Mayflash.

Yeah I had both and basically agree with your findings as well. The Mayflash has slightly truer colour and a bit less black crush, but worse "jailbars" on solid colours. Such a shame as the image clarity other than that was really nice, which leads me to believe my TV's video ADC isn't very good. I reckon the engineers at Mayflash might have fine tuned its pixel clock to suit the Wii, kind of like how in OSSC you can fine tune phase & timings to get less blurry pixels. I think Mayflash did a really good job with that, but forgot to check the low end for black crush, which can be done with 240p Test Suite.

 

[XFlak]

This code should work on all popular system menus, but it has only been tested on the 4.2U version.
It's been a long time but I think all you need to do is delete the hacks file installed (I used wiixplorer) and replace it with the new one.

[Remove Deflicker]
maxversion=518
minversion=288
amount=5
hash=0x0608080a,0x0C0A0808
patch=0x06000015,0x16150000
hash=0x0608080a,0x0C0A0808
patch=0x06000015,0x16150000
hash=0x0608080a,0x0C0A0808
patch=0x06000015,0x16150000
hash=0x0608080a,0x0C0A0808
patch=0x06000015,0x16150000
hash=0x0608080a,0x0C0A0808
patch=0x06000015,0x16150000

You might not care about this detail but injecting SMB3 in other VC emulators does produce some graphical glitches missing from the official release. I didn't test every VC of course so maybe I was unlucky but the same bugs appear in the Animal Crossing emulator.

@SuperrSonic and @NoobletCheese or anyone else that might know, can you please help me with @DacoTaco 's question on the remove deflicker priiloader hack?

https://github.com/DacoTaco/priiloader/pull/296

why is this hack 5x the same patch?
am i seeing this incorrectly that it tries to patch the hash 0x0608080A0C0A0808 to 0x060001516150000 5 times?
EDIT : is this because the hash exists up to 5 times in the binary ? are all 5 required to be patched?

His edit makes sense to me, but I don't know for certain. Thanks!

 

[Maeson]

If that's for the System Menu; I have no idea (but might be the same answer) but for games, every game that I have looked at has several strings you can edit, based on the fact that they have several video modes.

For example a PAL game can have info for 50Hz Pal; 60Hz Ntsc; 60Hz Pal; 480p Ntsc and 480p Pal. All video formats of a given game use the same string (which varies from game to game among a few variants) so it is normal to find it several times. In fact I wrote down over a hunder games' offsets on this thread and pretty much all of them have the string repeated at least 4 times.

You are basically patching away the filter from all video modes. If you were to search every single game to find the offsets in which 480p video modes are stored, you could just edit those, but that's an absurd amount of work that wouldn't make a difference because if you are on interlaced video on CRT you want the hack off, and if you are on progressive (or interlaced on modern displays adding their own filter) you couldn't care less about if the interlaces modes are unfiltered because it is not affecting you negatively.

The other way is doing a single change that disables all filters from the "root" which NoobletCheese found out long ago.

 

[XFlak]

Thanks! But for games do u see the same string getting patched multiple times (like with the priiloader system menu hack) ? Or all they each unique?

 

[Maeson]

Yes, it's always the same string; every video mode uses the same filter type in a game.

 

[NoobletCheese]

My best guess is that the Wii menu must have defined 5 render mode objects containing vfilter 08080A0C0A0808 and it's patching all 5.

It's strange the code repeats 5 times though -- given it doesn't specify any memory address to patch, I would have thought a single one was a "find and replace all". Perhaps @SuperrSonic can clarify.

 

[Maeson]

I don't find it weird it repeats, to me the weird thing is that they are always the same. Having a setting for each mode sounds exactly what I would do... With the difference that I would only set the filter for interlaced modes, and have none for progressive modes.

Developers seem they did not care at all, thus letting the default filter (the strongest one) on on pretty much every third party game, but having an instruction for each mode sounds logical to me, it just looks like pretty much no one took advantage of that...

