When you're playing your favorite game on Dolphin with a powerful computer, things should run fairly well. The game is running full speed, there are no graphical glitches, and you can use your favorite controller if you want. Yet, every time you go to a new area, or load a new effect, there's a very slight but noticeable "stutter." You turn off the framelimiter to check and your computer can run the game at well over full speed. What's going on?
The slowdown when loading new areas, effects, …
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June was a month where a lot of important features were merged, but few of them had to do with actual emulation. Every emulator has its own philosophy and goals. While the primary goal is usually to emulate the console at hand, many emulators place secondary goals on various features and ideas. One of Dolphin's secondary goals is to make using the emulator as simple of a process as possible. There are lots of features that try to simplify things, like the Game INI system, support for real …
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A project cannot survive for nearly fourteen years without making some difficult decisions. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong, but, to be successful you have to learn from each and every one. One of the most difficult decisions made for Dolphin was the deprecation and removal of D3D9 despite it being the fastest backend at the time. The promise was that we would take a step back then, and make huge gains in accuracy thanks to being able to use integers throughout VideoCommon.
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One of the more difficult parts of being an emulator is balancing accuracy, performance and presentation. When Dolphin replaced the hacky, broken asynchronous audio with the synchronous New AX-HLE and New Zelda-HLE implementations, audio accuracy greatly increased! It came as quite the shock when users started complaining about this change and demanding asynchronous audio's return. Some of the criticisms were valid; there were bugs in early synchronous audio causing increased latency that weren't present in asynchronous audio.
All of these growing pains were eventually fixed, but, one complaint …
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In case you missed it, we had a special April Fools announcement on our Youtube Channel that blog writer JMC47 retired due to his failed bid to sing well in American Idol on Wii. If you want to catch up on the ridiculousness, the video is still up for all to gaze at in utter confusion.
With that out of the way, some delays to get everything ready have given us more time …
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As of version 5.0-2874, Dolphin can do the unthinkable: you can now access the Wii Shop Channel from within the emulator.
Dolphin can now download the free demos Nintendo made available on the system, as well as purchase Wiiware and Virtual Console games from the service. Because this feature is so new, it may take some time for the guides to get updated. The Wii Networking Guide will get …
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As most of you know, Dolphin was born a GameCube emulator. A lot of its core design and concepts are based around assumptions made that it would only be a GameCube emulator. And, as a GameCube emulator, Dolphin performs admirably, with the ability to boot every single title and a large portion of the library having no major issues.
But, Dolphin isn't just a GameCube emulator. One of the more incredible things about its history is that it was modified into a Wii emulator around the time it …
Sometimes, it's easy to forget how much work there is left to do on a refined emulator. While the rush of getting a new game to boot or discovering a crazy feature hidden within an obscure gem never gets old, those moments do tend to get further and further apart as accuracy increases. As if to defy fate itself, excitement reigned over the month of January as a plethora of ancient bugs were fixed and many unbootable titles finally saw their day of reckoning come to be!
Among …
We have celebrated the 15th anniversary of the GameCube and the 10th anniversary of the Wii in the last few months. As the Wii's successor, and the brand lineage, has been discontinued in the run-up to the release of the Switch, it is a time for reflection. But, this doesn't mean an end for the GameCube and Wii; if anything, it's a new beginning.
This is when emulation and preservation becomes even more important. How many titles in previous generations would have been lost or forgotten if not …
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The biggest news of the month regarding Wii emulation has nothing to do with Dolphin. The vehicle for many of our hardware tests and much, much more, The Homebrew Channel, has gone open source. In its heyday, it was stuffed to the brim with anti-reverse engineering code to prevent nefarious entities from selling the free program. Unfortunately, some of those tricks were also designed to prevent Dolphin from running it. This isn't due to a dislike of Dolphin; in recent years, we've even been tipped off to what …
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