Author archives: JMC47

Dolphin Progress Report: January 2016


With Dolphin in the thick of the 5.0 feature freeze, things were expected to slowdown a bit. Some of us were worried there wouldn't even be enough content for a Progress Report! Alas, while the gears have shifted toward different things to prepare for a release, there is no shortage of interesting changes. As an added bonus a feature implemented three years ago was rediscovered! That kind of thing just …

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Plugged In - Wii USB Support


We at the blog love to demonstrate new, cutting edge features and documenting them for current and future users of the emulator. Wii USB device emulation is one of those things that lacks data and testing in Dolphin. It requires real hardware just to try it out and only a select few people are crazy enough to work on anything involving the Wii IOS HLE. The first time E-ticket Service Launch support was added to Dolphin, it managed to break connecting Wiimotes; that's just how touchy that …

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Dolphin Progress Report: December 2015


Happy New Year! Now for the big news. On January 7th, 2016, we will be entering a full feature freeze in preparation for the Dolphin 5.0. A feature freeze is basically a period where we all devote ourselves to doing testing and fixing regressions to move us toward the Dolphin 5.0 release, and we've had one for every release we've done! During the feature freeze, no new "features" can be added …

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Hey, Listen! Your Wiimote can speak now!


One of the oldest complaints about Dolphin's Real Wiimote support is that Wiimote audio not only sounds extremely bad, but can outright lag the controls and even cause the Wiimotes to disconnect from your PC. To work around these problems, the developers did the only thing they knew to do; implement "Disable Wiimote Speaker Data." This ended up being one of the most important features for many users to be able to use Real Wiimotes in Dolphin, as dozens of games suffered constant disconnects due to audio …

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Dolphin Progress Report: November 2015


Black Friday is a day when many gamers splurge for deals on their favorite games and consoles. For Dolphin testing, this presents an opportunity for users and testers alike to get a lot of games for very, very cheap. So, in honor of that, here's a picture of a Black Friday haul. Thirty-three Wii games and a Drawesome tablet for fifty dollars isn't too shabby of a haul, plus other deals and markdowns grabbed throughout the week make for a monster pile of games to test!


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Rodea: The Sky Soldier Releases for Wii U, 3DS and... Wii?


It's now late in 2015, and the Wii U has comfortably supplanted the Wii as Nintendo's flagship console. While there have been a few Wii releases the past couple of years, most of them are just low-quality ports of titles that are much better on other platforms along with the typical shovelware. But Rodea: The Sky Soldier is very different story. It is a high quality third party release for the Wii. In 2015. This would be a neat, but not exactly newsworthy story, except there is no …

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Dolphin Progress Report: October 2015


A few months ago, we announced our intentions to work on and release Dolphin 5.0 with a new release method. By using a stable branch, we hoped to avoid doing a feature freeze so that devs could both work on new features and continue to stomp out regressions. Unfortunately... that didn't work. Users wanted the newest features to be in Dolphin 5.0, developers were confused on what features needed …

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Dolphin Progress Report: September 2015


After some minor delays, Dolphin's new issue tracker is up and running, with all of the old issues preserved and imported. It hasn't taken long for things to heat up on our new tracker despite trying to keep it on the down low while it was being tweaked. A mixture of delays with the issue tracker and new bugs in our stable branch cropping up has pushed back …

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Dolphin Progress Report: August 2015


If you count the number of notable changes throughout August, you may think it was a down month. Aside from a flurry of Dolphin ARM updates, there really wasn't much to choose from. A lot of the major projects remaining on the emulator are multi-month affairs, so contributors seemingly disappear from the progress reports for months only to return with a bang. Then there's Sonicadvance1, who keeps trucking on with Dolphin ARM on an almost daily basis. Despite the miniscule number of big additions, the big …

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The New Era of HLE Audio


In early 2013, Dolphin had began its first steps in a new focus on accurate emulation. The 3.5 release represented a shift in the emulator's focus, and as such, saw great improvements in terms of compatibility and accuracy over the previous release. But one area that stuck out like a sore thumb during this era was the quality of High Level Emulation (HLE) audio. Hundreds of games suffered from crashes associated to audio, and thousands had significant problems, with missing effects, incorrect volume, and random bursts of …

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