The development cycle for Dolphin is a fairly weird and largely inconsistent process to those peering in from the outside. There are gigantic leaps with huge merges such as the tev_fixes_new merge we recently reported on, but those tend to be the exception. While it is great to have big articles on huge changes, those smaller changes are just as important for the emulator, often adding features and improving the user experience. The Dolphin Progress Report is a monthly update highlighting some of the improvements that keep the …
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The GameCube GPU is a complex, tight-knit piece of hardware with impressive features for its time. It is so powerful and so flexible, it was used unmodified within the Wii architecture. For a comparison, just imagine a SNES running with an NES's graphics system. This is completely unheard of, before or since. The GameCube is a remarkable achievement of hardware engineering! With its impressive capabilities, emulating the GameCube's GPU has been one of the most challenging tasks Dolphin has ever faced.
As well as …
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Update: There is an issue with the Nvidia drivers that kept buffer storage from being utilized properly on Windows: they do not report the driver version. Since the Linux version of the driver reports its version correctly, the Dolphin devs assumed that the nvidia drivers would report it and used a version check to make sure ARB_buffer_storage was only utilized on drivers that actually support it. Because of this issue, even the latest drivers that support the function failed the version check and Dolphin didn't use buffer_storage on Windows. And thanks to an unrelated bug discovered later, the …
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The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is one of the most popular Gamecube games, if not Nintendo games, in existence. Its mixture of an open world, sharp dungeons, and an inventive art style turned heads more than ten years ago when it was released. Dolphin has had its share of problems with Wind Waker, but none could be so frustrating as its mishandling of the heat distortion.
The Issues
This issue actually crops up in two ways throughout Wind Waker. The more common way is that all of the flame …
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