The Dolphin Emulator is used to play nintendo wii and gamecube games the download link is on the bottom of the page
Introduction to dolphin emulator
Origins (2003–2007)
Dolphin was first released in 2003 as an experimental Nintendo GameCube emulator that could boot up and run commercial games. However, it had terrible performance and many games crashed on start up or barely ran at all; average speed was from 2 to 20 FPS and the audio was not yet emulated.
Dolphin was officially discontinued in 2004, with the developers releasing version 1.01 as the final build of the emulator. However, the developers decided to revive the project in 2005 and then in 2007, version 1.03 was released with minor improvements and a little sound support.
Open Source and Wii Emulation (2008–present)Dolphin became an open-source project on July 13, 2008 when the developers released the source code publicly on an SVN repository on Google Codeunder the GPLv2. At this point, the emulator even had basic Wii emulation implemented. Since its open sourcing, various developers were attracted and development on the emulator has continued since, with regular releases of SVN builds, unlike before, when it was closed-source.[2] These preview builds and unofficial SVN builds were released with their revision number (e.g., RXXXX) rather than version numbers (e.g., 1.03). As with previous builds, differences between consecutive builds are typically minor.[3]
Dolphin's Wii emulation reached a milestone in February 2009 when it made a breakthrough, managing to successfully boot and run the official Wii System Menu v1.0.[4] By now, Dolphin can boot all versions of the Wii OS.[citation needed] There is, however, no full support for Wii channels, except for the disc channel.
By April 2009, most commercial games, Gamecube and Wii alike, could be fully played albeit with a few minor problems and errors, with a large number of games running with virtually no defect. Improvements to the emulator had allowed users to play select games at full speed for the first time, audio had dramatically improved, and the graphics capabilities were fairly consistent except for a few minor problems.[5]
By late October 2009, numerous new useful features were incorporated into the emulator such as automatic frame-skipping, which increased the performance of the emulator as well as increased stability of the emulator overall. Also improved was the NetPlay feature of the emulator, which allowed players to play multiplayer Gamecube and Wii games online with friends, as long as the game doesn't require a WiiMote. The GUI was reworked to make it more user-friendly. The DirectX plug-in also received huge developments, and is now often faster than the OpenGL plug-in.[6]
By the end of November 2010, the developers fixed most of the sound issues (such as crackling), added compatibility with even more games, and increased the overall emulation speed and accuracy.[7]
By July 2011, version 3.0 was released and the emulator reached its final stages. There've been roughly 2500 commits between 2.0 and this release. Strange UI behavior, crashes, graphical glitches and other problems were fixed. For example, many games which didn't boot at all in Dolphin now work. The configuration dialogs were restructured in a more sensible manner to ease emulator usage for new users. The video config dialog received a complete overhaul and features a description panel for each option now. Various features were added including support for the Wiimote speaker, EFB format change emulation, GFX debugger, audio dumping, and many others. Thanks to numerous fixes to the LLE emulator engine, audio emulation in Dolphin is close to perfect now (provided that one has the necessary DSP dumps). The developers also added a D3D11 video backend and an XAudio2 audio backend. The 2.0 release already had seen the introduction of plugin rewrites; the new plugins have been brought to feature parity and were replaced so well, that it was decided to merge all plugins into the Core. Further improvements are better suited as additions in the current infrastructure since this architecture allows for a much better integration with the other parts of Dolphin. A set of eight translations (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Greek, Hungarian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish) is also included with Dolphin 3.0. There have been some performance optimizations (especially in the texture decoder), but generally speaking performance decreased in favor of more accurate hardware emulation. The Windows build uses MSVC 2010 now, Linux users should use the new CMake build system. OSX people still compile Dolphin via SConsFeaturesThe development builds of Dolphin may have new enhancements, fixes, and experimental features which will eventually be in an official release. Dolphin's team is asking the community for suggestions for new and more useful features they want in Dolphin.[8] Current features include:
Features
See the download page for downloading the emulator
Introduction to dolphin emulator
Origins (2003–2007)
Dolphin was first released in 2003 as an experimental Nintendo GameCube emulator that could boot up and run commercial games. However, it had terrible performance and many games crashed on start up or barely ran at all; average speed was from 2 to 20 FPS and the audio was not yet emulated.
