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Dolphin - Emulating Wii and Gamecube Games

Hey guys. I stopped using Dolphin years ago as I had mediocre performance on my build at the time (which I suspect was because of my FX 8350).

I now have an i5-6600k and GTX 1070 (all stock), 16 GB of RAM and all my storage are SSD. Am I good to go? Also I have an Xbox One controller, a Steam Controller and some GameCube controllers with the adaptors. Are those all compatible?
 
Dolphin has removed the Direct3D 12 graphics backend: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/4424
I was honestly getting better performance on DX12, even compared to Vulkan. The only issue was that a ton of Wii games would crash after a while. As long as they get Vulkan up there eventually, I'm not too bummed out. It's enough that this is a passion project for the devs, I wouldn't expect them to maintain two young graphics API at once.

I now have an i5-6600k...
You're fine.

Also I have an Xbox One controller, a Steam Controller and some GameCube controllers with the adaptors. Are those all compatible?
Yep, they're compatible. Give the Steam Controller a shot with some Wii games if you can, it's great. Metroid Prime Trilogy is a lot of fun that way.

Also consider looking into the Ishiiruka builds.
I second this. If you get any stutter in a game, try running it through Ishiiruka. It will alleviate the issue with no drawback (at least, from my experience).
 

Luigi87

Member
Hey guys. I stopped using Dolphin years ago as I had mediocre performance on my build at the time (which I suspect was because of my FX 8350).

I now have an i5-6600k and GTX 1070 (all stock), 16 GB of RAM and all my storage are SSD. Am I good to go? Also I have an Xbox One controller, a Steam Controller and some GameCube controllers with the adaptors. Are those all compatible?

With Dolphin 5.0 you're more than fine. With a GTX 1070, and a very old i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz, I could get full speed at 3x native res (I've since upgraded to a Xeon x5760 @ 4.2GHz, and can downsample from 4k at full speed). Also consider looking into the Ishiiruka builds.
 

jediyoshi

Member
Dolphin has removed the Direct3D 12 graphics backend: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/4424

Someone expanded on this on reddit

Just to set the record, the primary reason (or at least one of them) for dropping it is that no one was actively maintaining it or trying to improve it compared to the other renderers. The developer that wrote the initial incarnation of the D3D12 backend essentially disappeared after the PR introducing it was merged. It's been ~194 days (as of writing) since the removal PR was opened and not once has anyone made a proactive effort to fully sort out any of the underlying issues present in the D3D12 backend.
Should someone actually want to start maintaining it again, they can feel free to open a PR to do so. However, anyone doing that must lay out at least some form of plan that they intend to follow. It can't be left to stagnate.
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/6c0765/dolphin_drops_direct3d12_video_backend/dhqwv9n/
 
Reading about the dropping of DirectX12 led me to learn about the Ishiiruka version and now I am getting 100% speed GameCube emulation for the first time ever on my laptop, a ThinkPad T440S with only a core i5-4200U in it. Fantastic.
 

finley83

Banned
Sorry to sound completely uninformed here (I've tried googling but still don't get it) - does anyone know if there's a way to update texture packs made using the old format compatible with newer Dolphin versions? There was a good one for RE: CVX but I have no idea where to start. Wondering if it's as simple as extracting the textures somehow to determine the new filenames, or if the image formats need updating altogether (currently they're DDS files).

Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated!
 

scitek

Member
I read Dolphin VR supports Vive, but not Oculus Touch. Is there a way to get Touch to work and emulate a Wiimote/Nunchuck?
 

Stallion Free

Cock Encumbered
Decided to replay COD2: Big Red One after replaying COD1 (the PC one) a couple weeks ago. It still holds up really well compared to COD1 PC apart from some of the textures.

35097187885_a2713de945_o.jpg
 

hlhbk

Member
I ran into performance issues on Dolphin when I tried it with my old rig a year ago. What level of performance should I expect out of of newly built rig and the current version of Dolphin mainly playing Metroid Prime Trilogy and Xenoblade Chronicles? What is the best configs for these games?

