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Wii U port — development log (condensed)

A chronological summary of how the port came together. The recurring theme is endianness: the engine reads most of its data structures by casting raw little-endian file buffers, and the Wii U's PowerPC core is big-endian — so nearly every subsystem worked only after its loader learned to swap.

Boot and first light

  • devkitPPC/WUT build glue: CMake toolchain file, Docker build script, wuhbtool packaging. First lba2.wuhb linked at 638 KB.
  • OSScreen video bring-up with a boot-trace status line; ProcUI lifecycle.
  • HQR resource loader fixed first (HQF_Init offset table, compressed-entry headers — CompressMethod read as LE32 instead of LE16 silently disabled LZ decompression and zeroed every decoded brick).
  • Memory: the Wii U default heap gave tiny allocations where the engine expected a flat 32 MB pool — solved with a dedicated pool allocator.

The endianness campaign

Fixed, roughly in the order the game forced us to:

  • Scene loader (LoadScene): zones, brick tracks, patch lists.
  • 3D bodies: header/group/point tables (WiiU_SwapBodyHeader, one-shot, idempotent across HQR cache reloads), plus texture tables.
  • Grids and bricks (ListCubeInfos, block library, mask overflow in CreateMaskGph).
  • Exterior islands: .ILE/.OBL payloads, T_DECORS, half-poly tables.
  • Painter's-order sort keys (32-bit stores collapsing to 0/−1 broke interior draw order).
  • Text banks, font GPM offset tables, dialogue ordering buffers.
  • Save games (LZSS token order), holomap, ANIM3DS.HQR description table, particle flows, impact scripts.

Diagnosis pattern throughout: bounded LogPrintf tracing to the SD card, memory canaries around suspect buffers, and Python decoders for the on-disk formats (scene/impact/font dumps) to compare ground truth against what the engine computed.

Systems

  • Input: VPAD backend with a unified keyboard+gamepad binding table and an in-game remap menu; GamePad touch panel with behaviour/weapon/spell shortcuts; on-screen keyboard for save names.
  • Audio: native AX backend with software mixing — SFX, positional samples, OGG music via stb_vorbis, voice-overs.
  • FMV: libsmacker in SMK_MODE_DISK streaming mode so the 76 MB intro plays from disk; audio through the AX FIFO.
  • Performance: profiler pointed at read-for-ownership traffic on the DRAM bus during the frame blit; a dcbz-based store path took the game from 10–23 fps to 43–82 fps ("100% playable").

Endgame

  • Full playthrough on real hardware: both planets, mines, wagon, buggy, dinofly, ending credits.
  • Final fixes after completion: ListAnim3DS swap (wrong animated object — a clam shell — appearing in the Sendell sphere room), ScaleSprite reimplemented (the opaque scaled-sprite blitter was a 1:1 stub, making the laser pistol's impact particles render at full magic-ball size), the UTF-8→CP850 converter made real (menu accents), and quit now returns to the system menu instead of a black screen.