Archives 2021

Dolphin Progress Report: September and October 2021

It's the beginning of the month and time for another Dolphin Progress Report! ...That line doesn't exactly work when it's midway through the month, huh? This Progress Report ended up being a very technically challenging report to write with several huge rabbit holes that go through the history of Dolphin and the games themselves. The first rabbit hole showcases TMEM, the GameCube and Wii's texture cache. Dolphin's approach to emulating this bit of the hardware has been to effectively ignore it exists. Trying to even begin to rectify the problems with this approach and explain the reasoning behind why it sort of wasn't emulated go very, very deep. This Progress Report also contains collaboration with the PCSX2 development team as they helped us understand some of the behaviors of Floating Point Math on the PlayStation 2. The fact that the PlayStation 2's floating point behaviors mattered to us for this Progress Report should tell you the kinds of things we were up against when writing up the changes.

If that wasn't enough, Dolphin also welcomed support for a wealth of mods through support for Riivolution. An easy to use GUI for launching Riivolution mods was added both to desktop Dolphin builds and Android. Speaking of Android, users may have noticed we pushed out an early beta last month. This beta was mostly to showcase and let users on the Play Store try out the newly finished Cheat GUI! We'll finally showcase that after a lengthy delay between when that extra beta was pushed and this Progress Report. While it's not related to Dolphin directly, Apple released the new M1 Max and we got our hands on one to see how it stacks up against the M1 with some rather interesting performance numbers at the end of the report.

With that out of the way, there's no point in delaying things any further. Please enjoy these rather lengthy Notable Changes!

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Dolphin Progress Report: August 2021

Many gaming communities over the years have reached out to thank emulator developers for their efforts. 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. 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. 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.

In this Progress Report, the gaming communities were the direct catalyst to many of the changes. 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. All of these contributions, even if it's not code, are appreciated and help make Dolphin what it is today.

So, without further delay, let's get started with the August Progress Report! Enjoy.

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Dolphin Progress Report: June and July 2021

Emulation is often seen as this suspect gray area of gaming that is tolerated but always on the edge. There's a lot of negativity and questions around the merit and purpose of emulation. 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.

As 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. It was heartwarming to see long-time users able to play Four Swords Adventures with their kids or friends across the world. The gratitude we received from users finally able to try previously hard-to-access features in their favorite games was so appreciated. We love these games and consoles the same as you, and we want to make sure that they live on.

Sometimes with all the negativity in emulation, it's refreshing to have something that makes both the developers and the users happy. And while we'd love to revel in past accomplishments, there's still so much more work to be done. We graciously thank everyone for their kind words over the past few months, and hope you continue to enjoy using Dolphin Emulator. With that said, it is about time that we get started with the June and July Progress Report.

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mGBA Integration: Introducing the Integrated GBA

Your eyes are not deceiving you. As of 5.0-14690, Dolphin now has mGBA directly built into it as a new way to handle Game Boy Advance connectivity with GameCube titles. For those who don't know, mGBA is the most renowned and accurate GBA emulator of this era and has been rapidly improving since its inception. Recently, we wrote about mGBA adding support for our TCP GBA protocol, but this is something completely new. With integration and synchronization work done by bonta, connecting your favorite GameCube titles with a Game Boy Advance for multiplayer and other bonus features is now greatly simplified. Dubbed the Integrated GBA, a stripped-down version of mGBA will boot up alongside Dolphin when set to one or more controller ports. These mGBA instances are clock-synced to GameCube emulation for impeccable connection stability. By bringing these two emulators together in one package, GBA connectivity features now work with popular features like savestates, input recordings, and netplay! All of this comes with the added bonus of improved performance and compatibility. If you don't believe us, check it out yourself!

Introducing the Integrated GBA!

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Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

After finishing up the macOS M1 article the blog staff took a little break. Then they saw the date.

Oh shi-

Upon looking at the actual changelog, however, something became readily apparent: this wasn't going to be just a Progress Report; this was going to be a MEGA Progress Report. The long rumored time era of developers merging everything at once had finally come to pass. We have graphical fixes for Super Mario Galaxy and Luigi's Mansion, crash fixes for Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III, Xenoblade Chronicles, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (AArch64), and new features that make playing games more pleasant! And about AArch64, there are a litany of optimizations and fixes that will change things across most of the library.

And we could go on: Bounding Box, Interpreter, GBA to GCN connectivity, GPU Syncing, Mouse Locking, and still more! There's even a lengthy dev diary at the end for good measure explaining how the great mystery of Pokemon Box's was finally solved. The only way to do it justice is to do it right. So buckle up and get ready for the April and May MEGA Progress Report.

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Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1

From the announcement made on November 10th, 2020, users have had high hopes for the new Apple M1 devices. With its powerful Apple Silicon processor smashing benchmarks all over the place, users and developers were both asking if a native Dolphin build would be possible. Now we have the answer.

Apple's M1 hardware is incredibly powerful and excels at running Dolphin. This announcement has been in the works for some time, eagle eyed users may have noticed that earlier this month macOS builds were now being designated as "Intel". That's because …

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mGBA and Dolphin Connectivity

Connecting multiple emulators together is a complicated and difficult task. This task becomes even more difficult when you consider connecting two different emulators together. You have to understand two different consoles, how these systems communicate with each other, adapt to latency restrictions, and have expertise across two different projects. In the case of GameCube to Game Boy Advance connectivity, we are incredibly lucky to have had talented developers from both GBA and GameCube circles create our current protocol for supporting "GBA" controllers. Dolphin's GBA connectivity has stagnated for some time with …

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Dolphin Progress Report: February and March 2021

Sometimes the introductions to the Progress Reports are the hardest part to write. The Dolphin Blog has been running for many years, and we've gone through hundreds of changes that affect thousands of titles. We've gone into detail on all kinds of games, from top sellers on the consoles to obscure titles that most of us wouldn't have known existed if not for some random bug report. Despite all of these exciting changes, despite seemingly seeing it all over the years, we still see things that amaze us. The GameCube and Wii library still have a few tricks up their sleeves and developers continue to come up with crazy new optimizations and features that keep pushing Dolphin forward.

It's hard to express how happy we are to not only be writing these articles, but still have interesting things to write about. In fact, we were working on a feature article spotlighting some new features, but things were unfortunately delayed. As such, this month's Progress Report is a little hurried. What exactly got delayed? Well, we'll have more on that later this month. For now... please enjoy this slightly belated Dolphin Progress Report!

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Dolphin Progress Report: December 2020 and January 2021

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. We on the blog team are familiar with the emulator, however there are a lot of technical details that are simply beyond our expertise. 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.

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. As a blog about emulation, getting these details correct about the various changes and how the emulator works is one of our highest priorities. So, with that out of the way, we hope you enjoy this belated Dolphin Progress Report!

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