Kept you waiting, huh? This summer we had our longest break since we started writing these Progress Reports. Some other obligations came up and a bit of a lull in development gave us the opportunity to postpone things for an extra month. As it turned out, pushing things back might have been a bad idea, as the floodgates opened and now there's a gigantic backlog spanning three months to get through! To put things into perspective, since our last Progress Report, the last Nintendo Wii games were released, Dolphin Android had …
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We've got a lot to get through the past two months. Headlining it all is that we're happy to announce support for a new compressed disc format developed specifically for Dolphin: RVZ. This lossless format allows for near top of the line game compression without compromising the integrity of ISOs, while also maintaining performance and stability. But what good is compression if emulation isn't up to snuff? The past two months have been chock-full of emulation and usability fixes for both Android and Desktop Dolphin! There's a little bit of everything, …
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It feels like it's been some time since we've had actually had a monthly Progress Report. This is because there haven't been as many major changes landing, making it harder to fill out a substantial article. That isn't to say that things have slowed down, these smaller changes increase the quality of life for users and add up, especially when jumping from older builds to the latest. However, these changes are a lot harder to show and feature in a Progress Report compared to things that actually affect the core emulation …
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We understand that the past few months have been trying for many of us across the world. Something like this can make what you do feel so very small in the grand scheme of things. Everyone has their ways of coping with isolation, using the internet, games, emulation, and much more as forms of entertainment to keep spirits up. To those of you relying on Dolphin Emulator, we hope that Dolphin Emulator makes your day a little brighter in these trying times.
In this Progress Report, you'll find that we've got …
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The Progress Report has come and with it some major changes and decisions. However, before we get into new things, we need to go over an ongoing change as we've seen some users struggling. In the last progress report, we updated our project solutions to Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2019. We thought there would be no issues at the time, after all, Microsoft says that VS2019 runtimes are forward and back compatible with VS2015 and VS2017, however, it turns out that is not always the case, and we definitely encountered …
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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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