Archives 2013

Dolphin 4.0.2 Release Announcement

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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Dolphin 4.0.1 Release Announcement

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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D3D9: Why It's Not a Part of Dolphin's Future

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 growing demands of a flawed backend. This is why the D3D9 backend was removed.

D3D9: Inherently Flawed

Dolphin's D3D9 backend was mostly known for its speed. On AMD and Integrated Graphics cards, it is by far the fastest backend. But Direct3D9 is very old; it was released in 2002! Its age means that many modern features are simply not available for it, features that Dolphin needs for GameCube and Wii emulation. And that's where its speed came from. The D3D9 backend was as fast as it was because it simply didn't emulate certain effects. All kinds of modern functions are simply not possible in D3D9.

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Ten Years of Dolphin

Video by Justin Chadwick with editing by MayImilae and neobrain.

You can also download the video in high resolution and 60 FPS.

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Dolphin Emulator and OpenGL drivers - Hall of Fame/Shame

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 the foundations for very cool optimizations), compatibility with mobile devices and the future Android port of the emulator (now in beta) was one of the key goals. This rewrite was merged into the main Dolphin codebase a few months back and started to be used by tens of thousands of Dolphin users, either on OS X and Linux where it is the only viable graphics backend, or on Windows where it is available alongside our D3D11 graphics backend.

Sadly, using recent, advanced OpenGL features also meant we got to discover how bad some graphics drivers actually are at doing their job. It turns out very few applications use some parts of the OpenGL standard we need to rely on to accurately emulate a GameCube GPU. More than that, on Android, OpenGL ES 3.0 support is extremely recent and only a couple applications on the Play Store use ES 3.0 features.

Here is basically our hall of shame of graphics drivers, sorted by the number of issues we found, how hard it is to report issues to the company and how many bugs were actually fixed.

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Dolphin 4.0 Release Announcement

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 of the most compatible and most performant GameCube and Wii emulator for PC. Dolphin 4.0 is a special release for all of us, since it also marks the 10 years anniversary of the project, first unveiled by Henrik Rydgård (ector) and F|RES in September 2003.

Dolphin 4.0 can be downloaded for Windows (x86 or x64), Mac OS X (>= 10.7) or Ubuntu 13.04 from our official website: dolphin-emu.org.

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