Specs are:

Intel 4970k (no OC)
Nvidia GTX 1080 TI
16 GB RAM
SSD
Win 10
 

NESpowerhouse

Perhaps he's wondering why someone would shoot a man before throwing him out of a plane.
I ran into performance issues on Dolphin when I tried it with my old rig a year ago. What level of performance should I expect out of of newly built rig and the current version of Dolphin mainly playing Metroid Prime Trilogy and Xenoblade Chronicles? What is the best configs for these games?

Specs are:

Intel 4970k (no OC)
Nvidia GTX 1080 TI
16 GB RAM
SSD
Win 10

I literally just finished Prime 1 and am playing through Xenoblade as we speak.
I have essentially the same setup except for an OC'ed 6700k to 4.5Ghz and a 1070.
Performance was fairly rock-solid except for whenever you would enter a new area and Dolphin would compile the new shaders into the cache. In the Prime Trilogy, there is an infamous issue where if the shader compilation takes long enough, the CPU would momentarily go out of sync with the gpu and a large black bar would appear and remain at the bottom of the screen, essentially squashing the image. The only way to get rid of it would be to restart Dolphin. Also in the Prim Trilogy, there will always be a dot a few pixels in size sitting in the center of the screen. The only way to get rid of it will be to set your visor opacity to zero. In Xenoblade, the shader compilation issues are much less pronounced, but I am getting a lot of frametime fluctuations during gameplay (the framerate average is still a solid 30, but the frametimes go all over the place, think Bloodborne or FFXV).

Also, disable Store EFB Copies to Texture Only
For posterity, I'm running at 1080p with 4xMSAA, 16xAF, and have Per-Pixel Lighting enabled with the DX11 backend. I used to have OpenGL enabled, but I changed it to DX11 after constantly running into massive frame dips whenever I would bring up the map in Prime 1.
 

hlhbk

Member
I literally just finished Prime 1 and am playing through Xenoblade as we speak.
I have essentially the same setup except for an OC'ed 6700k to 4.5Ghz and a 1070.
Performance was fairly rock-solid except for whenever you would enter a new area and Dolphin would compile the new shaders into the cache. In the Prime Trilogy, there is an infamous issue where if the shader compilation takes long enough, the CPU would momentarily go out of sync with the gpu and a large black bar would appear and remain at the bottom of the screen, essentially squashing the image. The only way to get rid of it would be to restart Dolphin. Also in the Prim Trilogy, there will always be a dot a few pixels in size sitting in the center of the screen. The only way to get rid of it will be to set your visor opacity to zero. In Xenoblade, the shader compilation issues are much less pronounced, but I am getting a lot of frametime fluctuations during gameplay (the framerate average is still a solid 30, but the frametimes go all over the place, think Bloodborne or FFXV).

Also, disable Store EFB Copies to Texture Only
For posterity, I'm running at 1080p with 4xMSAA, 16xAF, and have Per-Pixel Lighting enabled with the DX11 backend. I used to have OpenGL enabled, but I changed it to DX11 after constantly running into massive frame dips whenever I would bring up the map in Prime 1.

Thank you so much for the response! I know in the Wii U emulator Cemu you can download the shader cache for games so it doesn't have to populate. Can you do this in Dolphin? To be clear I am not asking where to download these from just if it's possible to do?
 

Codiox

Member
Thank you so much for the response! I know in the Wii U emulator Cemu you can download the shader cache for games so it doesn't have to populate. Can you do this in Dolphin? To be clear I am not asking where to download these from just if it's possible to do?

No but you can use ishiruka build to get asynchronous shader. With this it will play without hick ups.
 

hlhbk

Member
Ok massive update time! I received a dolphin bar today and after gathering info from around the web and here on GAF here is my progress for getting Metroid Prime Trilogy to play on Dolphin.

First of all my specs again are as follows:

Intel 4970K stock settings
Nvidia GTX 1080TI
16 GB RAM
SSD
Win 10

Version of Dolphin I am running?

