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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One month after the 4.0.1 release we're releasing the maintenance release 4.0.2. It turned out that some critical regressions had slipped into the 4.0 release due to the major changes linked to the wii-network branch and the global user directory changes.
In particular, one of the fixed issues was related to incorrect usage of wxWidgets and caused various problems with general Dolphin usage on Windows systems with Unicode characters in their user name (e.g. "François" or "あいうえお").
Some rather technical issues caused multiple games to stop booting or to freeze randomly. We've had multiple issue reports …
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After a somewhat large delay we're releasing a 4.0.1 release with single core crashes fixed and some other bugfixes.
Changes:
- Fixed single core mode crashes in 64 bit Windows builds
- Fixed missing music in Super Monkey Ball 2
- Added missing DirectX runtime installer files
- Fixed some graphics issues for Metroid: Other M, Skies of Arcadia and Call of Duty: Black Ops
- Fixed various other minor issues
At the time of writing we only have compiled Windows builds. OS X and Linux users will have to compile the source themselves (stable branch, 4.0.1 tag) or stay with their current …
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As many people have noticed, revision 4.0-155 removed D3D9 as a video backend, leaving D3D11 and OpenGL as the sole hardware backends in Dolphin. For the longest time, D3D9 was considered Dolphin’s fastest backend and was a favorite of Windows users. But then, why would it be removed?
While it was enjoyed by users, it was a source of endless frustration for the developers. D3D9 is inherently flawed, and working around its problems wasted time and slowed development. With D3D9 removed, the developers can focus their effort on making the emulator better instead of pandering to the ever …
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Video by Justin Chadwick with editing by MayImilae and neobrain.
You can also download the video.
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In light of the recent announcements by NVIDIA and AMD in support of Linux for their graphics drivers, we would like to share with the world some of the experience we had developing our open source project, Dolphin, a GameCube and Wii emulator for Windows, Linux, Mac and recently Android.
At the beginning of this year, after the successful release of Dolphin 3.5, Markus Wick (degasus) and Ryan Houdek (Sonicadvance1) started working on a rewrite of Dolphin's OpenGL backend in order to be compliant to the OpenGL ES 3.0 standard. While this rewrite was needed for other reasons (it provides …
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Update: a few hours after release, a bug causing crashes with Windows x64 and Single Core mode was found by testers. Single Core mode is not used for regular gameplay but is usually required for TAS and NetPlay. While it only affects a few specific use cases of the emulator, we still consider this a critical issue and we will release a Dolphin 4.0.1 version fixing this bug. Sorry for the inconvenience.
On behalf of the Dolphin Emulator development team, I am pleased to announce the release of Dolphin 4.0, the newest major release …
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