 

[NoobletCheese]

I don't find it weird it repeats

Yeah I guess each one would be a "find first occurrence of 0608080A0C0A0808 & replace it with 0600001516150000"

So the first one replaces the first occurrence, then finishes.

Second one finds the first occurrence, which is now not the one before since that one was just replaced. etc.

 

[x_sh]

@SuperrSonic and @NoobletCheese or anyone else that might know, can you please help me with @DacoTaco 's question on the remove deflicker priiloader hack?

https://github.com/DacoTaco/priiloader/pull/296


His edit makes sense to me, but I don't know for certain. Thanks!

I believe there's a noticeable difference with this priiloader hack on 4.2E (not region changed, PAL Wii from UK), so it works on at least two 4.2 regions. Not sure about 4.3 or 4.1, though, and I'd rather not update to 4.3 myself (no real reason to do so from what I've gathered).

 

[Maeson]

I tried the hack to remove the filter on the system menu on 4.3 on the version before this one, if that helps somehow.

It was strange to see the menu looking sharp, I found it very noticeable on the channel's little screens.

I rather not update until a stable version is released as DacoTaco adviced because my Wii can't have BootMii as Boot2.

 

[NoobletCheese]

Just wanted to report the Mayflash DolphinBar seems to be good. The feeling of the controls seems authentic to me, using a genuine Wiimote & Nunchuk.

Graphics-wise I'm not sure I can go back to Wii even with deflicker removed. Rendering 2x native res over HDMI is just another world, it feels more like Wii U games.

Even some games can be patched to 60fps it's insane. I don't even know why it works because I haven't overclocked Dolphin's CPU speed but it just works, eg. Sonic Colours 960p60 vs 480p30 is no comparison, it's basically a HD remake.

Even some games that slow down on the Wii hardware maintain 60fps on Dolphin, eg. Trackmania. Some games even have high-res texture packs it's crazy how much better some of these games look on Dolphin.

But Dolphin is still a bit buggy and not user friendly. But with tweaks I can get it running smoothly by enabling Exclusive Ubershaders, and vsync through the Nvidia driver instead of Dolphin's vsync.

There is one thing that Dolphin needs though -- custom adjustment of video width. You can only choose 4:3 or 16:9, nothing else. For me this is a dealbreaker for GameCube games as many of them need to be widened by around 9% to compensate for game developer error (not Dolphin's fault). I've requested it be added here. In the meantime it's possible to make cheat codes to adjust video width, but it's a long and painful process which must be done for each game.

It looks like I'll be moving to Dolphin now, and using Wii only for titles that Dolphin has trouble with.

I'd recommend using the latest beta version of Dolphin and deleting Documents\Dolphin Emulator to clear out any old settings from a previous version.

 

[x_sh]

There is one thing that Dolphin needs though -- custom adjustment of video width. You can only choose 4:3 or 16:9, nothing else. For me this is a dealbreaker for GameCube games as many of them need to be widened by around 9% to compensate for game developer error (not Dolphin's fault). I've requested it be added here. In the meantime it's possible to make cheat codes to adjust video width, but it's a long and painful process which must be done for each game.

This issue is something I'm quite interested in trying to get around myself since I'm seeing similar things on some GC games (whether in Dolphin or on real HW). What's the aspect ratio you get from Dolphin when trying to play such games?
I've seen one game render at exactly 640x480, despite clearly being designed to be run at 720x480, though that's not the aspect ratio mentioned in the forum post you've linked, so maybe these issues aren't related. I'm getting an HDMI upscaler in the mail later today so I'll see whether it can expand the signal for me before it hits the TV at 1080p or 4K.