The Ishiiruka build latest version located at: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-ishiiruka-dolphin-custom-version

Prior to setting everything up I purchased a Dolphin Bar from Amazon so I could use a real Wii Mote. Make sure to download the latest firmware! Link to purchase: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HZWEB74/?tag=neogaf0e-20

My settings are as follows:













With these settings in my test I was able to run the original Metroid prime at 1080p, 2x MSAA, at 60 FPS with no slow downs or graphical issues all the way up to the point you get the first map download. I attempted 4k since I am playing on a 4K TV but there was some slight stutters so I stuck with 1080p.

For those who would like to see how it looks and runs here is that test I ran and uploaded you my YouTube:

https://youtu.be/yZVrvuIgrOw

Please note that there are some slight hiccups in the video only because I am recording at 1080p 60fps and it's very demanding on my pc to be doing both at the same time. Actual gameplay is butter smooth! You may also notice a tiny dot in the center of the screen that is a bug in dolphin and can be removed by setting visor occupancy to 0. I never really notice it while playing so I leave it be.

One last thing to make sure you do before you start playing! If you want to 100% the game and get all the bonus content it's not possible without downloading a save file and importing it into Dolphin. There is no way to get the green credits anymore since they could only be obtained by getting friend vouchers via WiiConnect24 which is no longer online. We will need to download a save with the 15 green credits already present. Don't worry no other progress have been made on this save!

Go to this link: https://www.gamefaqs.com/wii/960329-metroid-prime-trilogy/saves

Download the first save and save it anywhere on your pc. Do into Dolphin and go to tools, and import Wii save. Browse to the location you saved the file you downloaded and select the file and click open. If prompted overwrite any files it prompts you to, and you now have the save imported! When you get in game it will have you select a new Mii and you now will have the 15 green credits.

It took a lot to capture all of this. I hope this helps people and really was what I was looking for in a guide to how to get MPT up and running! Feedback is welcomed and encouraged!
 
your gpu is a beast, turn on per-pixel lighting and use ssaa anti-aliasing.

feedback: that wall of screenshots of your config is pretty unnecessary as there is nothing there that needs to be changed to get the game running, its all pretty stock stuff...

nice to know about the visor opacity trick though, always put me off a prime 2 playthrough.
 

hlhbk

Member
Reposting since this was the last post on the previous page.

Ok massive update time! I received a dolphin bar today and after gathering info from around the web and here on GAF here is my progress for getting Metroid Prime Trilogy to play on Dolphin.

First of all my specs again are as follows:

Intel 4970K stock settings
Nvidia GTX 1080TI
16 GB RAM
SSD
Win 10

Version of Dolphin I am running?

The Ishiiruka build latest version located at: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-ishiiruka-dolphin-custom-version

Prior to setting everything up I purchased a Dolphin Bar from Amazon so I could use a real Wii Mote. Make sure to download the latest firmware! Link to purchase: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HZWEB74/?tag=neogaf0e-20

My settings are as follows:













With these settings in my test I was able to run the original Metroid prime at 1080p, 2x MSAA, at 60 FPS with no slow downs or graphical issues all the way up to the point you get the first map download. I attempted 4k since I am playing on a 4K TV but there was some slight stutters so I stuck with 1080p.

For those who would like to see how it looks and runs here is that test I ran and uploaded you my YouTube:

https://youtu.be/yZVrvuIgrOw

Please note that there are some slight hiccups in the video only because I am recording at 1080p 60fps and it's very demanding on my pc to be doing both at the same time. Actual gameplay is butter smooth! You may also notice a tiny dot in the center of the screen that is a bug in dolphin and can be removed by setting visor occupancy to 0. I never really notice it while playing so I leave it be.

One last thing to make sure you do before you start playing! If you want to 100% the game and get all the bonus content it's not possible without downloading a save file and importing it into Dolphin. There is no way to get the green credits anymore since they could only be obtained by getting friend vouchers via WiiConnect24 which is no longer online. We will need to download a save with the 15 green credits already present. Don't worry no other progress have been made on this save!