Dolphin was officially discontinued in 2004, with the developers releasing version 1.01 as the final build of the emulator. However, the developers decided to revive the project in 2005 and then in 2007, version 1.03 was released with minor improvements and a little sound support.
Open Source and Wii Emulation (2008–present)Dolphin became an open-source project on July 13, 2008 when the developers released the source code publicly on an SVN repository on Google Codeunder the GPLv2. At this point, the emulator even had basic Wii emulation implemented. Since its open sourcing, various developers were attracted and development on the emulator has continued since, with regular releases of SVN builds, unlike before, when it was closed-source.[2] These preview builds and unofficial SVN builds were released with their revision number (e.g., RXXXX) rather than version numbers (e.g., 1.03). As with previous builds, differences between consecutive builds are typically minor.[3]
Dolphin's Wii emulation reached a milestone in February 2009 when it made a breakthrough, managing to successfully boot and run the official Wii System Menu v1.0.[4] By now, Dolphin can boot all versions of the Wii OS.[citation needed] There is, however, no full support for Wii channels, except for the disc channel.
By April 2009, most commercial games, Gamecube and Wii alike, could be fully played albeit with a few minor problems and errors, with a large number of games running with virtually no defect. Improvements to the emulator had allowed users to play select games at full speed for the first time, audio had dramatically improved, and the graphics capabilities were fairly consistent except for a few minor problems.[5]
By late October 2009, numerous new useful features were incorporated into the emulator such as automatic frame-skipping, which increased the performance of the emulator as well as increased stability of the emulator overall. Also improved was the NetPlay feature of the emulator, which allowed players to play multiplayer Gamecube and Wii games online with friends, as long as the game doesn't require a WiiMote. The GUI was reworked to make it more user-friendly. The DirectX plug-in also received huge developments, and is now often faster than the OpenGL plug-in.[6]
By the end of November 2010, the developers fixed most of the sound issues (such as crackling), added compatibility with even more games, and increased the overall emulation speed and accuracy.[7]
By July 2011, version 3.0 was released and the emulator reached its final stages. There've been roughly 2500 commits between 2.0 and this release. Strange UI behavior, crashes, graphical glitches and other problems were fixed. For example, many games which didn't boot at all in Dolphin now work. The configuration dialogs were restructured in a more sensible manner to ease emulator usage for new users. The video config dialog received a complete overhaul and features a description panel for each option now. Various features were added including support for the Wiimote speaker, EFB format change emulation, GFX debugger, audio dumping, and many others. Thanks to numerous fixes to the LLE emulator engine, audio emulation in Dolphin is close to perfect now (provided that one has the necessary DSP dumps). The developers also added a D3D11 video backend and an XAudio2 audio backend. The 2.0 release already had seen the introduction of plugin rewrites; the new plugins have been brought to feature parity and were replaced so well, that it was decided to merge all plugins into the Core. Further improvements are better suited as additions in the current infrastructure since this architecture allows for a much better integration with the other parts of Dolphin. A set of eight translations (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Greek, Hungarian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish) is also included with Dolphin 3.0. There have been some performance optimizations (especially in the texture decoder), but generally speaking performance decreased in favor of more accurate hardware emulation. The Windows build uses MSVC 2010 now, Linux users should use the new CMake build system. OSX people still compile Dolphin via SConsFeaturesThe development builds of Dolphin may have new enhancements, fixes, and experimental features which will eventually be in an official release. Dolphin's team is asking the community for suggestions for new and more useful features they want in Dolphin.[8] Current features include:
Features
- Action Replay support
- Xbox 360 Controller support, with rumble
- (jailbroken) iPhone support, with motion control over Wi-Fi (through iController)
- Experimental NetPlay
- Anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering
- Save states
- Memory Card Manager
- Real and emulated multiple Wii Remote support
- Wii Remote expansions support
- DSP HLE and LLE
- WAD (DLC games) support
- Support for Homebrew and XFB emulation
- Hi-Res Support, Texture Dumper, Free Look[2]
- Frameskipping[9]
- Tool-assisted speedrun support[10]
- Post-processing pixel shaders
- OpenCL hardware accelerated texture processing
See the download page for downloading the emulator