Also, I assume you just use "Video Width" in Nintendont when playing on hardware to fix this? Can't say that all games support that, unfortunately. For such games, developing cheats might still be beneficial, since that way we could probably improve Nintendont's video width patching algo to work with currently unsupported games (if it's generalizable enough, that is). Some versions of Smash Melee had issues, for example.
Are there such cheats you could suggest as an example I could look into? Basically so that I know for what types of values to look for (e.g. aspect ratio in float, screen width in px, whatever else and however else it might be encoded in memory). This could make for an interesting weekend with Dolphin debugger/memory view in hand.

Coming back to the topic at hand, right now it appears to be impossible to turn deflicker on for multi-dol games, but why exactly is that the case? I seem to recall that when we boot a .dol with the USBLoader's latest implementation of this feature, we're able to modify the .dol on the fly before it starts, but only in RAM - the executable in the game image stays untouched.
So the options here would be to either add the ability to save patched .dol files onto the USB/SD somewhere, or even overwrite the ones inside .wbfs / isos (unless wbfs is read-only, of course) while backing the original ones up to the USB/SD.
I guess the only other option would be to somehow modify the part of the relevant IOS (cIOS) which loads the child .dol from the parent .dol, but that seems almost impossible - at least with my understanding of Wii, someone with a lot more experience should be a better source to chime in on this.

BTW, Metroid Prime Trilogy worked fine for me with deflicker disabled when I booted into the game normally (main.dol), loaded my save, quit the game, then booted it up again using the game-specific .dol - for Prime, didn't check other games since I don't have any progress in them on this collection. This collection appears to be able to remember which savegame was last loaded even on a cold boot (i.e. not from the game selection menu .dol).

 

[NoobletCheese]

What's the aspect ratio you get from Dolphin when trying to play such games?

The current version of Dolphin appears to do the same thing as Nintendont set to Auto width. i.e they both obey the game's viWidth setting, which is how it appears on real GameCube hardware. This ends up displaying a skinny image in cases where the game devs didn't realise their internal framebuffer was going to be mapped to non-square NTSC pixels. We can correct it by stretching it horizontally by around 9% using a custom viWidth in Nintendont, or custom aspect ratio in Dolphin (which hasn't been implemented...yet).

I reckon some Wii games might need this as well, eg. Battalion Wars 2. The 2D HUD assets in that game definitely have the 9% squish, but I still don't know the aspect of the 3d viewport so I'm not sure whether it should be stretched. I've got a feeling the 3d viewport is fine, but the game devs created all the 2D HUD assets on a square pixel monitor and imported them directly into the game.

It's possible to discover the aspect of the 3d viewport by setting breakpoints for certain functions in Dolphin but I don't know how to do that. This contributor wrote custom code for Dolphin that automatically sets the correct viWidth based on 3d viewport, but doesn't seem to have released the code.

Up until July 2015, Dolphin was unwittingly correcting any games that had the 9% squish, as it just scaled all games to the full 4:3 or 16:9 width. But then other games would have appeared too wide, eg. SSB:Melee which uses a 3d viewport aspect narrower than 4:3, causing circles to appear too fat -- https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2015/08/01/dolphin-progress-report-july-2015/ (last item).

Also, I assume you just use "Video Width" in Nintendont when playing on hardware to fix this? Can't say that all games support that, unfortunately.

Yep Nintendont cannot patch viWidth for some games. I believe this is because Nintendont only patches GXRenderModeObj->viWidth, and some games set viWidth programmatically at runtime without referencing the GXRenderModeObj-viWidth. In those cases it will be more difficult to patch. Probably requires patching the VIConfigure function, whose binary representation can differ between games, and requires knowledge of PowerPC assembly to know where to change the right instruction that loads the register containing viWidth.

For such games, developing cheats might still be beneficial... Are there such cheats you could suggest as an example I could look into? Basically so that I know for what types of values to look for (e.g. aspect ratio in float, screen width in px, whatever else and however else it might be encoded in memory). This could make for an interesting weekend with Dolphin debugger/memory view in hand.

I only know how to make Gecko cheats, but other people have made ActionReplay codes already for some games, eg Sonic Adventure 2.

