Archives 2016

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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This month, we have a few very important things to go over before we get to our notable changes, so let's dig right into that.

NVIDIA Vulkan Support Update¶

Users may remember that we recommended using older versions of the NVIDIA drivers when using Vulkan. Well, this is no longer required as once NVIDIA was aware of the bug, they fixed it in a few minutes and the fix was rolled out in driver version 375.63. Users can now use the latest …

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These days, most emulators use pre-configured mappings to allow any controller that uses xinput to be immediately mapped to whatever the original console used. But that is only possible because of the standardized button layout that has proliferated throughout consoles. Mapping older controllers, such as the SNES controller, to a modern controller is pretty much trivial. Even a PS2 controller can be mapped to an Xbox 360 controller without losing much.

For Dolphin, things get a bit more complicated. While the GameCube Controller has a few trouble spots, …

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There was apparently some big deal this month about getting every GameCube game to boot. But, the increasingly more amusing part of this new found accuracy is emulating game crashes. When using MMU Enabled + Single Core, it should be impossible for a game to crash Dolphin, but, much more likely to emulate a game crashing in situations where it would on console. As such, booting all games is old news, Dolphin is now onto emulating crashes in all games. One infamous one that didn't work in …

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Every single GameCube game can at least boot in Dolphin 5.0. Except one. Star Wars: The Clone Wars and its complex way of using the PowerPC Memory Management Unit rendered it unplayable in Dolphin up to this day. But finally as of Dolphin 5.0-540, this challenge has come and gone: Dolphin can finally boot every single GameCube game in the official library.

So what makes Star Wars: The Clone …

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Dolphin started solely as a GameCube emulator, focused only on the one console. But, when the Wii was released and it was discovered to have hardware almost identical to its older sibling, Dolphin naturally evolved into a GameCube and Wii emulator. All of our readers are probably familiar with this. However, many people don't know that there is yet another console based on the GameCube, one which Dolphin has emulated - the Triforce. An arcade …

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Now that the festivities surrounding the Dolphin 5.0 (and more importantly the feature freeze) are complete, changes have begun to roll into Dolphin once again. While none of the heavy hitters have gotten in just yet, June and July had more than their fair share of merges, regressions, and reverts that make up the typical Dolphin workflow.

It's good to be back!

Notable Changes¶

5.0-34 - Null Video Backend by degasus Continuer de lire

The long awaited Dolphin 5.0 release is finally here! After nearly a year of bug-hunting and handling the release process, everything has come together for our biggest release yet! The three previous releases followed a very distinct pattern: sacrifice performance, hacks, and features in exchange for higher accuracy. As such, Dolphin 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0 progressively grew slower. But thanks to the cleanups put forward throughout those releases, Dolphin 5.0 is the fastest Dolphin has …

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With Dolphin 5.0 almost here, we have one last announcement to make. In order to improve user experience in Dolphin, we're going to add a way for users to automatically contribute anonymized information about how Dolphin is running.

One of the chief inefficiencies in Dolphin development is that the team really doesn't get much feedback on how Dolphin is performing in the real world. Our dedicated testers can only do so much with limited hardware, game libraries, and time. On top of that, while fifoci is …

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This will likely be the last Progress Report before Dolphin 5.0 is released for one simple reason: we're running out of fixes and notable changes! From here on out, unless some huge bugs are discovered, all we're left with is a few minor regressions and prepwork for the release.

For those wondering why so much care is being taken into Dolphin 5.0's release, look back at Dolphin 4.0's release. It …

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