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Dolphin - Emulating Wii and Gamecube Games

Rufus

Member
It's not really complicated, just very comprehensive. If you can read and have a modicum of patience you can make it work. Again, it seems to cover pretty much anything, which is what makes it look a lot more intimidating than it is.
 

ThatObviousUser

ὁ αἴσχιστος παῖς εἶ
Jesus, that looks complicated as fuck. "Even if you're really dumb" my ass! Anything more than downloading / double-clicking is usually not worth it for me.

Maybe I'll just stick with SD...

It's just following some instructions. If you use a PC you should be able to do it no sweat.
 
Considering that he struggled to find the instructions despite the huge red capital letters saying "CLICK THIS IMAGE FOR EASY TUTORIAL" his reluctance is probably for the best.
 

Theonik

Member
Jesus, that looks complicated as fuck. "Even if you're really dumb" my ass! Anything more than downloading / double-clicking is usually not worth it for me.

Maybe I'll just stick with SD...
It's literally no more complicated than that. Just go to the appropriate page for your Wii version and follow the instructions on how to install the Homebrew channel and that's it. Then adding cleanrip is a simple case of downloading the file and dropping it in the SD card.
 

gokieks

Member
I don't have a Wii so I bought an 8164B GDR-DVD drive to rip my Gamecube/Wii games to play through Dolphin.

A couple problems, however:
My motherboard doesn't have an IDE port so I'm using an external IDE->USB2.0 bridge. This works fairly well, but it might be the cause of my major issue, which is that most of the time whenever I put a GC/Wii disc into the drive the whole drive disappears from Windows until I take it back out.

About one out of every 100 times I can get it to work (after so much fussing about that I can never be 100% sure what it is I've done to make it suddenly work)

Most IDE-to-USB adapters/enclosures do not work well, if at all, with optical drives. Neither do many PCI IDE controllers. Can't speak to Wii/GCN discs, but my experience in trying to find a good USB enclosure for my trusty old PlexWriter Premium led to getting this one with a NEC chipset that is known to work pretty well for optical drives.
 

BlackBeetleKing

Neo Member
MH3
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Tomodachi

Member
Guys can I ask a little question? I tried googling it but with no luck.
How can I move my dolphin save files (I'm not talking about savestates, just the regular saves in Skyward Sword) to my wii console? Is there any way at all? Any guide I can follow to do that? Do I need to install the homebrew channel to move savefiles? I'm not really familiar with my console since I've been playing with dolphin since I received my Wii as a gift, I literally turned it on like two times.
Thanks!
 

tsab

Member
Guys can I ask a little question? I tried googling it but with no luck.
How can I move my dolphin save files (I'm not talking about savestates, just the regular saves in Skyward Sword) to my wii console? Is there any way at all? Any guide I can follow to do that? Do I need to install the homebrew channel to move savefiles? I'm not really familiar with my console since I've been playing with dolphin since I received my Wii as a gift, I literally turned it on like two times.
Thanks!

You will need:
Homebrew enabled Wii
Homebrew Channel
Waninkoko's Save Game Manager
SD Card

There is a thread in gaf on how to hack/homebrew your wii, I'd suggest you start from there
The save game transfer gets easier after that though.
 

chiablo

Member
Is the gamer working fine speaking of control ? With emulation desync it can be a problem in general with rythm games.

I did well up until the Monkey Tamborine game. I couldn't even get past the training section.

I'm not sure if I suck, or if there's a delay introduced by the emulator that is killing me. I'll try it out on the Wii later and see if it's any better.
 

jediyoshi

Member
You will need:
Homebrew enabled Wii
Homebrew Channel
Waninkoko's Save Game Manager
SD Card

There is a thread in gaf on how to hack/homebrew your wii, I'd suggest you start from there
The save game transfer gets easier after that though.

Granted the save files aren't locked, you'd just need an SD card, the actual transfer could be done with a stock Wii.

Is the gamer working fine speaking of control ? With emulation desync it can be a problem in general with rythm games.

Fine with emulated controls, haven't tried using a Wiimote.
 

VertPin

Member
So I successfully installed Dolphin and am running my Twilight Princess (and soon to be Skyward Sword)! The only problem is, how can I get the widescreen hack to work? I have it enabled...and Twilight Princess doesn't go into 16:9 ratio. It is the gamecube version.
(also, how do I use my wired sensor bar if I want to play Skyward Sword?)
 

catabarez

Member
So I successfully installed Dolphin and am running my Twilight Princess (and soon to be Skyward Sword)! The only problem is, how can I get the widescreen hack to work? I have it enabled...and Twilight Princess doesn't go into 16:9 ratio. It is the gamecube version.
(also, how do I use my wired sensor bar if I want to play Skyward Sword?)