The basic procedure I use is to dump MRAM with Dolphin which ends up in Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Dump\mem1.raw, which should be 0x80000000 to 0x817FFFFF. Then have the cheat code patch GXRenderModeObj->viWidth which looks like this (column "widt"). But again, this is how Nintendont does it and doesn't work for all games -- VIConfigure patching will be required for reliable patching.

Coming back to the topic at hand, right now it appears to be impossible to turn deflicker on for multi-dol games, but why exactly is that the case? I seem to recall that when we boot a .dol with the USBLoader's latest implementation of this feature, we're able to modify the .dol on the fly before it starts, but only in RAM - the executable in the game image stays untouched.

Yep I think that's correct -- ULGX doesn't modify the dols on disk, and when the game goes to load another dol, it's loading it off disk which is unpatched.

So the options here would be to either add the ability to save patched .dol files onto the USB/SD somewhere, or even overwrite the ones inside .wbfs / isos (unless wbfs is read-only, of course) while backing the original ones up to the USB/SD.

Yeah I suggested this to Blackbox, but it's a lot of work and risks corrupting the image if modifying wbfs/ios. It sounds easy in theory but in practice it's probably a nightmare. The coder would have to be intimately familiar with wbfs and iso file formats, and even Wiim's ISO tools doesn't repack some games properly after modification and they don't launch.

There aren't many games that launch other dols like Metroid Prime does, so a rare trip to the hex editor can solve it. There are some games that launch a second dol, but ULGX already knows to avoid loading that dol and loads the game dol instead, eg. Super Swing Golf.

BTW, Metroid Prime Trilogy worked fine for me with deflicker disabled when I booted into the game normally (main.dol), loaded my save, quit the game, then booted it up again using the game-specific .dol - for Prime, didn't check other games since I don't have any progress in them on this collection. This collection appears to be able to remember which savegame was last loaded even on a cold boot (i.e. not from the game selection menu .dol).

Yep I observe the same thing. From memory it loads the game in 480i mode though & required patching to 480p with ULGX.

 

[blackb0x]

right now it appears to be impossible to turn deflicker on for multi-dol games

With USB Loader GX you can just go into a games settings and set alternate DOL to "List on game launch". That way everything gets patched correctly and you'll even skip some loading screens.

It's not possible for the loader to patch multiple DOL files ahead of time and a modified cIOS couldn't easily do it either.

 

[redfire_mrt]

Great work with that @SunkenSkunk, @NoobletCheese and @SuperrSonic
So i think now we can also get the original NES colors and brightness on Wii VC? Awesome and sweet!

So, I've tested @SunkenSkunk's new code for replacing the old values of the "dark NES color pallete" with the new colorful and bright NES color pallete, with some guidelines from @NoobletCheese.

Well, I only tried with Super Mario Bros. 3 (NTSC-U) but I think it will work on more NES Wii WADs.

@Zorg1996, have you tried these mods on your real Wii? Because I only test them in Dolphin since I can't have a Wii console

Here's some Dolphin screenshots of that in this comparison:

View attachment 268560 View attachment 268561

So now it looks so colorful, and better of all, it doesn't brighten too much the HOME Menu nor the original emanual, only the game is affected by the brightness. I hope @Zorg1996 get this running successfully in his Wii.

Greetings to all

Do I use the hex editor for that or another program?

 

[SaulFabre]

Do I use the hex editor for that or another program?

