::ISO-420 Review Center:: Nintendo Wii Review

Supplement - An Interview with Emu_Kidid the author of GCOS

I would first like to thank you for you have made to be interviewed, as I know you're a busy person.

Before I get into the Nintendo Wii stuff I was wondering if you could tell me a little about yourself. Where do you live? What kind of real life job do you hold and how old are you?

A: I live in Australia, I haven't traveled anywhere overseas yet as I've been busy with school and now university but one day I'd like to go back to my roots and visit Greece. I'm currently nineteen years old and I'm holding a job as a person in tech support at my local IT store, I also restore old consoles such as NES's and install the occasional mod in my consoles.

When did you first start playing video games and what was your first video gaming console?

A: Actually this is quite funny, I was playing video games since I was just 2.. Even though I barely understood the game play I just liked the feel of moving a character on the screen. The first console we had was a front-loading NES and Super Mario Bros. & Duck Hunt. Now I have a uncountable number of consoles that I have accumulated over the years, all of which I play occasionally.

What's your favorite video gaming console?

A: My favorite would probably have to be my Wii. It's just one of those consoles where you want to go and play with it everyday, even if it's just the in the menu etc. Also because there are the VC games so it's kind of all my older consoles in the one unit.

When you did you first discover homebrew?

A: I first discovered homebrew when I came across a SuperNES Public Domain ROM back in 1998. At the time I didn't even have my own personal computer and I had to use the ones at school as I sat there disassembling it to change colors and words :P

What type of programming experience do you have and what languages are you fluent in?

A: I've had many years in just looking at various programming languages and learning them that way, but now that I'm old enough I am currently at university learning C/C++/ASM/Java/etc in a degree for Computer Science. I'd have to say I'm most fluent in just plain old C.

What made you decide to develop GameCube applications?

A: What made me decide was when I got my ViperGC on it's release date and noticed that even though this was a modchip there was still much room to improve. All I wanted from my development of programs on the cube was to make people not have to pay for an expensive modchip but still have all the luxury features they possessed, or some even better which weren't offered by a modchip. To be honest, once I got into homebrew on the cube, it was pretty much the end of me playing games on it also.. Hopefully I can keep a healthy balance with that on the Wii :P

What do you think of the entire homebrew scene in general?

A: I think the entire homebrew scene in general has been going a bit downhill.. There’s too much going on in the sense of "it's mine first" etc with projects. Then there's also a lot of closed source projects happening and secrets left right and center about features. Homebrew is meant to be fun, open sourced and a way for everyone to contribute to improve... meh, maybe I'm just old fashioned.

How would you compare programming for the GameCube vs. the original XBOX?

A: Programming for the GameCube was quite difficult and sometimes annoying without decent libraries. Considering LibOGC only became stable as of Q2 2006, I'd say GameCube was much harder. Things had to be placed into memory carefully making sure of no overlaps, the Graphics Processor didn't have much documentation and many other things were problematic such as the entire memory card/SD card accessing. Original XBOX was basically like programming for a modern computer. You had DirectX, pretty simple, you had a hard drive, and best of all, you could hack it left, right and center to run homebrew. Where as GameCube, the easiest way was SD load, which still required a lot of time in each test loop (reboot, AR, lid, etc).

How did GCOS start out?

A: GCOS started out one day when I was on IRC and anaconda04 was released from Utopia. I was looking for a quick basic open sourced project to add anaconda04 into and found tmbinc's IPL replacement app. I had started to compile versions of it and apparently so had Shadowsan; we were basically on the exact same mission at the exact same time. So we compiled our efforts together and we were coding a project we called GCOS, with a release almost every night. It was all good at the start, everyone contributed, but then everyone lost interest.

How hard was it to adapt GCOS to boot on the Wii?

A: To boot GCOS on the Wii I had to write a small DOL reloader to be used as a pre-loader. The Bootable discs from GC-Linux expect a DOL file located in the lower memory region, but GCOS lies in the upper region because when a game boots it is copied to the lower region and if GCOS was there it would override it. Now to boot games, that was an easy task. Thanks to drive-mods all GCOS has to do is act as if it's booting original discs and the modchip does all the work, we simply set up the games variables such as video mode.

Do you have any further plans for GCOS Wii edition?

A: Eventually I want it to be moved back to LibOGC so I can add full Memcard/SD Card support and MP3 Playback etc… basically use everything LibOGC offers once and for all in one app. Yes this has been in the cards for a while for GCOS, but Shadowsan is kind of back these days and has a GUI all ready in GX for GCOS :)

Is there anything else you would like to add?

A: Keep the GC homebrew alive on the Wii, there's so much more possibilities that were never explored on the GC, perhaps now people will find the interest :)

Thank you very much for your time. :)

Wiinja Review