Is your computer connected to the same TV as the Wii?
 

catabarez

Member
Oh, could I just use an HDMI cord from my monitor and connect that to my TV?

Well you would have to connect the HDMI cord from your rig to your TV. If you do that you could just use the sensor bar connected to the Wii, just turn the Wii on when you wanna use the sensor bar.
 

jediyoshi

Member
So I successfully installed Dolphin and am running my Twilight Princess (and soon to be Skyward Sword)! The only problem is, how can I get the widescreen hack to work? I have it enabled...and Twilight Princess doesn't go into 16:9 ratio. It is the gamecube version.
(also, how do I use my wired sensor bar if I want to play Skyward Sword?)
In the Graphics Configuration window you want to make sure both
Aspect Ratio: Force 16:9 is set in the General tab
and Widescreen Hack is set in the Advanced tab

Widescreen hack doesn't work very well in TP. Worth just looking up a copy of the Wii version if you want widescreen.
 

jmdajr

Member
Question.

So is the Gamecube/Wii emulator easier to run since it's based on Radeon hardware?

You know, in comparison to the PS2?

Still, I heard the Xbox is hard to emulate and that's just a Pentium/Geforce hardware.
 
Still, I heard the Xbox is hard to emulate and that's just a Pentium/Geforce hardware.
It's not so hard to emulate it's just that the emulator development community never considered it a priority.

Most of it's library worth of notice was released on the PC and/or re-released as a HD classic elsewhere so there's little point.
 

Zomba13

Member
Got The Last Story today. Anyone know if it runs well in Dolphin? It looks nice enough in SD on my TV but I can just imagine it looking so so good in Dolphin like Xenoblade.
Don't want to spend the time ripping it if it doesn't run well through.
 

jmdajr

Member
It's not so hard to emulate it's just that the emulator development community never considered it a priority.

Most of it's library worth of notice was released on the PC and/or re-released as a HD classic elsewhere so there's little point.

I see what your saying.

But going back to Gamecube. Does that run better than Ps2 emulators?
 
It's not so hard to emulate it's just that the emulator development community never considered it a priority.

Most of it's library worth of notice was released on the PC and/or re-released as a HD classic elsewhere so there's little point.

I don't think that's true. The guy who was working on CXBX (or was it DXBX?) wrote a big long blog post detailing why emulating the Xbox was a pain in the ass from a technical perspective.
 

Borman

Member
It's not so hard to emulate it's just that the emulator development community never considered it a priority.

Most of it's library worth of notice was released on the PC and/or re-released as a HD classic elsewhere so there's little point.

Not entirely true. The Xbox is a lot more complicated than people give it credit for. Custom chips are custom chips. The GPU isn't off the shelf, nor is the CPU.
 

Borman

Member
hmmmm. I guess there is more to this story then.

People also don't realize how fast the Xbox was. It was pushing out some games at 720p natively. The Alpha kits for the Xbox 1 were modified off-the-shelf parts, sure, but the CPU has custom instructions, and the GPU was modified quite a bit with shaders and such.
 
Not entirely true. The Xbox is a lot more complicated than people give it credit for. Custom chips are custom chips. The GPU isn't off the shelf, nor is the CPU.
That's not really the issue there, it's really lack of interest, trust me.

The CPU and the GPU are pretty much off the shelf (A Pentium 3 with hampered cache? it has extra what? If it had anything that was turned off in Pentium 3 CPU's chances are it would be on current ones, enabled; or easy to recreate using programable SIMD units)

If anything the Northbridge isn't off the shell at all, because it's a "beta" nforce for intel CPU's, that never got released elsewhere (it was supposed to, but Intel blocked it and that's when they adapted it's technology for release with AMD Ahtlon CPU's where it kicked ass), but even then, it's not as if it's too complicated, a big chunk of the technology made it to the market and had documentation and drivers to be used freely.

The dificulty would be emulating the Soundstorm chipset, really; and that one has some public documentation, unlike some custom DSP's for the other consoles.

Other than that, the OS for it was said to be a stripped down windows NT5/2000 fork, and the API for Direct X would have to make it across seeing it ran under most if not all games, but even if that sounds like a big pain in the ass, it also means you didn't have crazy ass developers using too much of the hardware in there since they had software running under it.

Case in point: Top-tier PS2 games and the crazy shit they did, or how it has been said Factor 5 actually used the CPU to inject code onto the Flipper's ISA, via assembly coding as a means to obligue it to do more than it was supposed to do via the TEV pipelines.