@RedFireStudios (mrt84)

It still needs the use of a hex editor for replace the NES color palette used on NES Wii VC games.
Look at this tutorial here: https://gbatemp.net/threads/tutoria...-palette-in-wii-virtual-console-games.590714/

Hope this helps

 

[x_sh]

Coming across this thread again, and I have a bit of a related topic to discuss.
I've recently moved my TV closer to the floor and closer to the couch, which allows for better visibility, and the first thing I've noticed is that Wii seems to always have this sort of a "scanline" effect - faint grey horizontal lines alternating with normal color lines. Barely noticeable most of the time, but more prominent in some specific places like Skyward Sword text boxes / fog effects in Eternal Darkness. These are static artifacts, not diagonal interference lines like on a cheap adapter w/ dirty power (I have those on my bad PS2 to HDMI adapter so I know what to look out for).
Has this been documented? I've googled around and found some threads from 2007 complaining about this, but that's pretty much all there was. I've seen this on YouTube captures of Wii games via RetroTink 5x, so I doubt it's something to do with my setup (I've tried a couple of HDMI adapters - Hyperkin and Electron Shepherd - and it's still there).
So I guess here's a few things I was wondering:

• Does anyone else notice this (sorry if I ruin the perception Wii video quality for you...)?
• Is this a limitation of the Wii hardware? I.e. is this also an issue for vWii? I don't recall seeing it in Dolphin and it's not there in SMG/NMH on Switch, and I think those are emulated (at least SMG 100% is).

ETA: I've tried forcing deflicker to the highest setting, and it seems to blend/blur these artifacts away almost perfectly I'd say. Of course, the image is much softer as a result, though not unbearably so. Which kinda makes me think that maybe leaving the deflicker on in most places was a conscious decision after all? Not sure, just thinking out loud here.

ETA2: disabled the deflicker disable hack in priiloader, system menu also looks nicer (softer, but no artifacts). I might go back to using some amount of the deflicker filter, after all. Not chasing sharpness either way, since I added an mClassic to my signal chain (no, it's not the source of the problem, I've tried going directly into the TV).

 

[NoobletCheese]

@x_sh
I think you are probably noticing the dithering used by some games which render in 6-bits mode instead of 8-bit. Specifically GX_PF_RGBA6_Z24 or GX_PF_RGB565_Z16.

And yes the deflicker filter blends and blurs the dither pattern, hiding its visibility which has been discussed in this thread already. This is one of the reasons why blackbox allowed a "low, medium, high" setting so you can choose how much of a tradeoff you want between dithering or a softer image:

Low: 04 04 10 10 10 04 04
Medium: 04 08 0C 10 0C 08 04
High: 08 08 0A 0C 0A 08 08

It's also possible to disable dithering by patching the GXSetDither function, but then you get banding, back crush and some colours are really off hue.

Dolphin is able to upconvert 6-bit games to 8-bit without any visible artefacts (graphics > enhancements > force 24-bit colour). I suspect it uses dithering too, but perhaps a much higher quality algorithm, possibly a temporal one with coloured subpixel dithering, combined with the higher rendering resolution (smaller pixel pattern) makes it impossible to see.

 

[x_sh]

@x_sh
I think you are probably noticing the dithering used by some games which render in 6-bits mode instead of 8-bit. Specifically GX_PF_RGBA6_Z24 or GX_PF_RGB565_Z16.

And yes the deflicker filter blends and blurs the dither pattern, hiding its visibility which has been discussed in this thread already. This is one of the reasons why blackbox allowed a "low, medium, high" setting so you can choose how much of a tradeoff you want between dithering or a softer image:

Low: 04 04 10 10 10 04 04
Medium: 04 08 0C 10 0C 08 04
High: 08 08 0A 0C 0A 08 08

Yep, that's got to be it! Sorry for inflating the already huge thread, I've read through it multiple times in the past, but it can be hard to hold 30+ pages of info in memory . Interesting how the dither pattern is just made up of easily visible horizontal lines - almost like it was specifically designed to take advantage of deflickering and/or just interlaced signals on CRTs. This is nothing like the dithering I'm more used to seeing on, say, PSone games.

Still curious why I can see this effect in the system menu, though! I'm not talking about the grey-and-white stripe pattern on the background, either - slight artifacting is visible on the settings button, for example, unless I re-enable deflicker.

I guess I'll stick to a softer image, since apparently it's less distracting to me personally, but I'm really glad these options have been discovered and made available by blackbox + the rest of the community.