So I wonder if this is similar to how the console chips are "audited"

[cdoublejj]

ie how they are reverse engineered?

[Renazor]

Very interesting, thanks.
But it's not surprising, judging by the fact that the high-tech electronic hardware industry is heavily outsourced.
Most of the time we think of software bugs, but some of the random and weird crashes/errors that some people get might be actually hardware bugs but then developers solve it they might be actually going around a HW bug, but it's the SW that get's the blame.


I'm not sure, this looks pretty advanced stuff, an official IBM manual is used by the dolphin contributors, probably other various other stuff, but I think I heard mentions of undocumented stuff in the reports, I think it's very complicated and dolphin tries to emulate majority of the stuff that's documented, let alone going into a wild goose chase into the depths of the GCN GPU/CPU.

Also, those undocumented instructions might not really help dolphin if the games didn't use them in the first place.

[wertercatt]

Sandshifter hasn't been ported for PowerPC-based processors... yet. But I intend to see if I can port it to them to check for undocumented instructions on the Gekko and Broadway processors that likely exist due to them being custom-designed for Nintendo. Dolphin's accuracy focus would probably benefit from the information, even if they aren't likely to be used for most games.

I'll also probably see if I can port it to ARM9 to check Starlet, but it depends on how risky running homebrew code on Starlet is. (I'd rather not brick my Wii... I need it for dumping my games after all. )

[KHg8m3r]

Get a cheap Wii off ebay and use it for running Starlet Homebrew.