On the one year anniversary of the Dolphin Progress Report, we have a fairly slow month in terms of emulation development. While there are certainly some big things on the horizon, unfortunately development managed to hit one of the gaps where there were mostly some fix-ups and optimizations this month with only a few changes that users will notice.
With that, let's take a look at this month's notable changes.
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On Thursday, April 23rd, we lost part of our family. Rachel Bryk tragically died at just 23 years old.
It's hard to believe that just two years ago, Rachel was reluctant to submit changes to the emulator at all due to being relatively inexperienced. But over the course of two years, she spent a considerable amount of time working on what she loved, becoming the tenth most active developer over the time period.
She often would do a lot …
Console add-ons and linking emulation are almost always difficult tasks. Worse yet, availability, software support, cost, and even popularity can limit the ability to get these hardware add-ons documented and emulated. While their are numerous examples spanning tons of consoles and their respective emulators, this month, we're talking about GameCube to Game Boy Advance Connectivity.
Timings and synchronization are a given on real hardware; games know how it's going to work and many expect it to always work perfectly. When it doesn't? Certain games break. Now imagine a …
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Software licensing has been a way to control not only the quality of products for game consoles, but also limit what developers could do. From the Nintendo Entertainment System onward, Nintendo has used a variety of lockout chips and DRM in order to make sure all of the products on their consoles had the Nintendo Seal of Approval. Their efforts kept quality much higher than in the previous era of gaming, but did not completely stomp out all unlicensed products and games. For the GameCube, Wii, and many other …
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One of the topics of talk that have been hitting up message boards and social media is that of when the next official Dolphin release is coming up. So much has happened in the past year that it's kind of crazy. Huge speedups that hit the core of the emulator, crazy accuracy improvements, hundreds of games with higher compatibility ratings and much more. Most people by default recommend the latest development builds over Dolphin 4.0.2.
But a release build is about more than the latest and greatest features. …
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Playing a game in Dolphin instead of the GameCube or Wii can make a huge difference in visual quality. With HD output, Dolphin can bring the best out of many stunning titles. But beyond that, an assortment of crazy enhancements, including 3D output, free camera, widescreen hacks, a higher clocked emulated CPU and much more, can absolutely transform titles into new experiences even for veterans after many playthroughs.
Super Mario Sunshine is a beautiful GameCube platformer released in 2002. While its sequels on the Wii, Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 run at a fluid 60 …
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Let's kick off the new year with a bang! January will finally let Dolphin answer the question that gets asked every progress report: "Does Rogue Squadron work yet?"
Thanks to a ton of work from the staff, tons of testing from the forum users, hardware tests, newcomers and veteran's alike, Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader and Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike are …
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There is a whole chunk of the Dolphin project that most users don't know about and have no interactions with. Most of the blog's articles focus on user visible features: improvements in the emulator core, or accuracy changes that allow non playable games to finally work properly. We seldom talk about how these changes come to life.
This piece will relay the effort of a few people within the Dolphin team who have been working in the shadows for the past 30 months to provide tools and infrastructure …
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The Dolphin Progress Report is not only about featuring high impact changes, but also smaller changes that do interesting things, changes with interesting stories behind them and more. This month has a ton of everything to offer. Dolphin is graced with a new graphical enhancement that will have games popping right out of the screen, a new way to accurately use native controllers, more MMU optimizations, graphics fixes, and even a few other surprises sprinkled in. Some of these changes made us regret running the Best Of blog …
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When working on an emulator, a feature never really feels finished. Last month, crudelios triumphed with his new software bounding box implementation. It was easily the most accurate implementation of the feature to date. A few months before that, magumagu created more accurate disc timings to make games load more accurately. RachelBryk has been steadily adding features for TASing for years. Perhaps a longer term, more general project is Sonicadvance1's continued work on Dolphin's ARM port which is always receiving updates.
All of those …
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