For those who don't know, mGBA is the most renowned and accurate GBA emulator of this era and has been rapidly improving since its inception. As of 5.0-14690, Dolphin now has mGBA directly built into it as a new way to handle Game Boy Advance connectivity with GameCube titles. With that said, it is about time that we get started with the June and July Progress Report. We graciously thank everyone for their kind words over the past few months, and hope you continue to enjoy using Dolphin Emulator. And while we'd love to revel in past accomplishments, there's still so much more work to be done. Sometimes with all the negativity in emulation, it's refreshing to have something that makes both the developers and the users happy. We love these games and consoles the same as you, and we want to make sure that they live on. The gratitude we received from users finally able to try previously hard-to-access features in their favorite games was so appreciated. It was heartwarming to see long-time users able to play Four Swords Adventures with their kids or friends across the world. In contrast to that narrative, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to some of the features added the last few months, including heartfelt reactions from users, make all of the challenges and struggles so much easier.Īs we drift further from the heyday of the GameCube and Wii, we've been seeing a greater impact not only on the past generations of gamers, but the current one.
There's a lot of negativity and questions around the merit and purpose of emulation. So, without further delay, let's get started with the August Progress Report! Enjoy.Įmulation is often seen as this suspect gray area of gaming that is tolerated but always on the edge. All of these contributions, even if it's not code, are appreciated and help make Dolphin what it is today. They went on difficult debugging adventures, caught small issues that would be invisible to anyone who wasn't extremely familiar with the game, and even came up with patches to make games friendlier to emulator enhancements. In this Progress Report, the gaming communities were the direct catalyst to many of the changes. However, it's important to state that our relationship with gaming communities is mutual, and without the help of players and fans, there's no way we could handle maintaining a library of thousands of games. Sometimes it's simply more convenient to use an emulator that runs on your desktop, tablet, or phone rather than to dig out and hook up the original console every time you want to play one of your favorite games. Emulators are an important part of many classic game communities and give players access to features like netplay multiplayer, modding, and savestates, while also opening up the doors to enhancements not possible on console. Many gaming communities over the years have reached out to thank emulator developers for their efforts. You can continue the discussion in the forum thread of this article.
Please enjoy these rather lengthy Notable Changes! With that out of the way, there's no point in delaying things any further. While it's not related to Dolphin directly, Apple released the new M1 Max and we got our hands on one to see how it stacks up against the M1 with some rather interesting performance numbers at the end of the report. This beta was mostly to showcase and let users on the Play Store try out the newly finished Cheat GUI! We'll finally showcase that after a lengthy delay between when that extra beta was pushed and this Progress Report. Speaking of Android, users may have noticed we pushed out an early beta last month.
#DOLPHIN EMULATOR PS2 DOWNLOAD MODS#
An easy to use GUI for launching Riivolution mods was added both to desktop Dolphin builds and Android. If that wasn't enough, Dolphin also welcomed support for a wealth of mods through support for Riivolution.
The fact that the PlayStation 2's floating point behaviors mattered to us for this Progress Report should tell you the kinds of things we were up against when writing up the changes. This Progress Report also contains collaboration with the PCSX2 development team as they helped us understand some of the behaviors of Floating Point Math on the PlayStation 2. Trying to even begin to rectify the problems with this approach and explain the reasoning behind why it sort of wasn't emulated go very, very deep. Dolphin's approach to emulating this bit of the hardware has been to effectively ignore it exists. The first rabbit hole showcases TMEM, the GameCube and Wii's texture cache. That line doesn't exactly work when it's midway through the month, huh? This Progress Report ended up being a very technically challenging report to write with several huge rabbit holes that go through the history of Dolphin and the games themselves.
It's the beginning of the month and time for another Dolphin Progress Report!.