Monthly Archives: February 2007

Wii Media Center should be right around the corner

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Since the Wii is running the Opera browser, it’s (in a sense) allowing us to run limited unsigned applications on the Wii. Even more, through Opera (and perhaps not even limited to Opera), the Wii supports SWF natively.

The first thing we can do with this is write a media center as a web-application that would stream video using flash/flv to the Wii. This would require an application on a nearby PC to supply the video, but that’s cool. It should be able to setup the vlc media player to transcode in real time video into flv and stream it to some flash applet running in a web-page inside opera on the wii.

So, we need to develop a PC application that is also a web server and also a streaming video server, that can be done, even compiled into a single executable.
Heck it should work with any other console that allows unrestricted browsing and supports Flash natively

looks like these guys started something in this direction, but no automatic video streaming yet :
http://wii.secretdeveloper.com/download.html

here’s another fine example of a site writing a special Wii frontend and using Flash to deliver rich content (notice the Wii’sh UI): http://www.finetune.com/wii/

update: here we go – http://wiicr.org/wiki/index.php/WiiCR

man would i like to write a wii emulator

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Why ?

First of all because the wii is a cool console, but second of all, because such an emulator could run on many different devices.

The PC would be the first target, should be no problem as it’s got bluetooth for the wii-mote, wifi/lan for the net connection, a screen and so forth…

But hey, why stop at PCs (windows/linux/mac), why not go ahead and port it to… the xbox360!

Yeah that’s right, a wii emulator for the xbox360 is theoretically possible. Once the xbox360 is fully cracked and homebrew apps can run on it, it should be possible to port a windows wii emulator to the 360.
The 360 sports bluetooth (yuval updated me that it doesn’t have bluetooth, so take everything i wrote and apply to the PS3 :-) , wifi/lan, screen, all you need…. now wouldn’t that be fantastic. imagine booting the 360, starting the wii emulator, then popping in wii-sports and playing wii games on your xbox-360… wonder if that would be legal. There used to be a Playstation emulator for Windows called Bleem, it sold legit but I think Sony gave them lots of trouble.

It may even possible to get a wii emulator on the PS3, who knows. this is a cool challenge.

here are the wii specs, and a comparison to the gamecube : http://www.wiili.org/index.php/Gamecube-wii-hardware

COM, STA, apartment, reentrancy, re-entrancy

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are you getting cyclic function call graphs in your STA (or multiple STAs) ?
so you’ve probably heard of re-entrancy.

if you’re re-entrancy are due to a COM call waiting on some handles (WaitForSingle/MultipleObject/s), you can replace it with


What this method does is wait for your handles, but also handles new COM calls (through a simple message pump), which is just fantastic.
If you have custom message processing, CoWaitForMultipleHandles will not execute this custom behavior, for more info on that look here: http://blogs.msdn.com/timng/archive/2006/09/06/743795.aspx