Compared to that, emulating Xbox, a console that used PC standards for everything should be a piece of cake; they're just not interested in the load of work that would give to play Panzer Dragoon Orta and Conker's remake (what other quality games weren't ported?).
People also don't realize how fast the Xbox was. It was pushing out some games at 720p natively. The Alpha kits for the Xbox 1 were modified off-the-shelf parts, sure, but the CPU has custom instructions, and the GPU was modified quite a bit with shaders and such.
No it wasn't. It just had a second shader unit. And the "custom instructions" would make it onto every DirectX 8.1 standard GPU (geforce 4 onwards) and even if there was something left there that DirectX 8.1 devices lacked (probably not) it would be on all DirectX 9 GPU out there. Plus I've never seen the Xbox doing something that wasn't on the Geforce 3/4 class of things it should be able to achieve.

1280x720 was nice, yes, but on the other hand little games made it to the 60 frame mark, because of huge framebuffer handycaps (xbox was a handycapped beast, truth to be told; theoretically it was capable of so much, but then it was bottlenecked to the ground), the polycount would also often be halved with the polygon trick as a means to push better textures with more passages per clock; because like the Geforce 3 it only did one passage per clock; well, it was pretty much a off the shelf Geforce 3, that's why; if they could change anything in there as a means to make it that much better it would be that, all the rest is just optimizations/path's in place for what would be the Geforce 4 later.

We have to remember we had Quake 3 doing 1024x768 back in 1999 on a Geforce 256, 1280x720 was on the feature list a top range Geforce 3 should be able to achieve if the developer wished so and providing it wasn't too taxing.

It's not rocket science really; reason why most Xbox games came out on the PC like if it was just a flick of a switch; before a Geforce 3 started being outclassed by everything but the Geforce MX turd series, that is.
I don't think that's true. The guy who was working on CXBX (or was it DXBX?) wrote a big long blog post detailing why emulating the Xbox was a pain in the ass from a technical perspective.
I wouldn't mind reading that, but I stand by everything I just said; Xbox emulation is as it is because there's no interest; the community interest and developer interest is low, so it's a gargantuan job for anyone really, even if it's not that difficult to do versus the amount of reverse engineering that has been done on PS2 or NGC architectures.

The loops and hoops in there, compared to the custom from the ground architectures we had last gen are child's play.
 
New album up. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect

http://dolphinsnacks.com/screenshots/timesplittersfutureperfect/

http://www.dolphinsnacks.com/gaf/Dolphin 2012-02-22 20-45-30-28.jpg[img]

[img]http://dolphinsnacks.com/screenshots/timesplittersfutureperfect/images/002.jpg[img][/QUOTE]

I want this game so badly.
Sadly I don't find it ANYWHERE for GameCube :(

Also these Screenshots look beautiful. I never knew that the textures were so detailed. Free Radical really was awesome. GIVE US TIMESPLITTERS 4, DAMMIT!
 

Pro

Member
So I want to play RE4 on the Dolphin with the Hi-Res textures. The Wii version is the only one that can run Hi-Res textures from what I understand. I have them loaded and the game is running fine but I'm using an emulated Wii-Mote and the cross-hair sight is SO ANNOYING! Is there a way remove the cross-hair sight and replace it with the original laser pointer sight?
 

linko9

Member
So I want to play RE4 on the Dolphin with the Hi-Res textures. The Wii version is the only one that can run Hi-Res textures from what I understand. I have them loaded and the game is running fine but I'm using an emulated Wii-Mote and the cross-hair sight is SO ANNOYING! Is there a way remove the cross-hair sight and replace it with the original laser pointer sight?

Only if you play with a gamecube controller (or emulated gamecube controller).
 

read this

"Xbox is just like a PC, it's easy to emulate!"

Yes, we've all heard this silly and pointless argument a million times and it usually ends in the same, and rather ignorant conclusion (or should I say assumption) that just because the Xbox is PC similar, it's hardware should be relatively easy to emulate. That's a very wrong frame of mind. How hard can it be? Very. Xbox's hardware is very complex and still poorly documented to this day. This requires some explanation.

1. Is a PC easy to emulate? Well, I wouldn't say so myself. Take a look at the source code from bochs. A lot of source code/work isn't it?