Go to this link: https://www.gamefaqs.com/wii/960329-metroid-prime-trilogy/saves

Download the first save and save it anywhere on your pc. Do into Dolphin and go to tools, and import Wii save. Browse to the location you saved the file you downloaded and select the file and click open. If prompted overwrite any files it prompts you to, and you now have the save imported! When you get in game it will have you select a new Mii and you now will have the 15 green credits.

It took a lot to capture all of this. I hope this helps people and really was what I was looking for in a guide to how to get MPT up and running! Feedback is welcomed and encouraged!
 

hlhbk

Member
your gpu is a beast, turn on per-pixel lighting and use ssaa anti-aliasing.

feedback: that wall of screenshots of your config is pretty unnecessary as there is nothing there that needs to be changed to get the game running, its all pretty stock stuff...

nice to know about the visor opacity trick though, always put me off a prime 2 playthrough.

Actually quite a few things needed changed for it to rub like it does. Imo posting a step by step guide and config would immensely help new comers.

What does per pixel lighting do?
 
What does per pixel lighting do?

It calculates lighting per pixel, duh

Well, I would imagine that this specifically applies to built-in "hardware lights" of GX, which are otherwise calculated in per-vertex manner (probably on real hardware too). So if you have a huge triangle and tiny lights in front of it the effect would be nearly invisible in per-vertex mode.
 
Actually quite a few things needed changed for it to rub like it does. Imo posting a step by step guide and config would immensely help new comers.

What does per pixel lighting do?

Start a game and stand in a 3D scene, then toggle the checkbox on and off. The difference is immediately noticeable. Per pixel lighting looks better.

Worth noting: Original Wii matches the look with per pixel lighting off. Enabling it is an enhancement over console.
 

bomblord1

Banned
Reposting since this was the last post on the previous page.

Ok massive update time! I received a dolphin bar today and after gathering info from around the web and here on GAF here is my progress for getting Metroid Prime Trilogy to play on Dolphin.

First of all my specs again are as follows:

Intel 4970K stock settings
Nvidia GTX 1080TI
16 GB RAM
SSD
Win 10

Version of Dolphin I am running?

The Ishiiruka build latest version located at: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-ishiiruka-dolphin-custom-version

Prior to setting everything up I purchased a Dolphin Bar from Amazon so I could use a real Wii Mote. Make sure to download the latest firmware! Link to purchase: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HZWEB74/?tag=neogaf0e-20

My settings are as follows:

























With these settings in my test I was able to run the original Metroid prime at 1080p, 2x MSAA, at 60 FPS with no slow downs or graphical issues all the way up to the point you get the first map download. I attempted 4k since I am playing on a 4K TV but there was some slight stutters so I stuck with 1080p.

For those who would like to see how it looks and runs here is that test I ran and uploaded you my YouTube:

https://youtu.be/yZVrvuIgrOw

Please note that there are some slight hiccups in the video only because I am recording at 1080p 60fps and it's very demanding on my pc to be doing both at the same time. Actual gameplay is butter smooth! You may also notice a tiny dot in the center of the screen that is a bug in dolphin and can be removed by setting visor occupancy to 0. I never really notice it while playing so I leave it be.

One last thing to make sure you do before you start playing! If you want to 100% the game and get all the bonus content it's not possible without downloading a save file and importing it into Dolphin. There is no way to get the green credits anymore since they could only be obtained by getting friend vouchers via WiiConnect24 which is no longer online. We will need to download a save with the 15 green credits already present. Don't worry no other progress have been made on this save!

Go to this link: https://www.gamefaqs.com/wii/960329-metroid-prime-trilogy/saves

Download the first save and save it anywhere on your pc. Do into Dolphin and go to tools, and import Wii save. Browse to the location you saved the file you downloaded and select the file and click open. If prompted overwrite any files it prompts you to, and you now have the save imported! When you get in game it will have you select a new Mii and you now will have the 15 green credits.

