I'm a glitch hunter of the 3D Zelda Speedrun Community and recently we managed to get our hands on the Chinese NVIDIA Shield and Twilight Princess on it. This was made possible by a generous member of my TP community who took the risk of importing a Shield from China for $250 with 0 guarantees it would actually be possible to make it work. Buying the game from the Chinese store proved to be difficult, but a member from this very community here at resetera went ahead and used her wechat account to buy the game for us.
2 days ago Pheenoh, the person who imported the shield, did a full playthrough and glitch testing on this version. You can find the VOD here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/224297805
The most remarkable things about this version is how well it performs. It doesn't crash, it has no graphical issues, the framerate is locked at 30 fps pretty much throughout the entire game and the loading times are on par with the Dolphin Emulator with fast load times enabled, so pretty much instant.
There was one thing that hit our attention however. 2 notorious consistent game crashes on the original GC did not crash the game on the Shield. Interestingly enough the same 2 glitches that also didn't crash Dolphin until very recently where an option of proper Memory Management emulation became available.
With the hints mounting up, yesterday we went ahead and dumped the APK from the shield. After extracting it I immediately found the native executable that should be the game executable if this was a true port of the game. But taking a look at it it didn't match its GC counterpart whatsoever - especially crucial game asset strings that are required to run the game are missing.
What I did find however were the following strings:
Note: OSPanic is a GC function called by the game when it encounters a critical error
This leaves pretty much no doubt that the executable I'm looking at is in fact a GC emulator. A GC emulator that runs one of the most demanding games on the Cube very smoothly on the same hardware as the Switch. Something tells me this emulator wasn't created to just emulate 2 Nintendo games on a niche console in China :P
EDIT:
Title is maybe a bit misleading. Wouldnt mind if a mod changes it to: "Nintendo has theoretical access to a highly capable GC/Wii emulator for the Tegra X1"
2 days ago Pheenoh, the person who imported the shield, did a full playthrough and glitch testing on this version. You can find the VOD here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/224297805
The most remarkable things about this version is how well it performs. It doesn't crash, it has no graphical issues, the framerate is locked at 30 fps pretty much throughout the entire game and the loading times are on par with the Dolphin Emulator with fast load times enabled, so pretty much instant.
There was one thing that hit our attention however. 2 notorious consistent game crashes on the original GC did not crash the game on the Shield. Interestingly enough the same 2 glitches that also didn't crash Dolphin until very recently where an option of proper Memory Management emulation became available.
With the hints mounting up, yesterday we went ahead and dumped the APK from the shield. After extracting it I immediately found the native executable that should be the game executable if this was a true port of the game. But taking a look at it it didn't match its GC counterpart whatsoever - especially crucial game asset strings that are required to run the game are missing.
What I did find however were the following strings:
Note: OSPanic is a GC function called by the game when it encounters a critical error
This leaves pretty much no doubt that the executable I'm looking at is in fact a GC emulator. A GC emulator that runs one of the most demanding games on the Cube very smoothly on the same hardware as the Switch. Something tells me this emulator wasn't created to just emulate 2 Nintendo games on a niche console in China :P
EDIT:
Title is maybe a bit misleading. Wouldnt mind if a mod changes it to: "Nintendo has theoretical access to a highly capable GC/Wii emulator for the Tegra X1"
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