State of Linux (Cont)

[Exzap]

This is a continuation of #1

The current top priorities for our Linux build are:

• Providing AppImage releases
• Wayland support (at least for Vulkan)
• Finding a way to correctly emulate Wii U's case-insensitive filesystem on case-sensitive host filesystems

There are also some features that haven't been ported over yet:

• HID support (Wii U nsyshid.rpl driver). Required for USB portals (Skylanders Portal of Power, Lego Dimension etc.)
• nlibcurl. Has been ported but not tested a lot
• Some debugger features like memory breakpoints

Nice to have:

• Providing flatpak releases

(List last updated on 16-03-2024)

When building from source we use vcpkg for managing dependencies on all platforms and our officially supported and recommended compiler is Clang 14 or higher (and MSVC on Windows). With the -DENABLE_VCPKG=OFF option you can use system libraries instead of vcpkg but we generally discourage it as we prefer having builds with the same exact library configuration across all platforms for simplicity of debugging. We also won't officially support distributing Cemu as a distro package. Of course package maintainers are free to package it, but our focus is to streamline the troubleshooting and bug reporting process and it's way easier if there aren't dozens of different builds.

[Tachi107]

Finding a way to correctly emulate Wii U's case-insensitive filesystem on case-sensitive host filesystems

ext4 has case-folding support. Would it be possible to make it a requirement for Cemu? Users would have to store stuff accessed by the Wii U in a separate volume with this feature enabled though, which could be hard to do.

[JakobDev]

ext4 has case-folding support. Would it be possible to make it a requirement for Cemu? Users would have to store stuff accessed by the Wii U in a separate volume with this feature enabled though, which could be hard to do.

That's a very bad idea. This requires, as you said, a seprate volume. Users might want to use a case-sensitive filesystem, so they need a own partition/drive just for Cemu.

It is also not very end user friendly to show a Message to new Linux Users, who want to play their Games: "Welcome to Cemu on Linux! Linux is a user friendly OS and not only a nerd OS as everyone says. Now please reformat your drive and create a partition with a case-insensitive filesystem to use Cemu."

Especially Steam Deck Users will have fun.

[Tachi107]

Yeah I was just pointing out that the thing exists. It would be cool if Cemu supported it though, as I doubt that any workaround for case-folding would be more performant than an in-kernel implementation.

[Crementif]

Steam Deck wouldn't have this issue afaik since it's using a case-insensitive filesystem. But yeah, really only Wine does this to my knowledge and they do heavy caching using a virtual filesystem to prevent it from hurting performance.

[Tachi107]

To have a bit more context: what data used by Cemu needs casefolding support? Only the mlc01 folder? Only the games one? Both? Something else?

[Exzap]

Case-insensitivity is needed for all files that map to the virtual Wii U file system in some way. Which is mlc and game folder files. So basically a majority of our file access code done by many different HLE modules

[IcyAlmond]

This might be too hacky and im not too much of a programmer but cant all the files and directories which will be mapped to the wii u filesystem just be all uppercased or all lowercased

[Exzap]

That wouldn't work because the case must be kept intact. Anything else is not accurate emulation and some games might rely on case-sensitive checks internally

[Dungeonseeker]

Edit - I was wrong

Another possibility though - https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/using-the-linux-kernel-case-insensitive-feature-in-ext4/

[Haxorzz]

How do other emulators cope with this?

[PeterPierinakos]

It seems that y'all are talking about the Wii U's case-insensitive FS, but I'll throw this issue I'm having here since I think it's related to the main discussion:

Porting the remaining features (e.g. online play and some UI features)

About the online play feature(s), has anyone managed to get online actually working on Linux? I'm using the pre-compiled binary for Ubuntu on Arch, and after symlinking the missing dependencies the games I play work fine but when I try to go online by copying mlc01/ (recursively, of course), otp.bin and seeprom.bin it just throws this error in the account settings:

The currently selected account is not valid or dumped online account
AccountId missing (The account is not connected to a NNID)

My host machine is running Arch. Online works just fine on a Windows 10 VM (it says that the account is valid on Windows), so it's definitely not me following the instructions incorrectly. Does anyone know what could be causing this issue?

[JPabloLassala]

Users might want to use a case-sensitive filesystem, so they need a own partition/drive just for Cemu.

You can create an image file and format it as ext4

[Dungeonseeker]

Users might want to use a case-sensitive filesystem, so they need a own partition/drive just for Cemu.

You can create an image file and format it as ext4

To do it properly someone would need to write a Wii/U filesystem driver just like this one for FATX...

https://github.com/mborgerson/fatx

... which uses a userspace FUSE based library and can seamlessly handle mounting Xbox & Xbox 360 images directly.