2. Emulating an x86 CPU is a lot harder than it sounds. I don't know where this mindless assumption comes from. Yes, there's loads of documentation on how the x86 processor works, but that doesn't exactly make it easy. First of all, the x86 instruction set is M-A-S-S-I-V-E! There can be at least 20 different versions of one instruction (i.e. There are many different versions of the MOV instruction, as well as INC, DEC, ADD, SUB, SHR, SHL, AND, OR, XOR etc.) and it takes time to implement them all. Of course, that's not exactly difficult. The real problem is that any modern x86 processor including the Pentium III can execute multiple instructions at once. So it's not like emulating a Z80 doing one instruction at a time. The actual algorithm and how x86 does this is undocumented and still unknown. In short, the Xbox's CPU can be emulated, but not accurately.

3. Emulating any hardware by NVIDIA is not a walk in the park! The Xbox's GPU, the NV2A is often assumed just a GeForce 3. It's not! It's similar but not identical. It has some GeForce 4 capabilities too, so it's more of a cross between an NV20 and NV25. This is by no means easy to emulate either. NVIDIA's GPUs have very large register sets and afaik not even half of them have been discovered, and a large portion of known registers have unknown purposes. There is little to no documentation on how NVIDIA GPUs work. The best thing to do is to look at similar GPUs such as RIVA, TNT, and older GeForce cards. Some registers are similar, but not identical. The best place to look for information is in open source drivers available on the net. Adding to the dificulty is that no one has ever discovered how pixel shaders work on NV2x cards, vertex shaders yes though. The Xbox GPU also has exclusive registers that are not found in other GeForce cards. Information on the NV2A's GPU registers are just now beginning to be discovered a few months ago. And yet, there's still a long way to go. The GeForce 3 series is the most mysterious of all NVIDIA GPUs (G7x and G8x aside) and the NV2A is alot worse. "But can't you just directly execute the NV2A instructions on another NVIDIA card?". No, I get alot of questions concerning this, and it is impossible. It's MMIO addresses are different and the exclusive registers must be emulated. Plus, in windows, we don't have ring 0 access anyway, so you all can scratch that idea now. Then comes the NForce 2 chipset. This is where it get easier. The NVIDIA MCPX is the control center for things such as audio, USB for input, Network adapters, PCI, AGP, etc. These things are not really that difficult to emulate IMO except for the audio.

4. The Audio system is rather complex. Xbox's audio consists of at least 4 DSPs, and audio codec (AC '97) and an NVIDIA SoundStorm APU. The DSPs shouldn't be a problem (just figuring out what they all are is) nor should the AC '97 but the NVIDIA SoundStorm APU is the really difficult part. So far I haven't found any information on this thing, but right now, it's relevance is low.

5. The Xbox BIOS isn't fully understood. The basic execution process of the BIOS is understood, but details on the process are at a loss. What we do know gives us hints, but before the BIOS can be emulated, we'll need a better understanding of the Xbox hardware layout because the BIOS does some unknown hardware initialization at boot time and writes to the hardware directly without using any XDK stuff. It will take some time, and effort, but I'll eventually get it working.

6. Video Encoder "Hell". Instead of using a RAMDAC for video output, the Xbox uses a Video Encoder. What makes this suck a pain? Microsoft sought the need to change the video encoder every other Xbox version (there are seven in all, 1.0 - 1.6). Why, I dunno, it's a Microsoft thing, they always tend to try to "fix" things that aren't broken >.> AFAIK, there are at least 3 different Video Encoders used: Conexant CX25871, Focus FS454, and Xcalibur. For more information in Xbox video encoders, click here. Emulating all three video encoders is only less than half the battle, the real problem is that BIOSes can be specifically tied to a specific encoder depending on it's version (don't quote me on this though). Like PS2, every Xbox model revision has a updated BIOS and has different expectations. This is a potential problem, but not exactly major.

Basically, I'm trying to get this "Xbox should be easy to emulate because it's just like a PC" crap out of your heads. I'm sure that most of you will disagree with me on this, but for these reasons and more, on a low level, Xbox is harder to emulate than PS2.

^ The exception to that above is that the NV2A is much better documented now, but not fully. There's an open source library for the OpenXDK called pbKit. It interfaces directly with the hardware to fully expose it's potential. This is what Microsoft should have done all along (or at least wrote a low-level OpenGL implementation).
 

Dizzy-4U

Member
jediyoshi, how's the emulation on Future Perfect? I have it for Ps2 but it never ran good on the emulator. If you tell me that it runs at 60fps locked, I'll buy the gamecube version right now.
 

Roo

Member
Could someone do screencaps of Mario Kart Wii? Bowser's Castle and Grumble Volcano?
I would be in debt forever =,)
 

jediyoshi

Member
I have them loaded and the game is running fine but I'm using an emulated Wii-Mote and the cross-hair sight is SO ANNOYING! Is there a way remove the cross-hair sight and replace it with the original laser pointer sight?