It took a lot to capture all of this. I hope this helps people and really was what I was looking for in a guide to how to get MPT up and running! Feedback is welcomed and encouraged!

Now try it with the new ubershaders ;P
 
Am I reading this right -> basically the load is being shifted off the CPU onto the GPU for once?

It's more about load being shifted from preprocessing to runtime.

Imagine you are the owner of world's hugest and greatest fast food restaurant where each chef tries to grab multiple roughly identical orders.and handle them with a step by step recipe. Unfortunately this means every time an off-the-wall order happens you must personally write a recipe which takes time. If you try to handle orders roughly in order (sic) people ordering loads of weird things (which does not happen all days but when there's an expo or something is often the case) can end up being causing a clog. Your competitor cousin never clogs the queue and instead denies new orders while still starting to write up recipes for them in case they repeat.

You decide that your chefs are better than that and supply them with sixteen huge recipes that cover everything orderable. Unfortunately this is not perfect because some stuff becomes more complicated by the virtue of being able to cover everything. And the chefs grab recipe-fitting orders and still do each step to all of them, though they may be conditional, so if they grab dishes from opposite spectrum of an universal recipe a lot of steps cover only one order and thus that slows down. And then there's the problem that they have always distinguished orders by recipe fitting so even if they could grab things so that each chef has very similar orders, they may not really recognize that's the case and only distinguish them by their universal recipe (though sometimes they will get them right due to timing and/or luck).
 

Datschge

Member
Wow, this is massive news isn't it?
In the ideal case it's the perfect solution.

Dolphin rejected the async approach of Ishiiruka as until the shader is compiled the graphics are flawed. But without it the rendering has to wait for shader compilation to finish, thus resulting in stutters.

Gamecube/Wii couldn't do fully programmable shaders. Instead the TEV had a fixed setup allowing the combination of up to 8 textures in up to 16 stages. While there are a lot of possible combinations, it's still a limited amount, and ubershader aims to cover all commonly used combinations. This results in a huge slow shader, but that can now be used as a fallback until the dedicated shader finished compiling. If everything works as intended this gives the best of both world, neither do graphics glitch nor does shader compilation result in stutters.
 

finley83

Banned
Thanks, that makes perfect sense. I'm glad Dolphin has gone this way in terms of development as it means we eventually end up with a uniform solution that doesn't rely on weird hacks. Looking forward to trying it out with Metroid Prime Trilogy when I get back home!
 

Theonik

Member
I hope they won't treat it as an excuse to discontinue regular GUI, as I absolutely despise Retroarch.
Yeah I never quite got that and I love the PS3 UI. But what they've done with it in Retro-arch seems convoluted and each core added only makes it worse.
 
Yeah I never quite got that and I love the PS3 UI. But what they've done with it in Retro-arch seems convoluted and each core added only makes it worse.

I mean, I read once that the road map was to make Retroarch basically an operating system in to itself. They're trying to build some kind of XBMC competitor that will do everything all under one roof (play media, games, I think even browse the web and other such nonsense)

But they are just terrible at UI design. Every step forward they make they take two back.

Anyway, I wouldn't expect RetroArch having a Dolphin core would effect the actual Dolphin in any way, just like how all of RetroArch's other emulation cores continue to exist as stand-alone software. Being converted to a RetroArch core is something Libretro (the developers) do, not the people making the emulators themselves do.

Think of it as another fork, like Ishiiruka. Ishi doesn't effect the main build of Dolphin.
 

KainXVIII

Member
I thought that Metroid Prime (at least 1-2) is better to be played in gamecube versions, especially if you can hook up gamecube controller to pc =)
 

jackal27

Banned
That wouldn't make sense. Uber shaders supersede the crux of ishiiruka's functionality, ishiiruka was only ever a half-step.

Omg this is blowing my mind. Are you saying that I may finally be able to play Project M on my laptop? I could get it running fine, but it would always have minor hiccups and stutters that made competitive play impossible.
 
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