Dolphin Progress Report: Release 2509
dolphin-emu.org
The Dolphin Blog is full of stories surrounding games, their development, and the challenges they present to emulate them. And in these stories, we sometimes have some recurring characters that we gain a better understanding of over time. Factor 5 and their Star Wars: Rogue Squadron games continue to amaze us time and time again as we find different ways that they push the hardware to its limits. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker uses many graphical tricks to create a timeless style, that surprise again in again with just how much care was put into every detail. And, of course the Metroid Prime series shows up often given its sensitivity to even subtle changes to emulation. However, as with every story, there have to be villains as well. One such villain is the The Disney Trio of Destruction™. For years, users have awaited the final showdown with these games. And guess what? They're finally playable right now. But are these games truly villains? Or were they just misunderstood? In this report, we dive into The Disney Trio of Destruction™ once and for all to determine their true nature. Not every returning character is a game. Sometimes we also have to deal with our own issues, such as Dual Core mode. It is constantly breaking games, disabled in many popular games by default, and the source of most crashes in Dolphin. But is Dual Core really a hack? Or is Dolphin simply doing something wrong. In this report, we'll dive into the history of Dual Core and make a change that was long overdue. On top of all of this, several longstanding features in Dolphin also saw some major upgrades, and we'll also get to those throughout the Dolphin Progress Report. With that, let us begin.

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  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    2·
    18 hours ago

    For those of you less interested in the nitty-gritty, the main points are:

    • Single Core emulation is now the default for non-mobile platforms (Dual Core had been for the longest time, since it used to be necessary to get games running at full speed, but it causes all kinds of instability and is not necessary on modern hardware)
    • Performance issues in the Disney Trio of Destruction have finally been solved with game patches
    • General Bluetooth Passthrough performance improvements + specific support for a chipset used in many modern Bluetooth adapters
    • Improvements to custom texture pack management and performance
    • Low-level DSP emulation regressions have been ironed out
    • Option added to reduce time drift caused by lag (apparently useful for online Mario Kart Wii as well as speedrun timing accuracy)

    I always love reading these updates. As the core emulation and additional features have become more and more refined, the scope of the additions has become less earthshaking, but it’s amazing to see the continued passion and dedication developers have for continuing to push the limits of accuracy and improve the experience for people using Dolphin across the spectrum, from mobile gamers all the way up to reverse engineers. By this point, I imagine there are contributors who weren’t even born when Dolphin was first released in 2003!