Assuming you're using a gamepad, set up your controls as a Gamecube controller with the GCPad button on the toolbar. Make sure it's also enabled by going to the Gamecube tab in the Config options and selecting Standard Controller.

After loading up the game and getting to the main menu, hit the Wiimote button on the toolbar, select the dropdown list next to Wiimote 1 and select none. Controls should work as if it were the Gamecube version.

jediyoshi, how's the emulation on Future Perfect? I have it for Ps2 but it never ran good on the emulator. If you tell me that it runs at 60fps locked, I'll buy the gamecube version right now.

Yep, definitely one of the better emulated games overall. Probably the best first person shooter you can play on a Nintendo console either way

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU5-iZlxadQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAP6V-fD8uY
 
read this
In short:

x86 dominates the market, so the need for an accurate x86 emulator with all the bells and whistle's was never a priority; unlike Z80, MIPS, PowerPC architectures. To my knowledge Boch's emulator never focused on it, too.

Doesn't mean it's hard (or rather, every act of emulation is dificult and taxing, but that doesn't change the fact that it happened time and time again, providing there was interest and/or previous work the developers could draw from), it does mean it's probably way too much work to have just so Xbox games can be emulated, or rather that the current number of individuals working on it are probably overloaded by this "hole" whereas PS2 used MIPS and GC PowerPC who already had well documented emulators for that portion of the hardware out there. The raw dificulty is the same though, it just hasn't really been done.

It has been done professionally by Microsoft though, for Xbox 360 and for Mac with Virtual PC. And I digress; reverse engineering something like a console with really proprietary hardware is a pain in the ass because you can't possibly ping it anytime/everytime so it becomes a painful trial and error endeavour. Now when you have a variation of that in your system, properly emulating x86 becomes theoretically easier; it's just that it clearly hasn't been done (why would you emulate your own system? plus, you have multiple threads these days, so even if you wanted to run virtual machines and the like you wouldn't have to go through that), and seeing Xbox library is the poorest when it comes to exclusives it's just normal to have less interest, the fact that it gives some work is just the icing of the cake; but if it had the same resources and interest some last gen consoles had I doubt it would still be in that sorry state.

It's also worth being said that although that's the classic way to go around it, that's not the only one; GP32's has only 133 MHz and so emulating a console like GBA would be very, very hard, but they managed too do it with good results by bypassing the cpu emulation and making that portion of the emulation run semi-natively. It's hard to do, but it's surely doable for Xbox on x86 PC's. It sure would have been easier for Microsoft with X360 if it had a x86 architecture. In regards to a Pentium 3 with hampered cache it probably would suffice; of course getting there is the dificult part.

The 3rd point is precisely what I previously said, it has some beta path's for DirectX 8.1 and stuff that would make it onto Geforce 4. If it's not doable to do on another GPU with the same calls then again they can't really complain against GC and PS2, because those were unlike any commercial gpu out there, and weren't even compliant with standards like Shader Model 1.1. In fact PS2 wasn't compliant with anything, and if that means that they don't have to implement that support it also means there's no telling what the hell those crazy developers were doing in there. PS2 and GC certainly had more full access to the hardware in them, and lots of "freestyle" techniques to it than Xbox, and that sure hurts the compatibility to this day.

4th point is the Soundstorm chip, I also mentioned it. Then again, PS2 and GC had custom DSP's for that task, so at worst it's a case of being in the same boat.

5th Bios. I talked about OS, but of course that includes all the software needed for it to boot.

6th Video encoder, I did know that one, didn't spring to mind. But even the guy says it's probably not major.


No one ever said the games just needed some kind of patch to run on PC's, I at least didn't. But it should be certainly simpler than PS2. And with regards to Low Level; the low Level approach isn't used ever since SNES/Mega Drive emulation so it's a huge null point. PS2 and GC emulators are not Low Level and never could be.
 

RS4-

Member
Had a friend test Last Story on a rig similar to mine

2600k @ 4.5
2GB 6950
8GB ram

He's using the latest build

General config:
JITIL

Graphics:
DX11
1080p fullscreen
16x AF
2x AA
3x internal resolution

Hacks:
ram to load up game, then switch to texture in-game to restore the missing armor.

Said he averages 30FPs with the occasional sound glitch or something.

I don't know how optimal that is compared to other working configs and which build to use.
 

Seik

Banned
HHHHHGGGGNNNN at those The Last Story's pics, can't wait to get it next week! :D

Time Splitter on Dolphin with some sort of online mode would be so neat.
 
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