rem-verse/sprig

[WIP] Re-implementations of Wii-U Development tools

Sprig

note: this current project is far far far from done, and is one of many spare time projects. I wouldn't expect a ton of movement or usefullness out of this repository yet.

A re-implementation effort of Wii-U Development tools, without the fuss. This recreation effort was lead after all the work to setup a working Cafe SDK environment in the current day (mirroring old versions of cygwin locally (which we also started hosting for others), specific windows 7 machines, and a collection of not generally available tools). We want everyone to be able to use the Wii-U SDK, on any OS. Not to mention we want to document, and how these Development Environments exist.

As a side note: if you're interested in testing something on a cat-dev for something related to preservation, and don't have one. PLEASE reach out, I'd be more than happy to use my hardware to test things for you.

Why The Name Sprig?

The name "sprig" was chosen after "sprigatito" the "Weed Cat Pokemon", because not only was the code name for the Wii-U "CAT" (cat-dev/cat-r/etc.), and the fact "Cat Bridge - Dev" is shortened to CBD (thus 'weed'). Plus Sprig is just a fun word to say.

What Parts Are Re-Implemented

As mentioned at the top of this repository ALMOST ALL of the tools here are NOT re-implemented yet. We're working on it bit by bit, but to be clear it is not our #1 priority or preservationist thing being worked on. It's very much as an on needed basis til we finish other things (and in the meantime we'd love help from anyone willing to contribute).

The end goal is to offer a complete port of every single tool that was officially part of the Cafe SDK developed by Nintendo, plugins to use other compilers besides MULTI (so we don't need the license keys!), and a suite of tools designed from the ground up to offer a pleasent development experience. As some of the CLI choices of the Cafe SDK are not great choices looking back.

Overarching Cafe Tools

Official Tool Replacements:

• cafe.bat
• cafex_env.bat
• cafex

Sprig Custom Tooling:

• mochiato: our replacement for cafe.bat/cafex_env.bat

Host Bridge Tools

The "Host Bridge" tools are a series of tools used for setting up a connection to a CAT-DEV Unit on your local network. These tools are all documented in the Cafe-SDK documentation underneath: "Cafe SDK Basics > Development Cycle > Run Applications > HostBridge Tools".

Official Tool Replacements:

• findbridge: a tool to list all the bridges on your local network who your PC can see.
• getbridge: print either the current bridge, or all known bridges.
  • getbridgetype: an internal script that sets environment variables that getbridge uses.
  • getbridgeconfig: the actual executable that does the BULK of work for getbridge when not just echoing environment variables.
• [-] setbridge: set the bridge to use for your active session, or set the default so you don't have to set it everytime.
  • setbridgeconfig: the actual executable that setbridge ends up reaching out too.
  • SessionManagerUtil: ???
• hostdisplayversion: Display the current emulated Host Bridge installation version, and the firmware installed on your actual CAT-DEV. It is typically only used for diagnostics.
  • `FSEmul``: ???
• updatebridges: a command used to update the firmware on a particular Host Bridge.
• imageuploader: allow uploading mastered WUMAD/WUM's to the internal HDD of a CAT-DEV.

Sprig Custom Tooling:

• [-] bridgectl: our replacement tool that wraps all the bridge commands, and host-bridge utilities into a single tool.

Cat-Dev Bridge Internal Tools

There are some tools that are not explicitly mentioned being tools in any parts of the developer facing documentation, however they are used for interacting with that cat-dev bridges a developer would have used. Sometimes, these tools were also used to build things ontop of them (e.g. mionps is used during cafe.bat).

• CatLog: a port of the the csharp "CatLog" utility who's source was included in some of the cafe sdk releases, which receives logs over the serial port.
• mionps: a tool used to fetch the "parameter space" from a particular MION board. It is not clear what the parameter space is, but it contains a whole bunch of configuration values you can get/set.
• mionparameterspace: a tool like mionps, but it has different output and is probably an older version of mionps that couldn't be removed cause someone depended on it's behavior somewhere.

Building

Building these tools for yourself (and not installing from some package when we start distributing pre-built artifacts) you will require whatever the latest version of stable Rust is at the time the source code was published.

You can follow instructions from https://rust-lang.org, and https://rustup.rs. To install a working rust toolchain locally on your machine. I personally recommend using rustup as it'll be the easiest to update in the future.

Then run cargo build from the root directory of this project to build debug versions of these tools. The built binaries will be placed in ${PROJECT_DIR}/target/debug/${tool-name}. NOTE: not all tools are binaries that need to be built. Some are just simple scripts. For these 'simple scripts' they are just locally located in the directory their located, and you can just run them directly. On windows you can run the scripts located in the pwsh directories, on anything else you can use the scripts located in the sh directories. NOTE: there may be extra steps consult each projects README for more information.

Building the Installable Packages

If you actually want to build packages you'll need to not only be the OS that you want to package for. You'll also potentially need extra tools depending on the OS you're using:

• Windows: Please install wix 4.
• Mac OS X: Please ensure you have pkgbuild, and productbuild installed you may need to install XCode.
• *Nix: Please install NFPM.

From there you can run: ./installer-scripts/<os-type>/<install scripts>, and read: ./installer-scripts/<os-type>/README.md to get instructions on how to build things for your OS.