One of the most enjoyable parts about being a part of emulation is seeing the classic gaming community use the tools we provide to find hidden bits of joy that would be impossible to reach otherwise. Freelook has found secret after secret hidden away just off-screen, and there's even a youtube series that focuses entirely on them! Savestates basically made speedrunning and TASing possible, allowing for quick testing of routes and sequence breaks to push games to their limits. But communities can go far beyond that, with tools now allowing …
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We apologize for the late Progress Report, but at this point it's partially by design. There's been an ongoing issue with Dolphin's updater being recognized as a trojan by Window's Defender Cloud AI scanning. The good news is that Microsoft has acknowledged that Dolphin's updater isn't a trojan, however for now they have to manually whitelist our executables. In order to ensure that the monthly builds distributed through our update track aren't deleted by Window's antivirus, we've been verifying that the build we've chosen is whitelisted. If you're interested in learning …
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Earlier this month, an interesting development within the Wii reverse engineering scene was announced as Fullmetal5 revealed that they had hacked the Wii Mini via a Bluetooth exploit. This bookends a flurry of a Wii Mini hacking, including rigorous hardware modding by DeadlyFoez. You may be wondering, "Wait, wasn't the Wii hacked over a decade ago?". That's true, but the Wii Mini stubbornly remained unhacked all the way into 2019.
This resiliency came from the Wii Mini's cut down …
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As seems to be happening annually, due to a short summer lull, we decided to combine the June and July Progress Reports. As you may have noticed, we're a few days into August at this point and things ended up running a bit late. That's actually a consequence of how we do these Progress Reports - we sometimes will go through big changes, test them, and get developer input on how they work in order to better explain them. In late July, a mixture of late changes, unexpected behaviors, and an …
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While we usually wait for a Progress Report to write about bug fixes and other features, a regression was causing so many issues that we've decided to roll out an early monthly build and detail what happened and why right now. If you're a heavy user of Dolphin's passthrough features, this is a rather important update.
libusb Thread Safety Problems
libusb is an incredibly powerful library that facilitates direct communication to USB devices without needing to develop a kernel level driver. It also has the benefit …
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The past few months have been quite hectic with a slew of gigantic changes requiring lengthy articles alongside them. These big features all hitting together seems to have brought up a talking point in the community would be irresponsible to ignore. Everyone wants to know when Dolphin 6.0 is coming. After all, Dolphin 5.0 launched nearly three years ago and lacks features like Ubershaders, Bluetooth Passthrough, Hybrid XFB, Emulated Motion Plus... the list goes on. Unfortunately, we have to announce that we aren't especially close to a …
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The last few months have been absolutely hectic, with several long-awaited features hitting the emulator all at once. In order to keep users up to date with these major changes, the blog staff has been busy with feature article after feature article. It has been exciting, but also pretty exhausting! With us burning the candle at both ends to keep up with development, the Progress Reports have fallen a bit behind.
So here were are, bleary eyed and with three …
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Your eyes are not deceiving you, MotionPlus emulation is finally here. In a dramatic return to the project after a long hiatus, Billiard returned to the project with the goal of cleaning up emulated Wii Remotes and implementing emulated MotionPlus correctly once and for all. These efforts have greatly improved Dolphin's ability to create motions that games can recognize without the need for real Wii Remotes. The key behind these improvements was thinking about motions differently, by treating an emulated Wii Remote as a virtual object acting out these motions, …
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Over the past few years, Dolphin Netplay has seen a ton of work that we've kept track of in the blog. The main goal of much of this work was to make it so that users could just play games together without having to worry about synchronization. Thanks to some of these recent efforts, it's fully possible to go on netplay and enjoy a game with others without having to do any specialized setup. While things aren't bulletproof, Dolphin does its best to synchronize saves, cheats, settings, and more to make …
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It's not common for a rewrite to be something that warrants an article, but, this is one of the exceptions. Over the past few years, parts of Dolphin's video core have seen renovations to make way for new features, but a fundamental problem remained. Dolphin's video backends suffered from both having too many unique features while also duplicating tons of code from the other backends, making it difficult to add new features and maintain old ones.
Those that have followed Dolphin from the very beginning may remember that its video backends …
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