In contrast to that narrative, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to some of the features added the last few months, including heartfelt reactions from users, make all of the challenges and struggles so much easier.Īs we drift further from the heyday of the GameCube and Wii, we've been seeing a greater impact not only on the past generations of gamers, but the current one. There's a lot of negativity and questions around the merit and purpose of emulation. So, without further delay, let's get started with the August Progress Report! Enjoy.Įmulation is often seen as this suspect gray area of gaming that is tolerated but always on the edge. All of these contributions, even if it's not code, are appreciated and help make Dolphin what it is today. They went on difficult debugging adventures, caught small issues that would be invisible to anyone who wasn't extremely familiar with the game, and even came up with patches to make games friendlier to emulator enhancements. In this Progress Report, the gaming communities were the direct catalyst to many of the changes. However, it's important to state that our relationship with gaming communities is mutual, and without the help of players and fans, there's no way we could handle maintaining a library of thousands of games. Sometimes it's simply more convenient to use an emulator that runs on your desktop, tablet, or phone rather than to dig out and hook up the original console every time you want to play one of your favorite games. Emulators are an important part of many classic game communities and give players access to features like netplay multiplayer, modding, and savestates, while also opening up the doors to enhancements not possible on console. As a blog about emulation, getting these details correct about the various changes and how the emulator works is one of our highest priorities.Many gaming communities over the years have reached out to thank emulator developers for their efforts. With Progress Reports coming at a mostly bimonthly schedule at this point, this means that sometimes authors have moved onto different things or aren't available to talk. Going from things like the AArch64 JIT to GUI changes to IOS updates to game patches that go into low-level hardware behavior is enough to make anyone's head spin! More often than not, we rely on core developers and the authors of a specific change to help us understand what a pull request does so that we can express its purpose accurately here on the blog. We on the blog team are familiar with the emulator, however there are a lot of technical details that are simply beyond our expertise. Welcome to the Dolphin Progress Report for December 2020 and January 2021! Things ended up running a little behind for this report due to some technical details that we needed to hammer out for a few of these entries. Mario Kart GP and GP2, F-Zero AX, along with many other titles headline the Triforce's release library. An arcade system board developed in a joint partnership between the three powerhouses Namco, Sega, and Nintendo, the Triforce used the GameCube hardware as the heart of many arcade games. However, many people don't know that there is yet another console based on the GameCube, one which Dolphin has emulated - the Triforce. All of our readers are probably familiar with this. 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.
It started solely as a GameCube emulator, focused only on the one console.
It was first developed as closed source in 2003, and as open source since 2008.ĭolphin allows PC gamers to enjoy games for these two consoles in full HD (1080p) with several enhancements: compatibility with all PC controllers, turbo speed, networked multiplayer, and even more! It is highly compatible with the majority of titles for both platforms. Dolphin is an emulator for two recent Nintendo video game consoles: the GameCube and the Wii.