14 DAY TRIAL // A new Wii U emulator has been released for the Windows platform. It's called Cemu and is now freely available to anyone who wants it.
If you're a fan of the Wii U platform, and you happen to have a Windows 7 OS or above lying around, then you're in luck. The Cemu Wii Emulator has just been released, and it's capable of running and rendering commercial games, but there is a catch. The problem with these emulators is that the hardware used in the Wii U is not the same as what you can find everywhere else, especially the CPU. This means that developers will have a harder time building games for it and that it's a lot more difficult to emulate.
Some of you might remember that PlayStation 2 emulators were all over the place, but the game performance was terrible. It wasn't the fact that the PlayStation 2 was extremely powerful, it just used a weird processor.
The same happens with the Wii U, which has a CPU / GPU solution put together by AMD, IBM Renesas in co-operation with Nintendo IRD and Nintendo Technology Development (Wikipedia). For now, the game performance won't be great, but hopefully that will improve in the future.
Cemu 1.0 is just the beginning
The developer of Cemu is saying that he will update the application every two weeks and that many of the issues that are now present will be slowly fixed, and that includes the lack of controller support, which makes it unusable right now.
According to the developer of Cemu, the application can run encrypted Wii U images (WUD) and RPX/RPL files, it supports up to 1920x1080 resolution, it has no optimizations, and it needs at least Windows 7 to work. He only tested it on Nvidia and Intel hardware, the latter not being recommended. Also, there is no audio. Told you there was a catch.
The question is, of course, where we can find encrypted Wii U images (WUD) and RPX/RPL files. This, unfortunately, sits in a rather gray area, as this might be legal in some countries and illegal in others. We'll tell you this much. It's not difficult.
You can download Cemu 1.0 right now from gbatemp.net, where it was originally posted. We'll be following this project in the coming weeks and months so keep an eye on this place for more details on the matter.
