2024 has been a horrible year for emulation, but at least we still have Dolphin, the Nintendo GameCube and Wii emulator. The emulator is still in constant development, and the latest progress report outlining all the recent changes and bug fixes.
Like previous progress reports for Dolphin, many of the updates are background changes meant to enhance compatibility of specific games. While you might notice the effects of these updates on those specific games, the experience will be unchanged for others. It’s all part of the goal to make Dolphin the perfect GameCube and Wii emulator.
Through meticulous work on Dolphin’s sound engine, games like “I SPY: Spooky Mansion” and “Need for Speed: Nitro” now boast more accurate sound reproduction, bringing players closer to the original console experience. In addition to this, a persistent issue with the “Bounding Box” graphics setting, which previously caused graphical glitches in games like “Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door,” has finally been squashed. And if you’re a Linux user, you’ll be very glad to hear that an annoying freezing issue, occurring when resizing the game window with Nvidia GPUs and the Vulkan backend, is also a thing of the past.
Dolphin has also made some tweaks to how it actually emulates consoles. By fine-tuning the synchronization between the emulated CPU and GPU, the developers have managed to reduce the occurrence of “unknown opcode” errors that plagued a number of games. This translates to smoother gameplay in titles like “Metroid Prime” and “Resident Evil Zero,” among many others. They also tackled some notorious game-specific issues. “LIT (School of Darkness)” had some graphical problems that required a deep dive into the Wii’s rendering quirks to resolve. Meanwhile, the “unknown upcode” fixes actually caused problems for “Eternal Darkness,” causing the game to hang on boot. This required careful analysis and a game-specific patch to make sure it ran well following that otherwise great patch.
There are a ton of changes, and if you’re interested to look through all of them in a detailed manner, you should certainly look at the full progress report. You can download Dolphin from the project’s official website.
Source: Dolphin
