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Dolphin - Emulating Wii and Gamecube Games

Ydahs

Member
jediyoshi said:
dolphin2010-06-1502-21xcj9.jpg
Can I steal your magical box?
 

Nabs

Member
i can't even keep up with all the updates to dolphin.

one thing i do know is that Story Mode now works in F-Zero.
 

desu

Member
I wonder, does Dolphin benefit a lot from a i7? Currently got a Q6600 and thinking about upgrading, wonder if the upgrade is worth it?
 

Fitz

Member
desu said:
I wonder, does Dolphin benefit a lot from a i7? Currently got a Q6600 and thinking about upgrading, wonder if the upgrade is worth it?


If it's just for the purpose of using Dolphin, it's not worth the upgrade. It would certainly perform better for a number of reasons, but overclocking your current processor would be free and give a decent performance increase, bearing in mind that Dolphin can't use more than two CPU cores anyway, CPU speed is one of the biggest factors in what performance you get. The Q6600 overclocks fairly well I believe.
 

Nabs

Member
suikodan said:
Can I take my save file from the Wii console and "continue" my game on the emulator for the same game?

if you can copy your Wii Save to your SD card, there is a good chance you can use it in Dolphin. Just go to Tools > Wii Save Game Importer and locate the file.

There's also an exporter, but it's broken :(
 

vazel

Banned
Wow the lowest SSAA in the latest Dolphin is 4xSSAA instead of 2.2x. That's ridiculous. And apparently nhancer doesn't work with Dolphin?
 

Fitz

Member
vazel said:
Wow the lowest SSAA in the latest Dolphin is 4xSSAA instead of 2.25x. That's ridiculous. And apparently nhancer doesn't work with Dolphin?

I'm not quite 100% sure on this, but if I remember rightly, 4x SSAA = 2x2 SSAA, which I think is the minimum amount of super sampling, so it's probably just a correction in description I imagine, not really sure what the deal with 2.25x SSAA was.
 

kiryogi

Banned
Can anyone recommend a place to find a compatible bluetooth adapter? I spent a bit just combing thru the list and some big sites and had no luck.
 

darkwings

Banned
shit, dolphin will probably be amazing when new zelda is out. I am going to buy the game for wii but there is a chance that i will run it in HD with this emu
 

Nabs

Member
Chao said:
I just want to try this on my Mac and I know jack shit about compiling. What is taking them so long?

apparently this dude is trying to make it easier http://forums.dolphin-emu.com/thread-10105.html (check the link in his sig)

i don't have a mac, so i can't really help

..........

apparently eternal darkness works now? probably not that well, but the guy who got f-zero to work is putting in a lot of effort to get it running well.
 

vazel

Banned
kiryogi said:
Can anyone recommend a place to find a compatible bluetooth adapter? I spent a bit just combing thru the list and some big sites and had no luck.
Any bluetooth adapter should work. The Wiimote will pair with the adapter just like any regular bluetooth device. Be careful about getting the micro/tiny bluetooth adapters they have shit range. I tossed it and bought [this] one.
 

evlcookie

but ever so delicious
For those with the DX11 plugin, what's making it so much better (apart from lack of AA i guess) over the other plugins?
 

darkwings

Banned
evlcookie said:
For those with the DX11 plugin, what's making it so much better (apart from lack of AA i guess) over the other plugins?

Q1a: DX11 plugin? What happened to DX10?
Q1b: Why DX11?? Now I need to buy yet another new GPU!
A: DX11 supports so called "feature" levels which make it possible to use the DX11 runtime even with DX10 GPUs. That means: You're fine with a DX10 card as well. DX9 users are out of luck though Wink

Q2: How does this plugin compare to the existing gfx plugins, speedwise and in compatibility?
A: Performance is quite a bit slower than DX9 and OpenGL right now. There's room for optimization, but I can't estiminate how much, yet. Right now, expect about 50%-85% of DX9's speed.
Compatibility is, of course due to the early development stage, worse than with the other plugins. Still quite a few games are already perfect with DX11 and most should be playable!

Q3: What do we need DX11 for anyway?
A: There's numerous things to mention here: The new plugin is (in my opinion) a lot cleaner now because of the cleaner API itself as well as because of being rewritten. Apart from that, DX11 provides support for specifying the maximum LOD of a texture and for some vertex element formats (both of these things are unsupported in DX9). This should allow for slightly higher compability, once the plugin is mature enough.
Anyway, DX11 will NOT fix logic blending, even though many think so. DX11 only supports logic ops within shaders, but not for blending.

Q4: What can I do to help here?
A: Apart from just joining development, there's quite a few things I still need to know:
- How well does this plugin run any games which DON'T run with the dx9 plugin? I'm especially curious about those games, which failed because of vertex declaration errors (VarToD3D in the error message, enable panic handlers! Supposedly these games include Starfox Adventures and some Sonic games..)
- How well does this plugin speedwisely behave on very recent hardware which actually supports DX11?
- Just ask if there's something not answered in these FAQ, especially if you're sure that's it's not a dumb question Wink

Q5a: omg I just tried the game XXX and it...!!!
Q5b: Where is antialiasing / texture dumping / hires texture support / feature XX?
A: I don't care, I still have enoug other stuff to do. Many features are missing right now. I can't fix everything within a day and I still have enough stuff to do, and I don't want to have thousands of bug reports for things I already know.
Unless you want to tell me anything from Q4, there's no need to answer then Wink

Q6: Did you program the WHOLE plugin by yourself?!
A: Yes, although it started as being a port of the DX9 plugin which was not created by me. Now it has been heavily modified, but there are still many things which the the two plugins have in common (see Q7).
Special thanks go to rodolfoosvaldobogado. He was almost always around when I had a question about anything concerning the gfx plugins and without him at least two major bugs would still not have been fixed Big Grin

Q7: Why not put DX9 and DX11 in one plugin?
A: That'd be the longer term goal. Anyway, keep in mind that DX9 and DX11 are quite different APIs. Not as different as DX9 and OpenGL, but anyway it's still not as simple as just updating the 9 in all function calls to an 11

in short, DX11 will allow for better compability in the long run.
 

Kerrinck

Member
kiryogi said:
Can anyone recommend a place to find a compatible bluetooth adapter? I spent a bit just combing thru the list and some big sites and had no luck.
I got mine from dealextreme and it works perfectly. I think it was 2$ with free shipping.
 

Jin34

Member
What's the deal with the latest revisions not having the GC pad plug-in? Bizarre, they take that and 2xSSAA out? I'm sticking with the older versions for now so I can use AA w/o getting a performance hit.
 

Nabs

Member
Jin34 said:
What's the deal with the latest revisions not having the GC pad plug-in? Bizarre, they take that and 2xSSAA out? I'm sticking with the older versions for now so I can use AA w/o getting a performance hit.

the incomplete GC Plug-in is now completed. Just go to Options > GC Pad Settings.
 

Mithos

Member
darkwings said:
the new DX11 plugin is amazing

I just get blackscreen on every single game I try (yes my card is DX11 compatible)

Update:
Deleted the build and unpacked fresh, now the games start but some games have a transparent mirror-effect.. weird.
 

Stallion Free

Cock Encumbered
Bleepey said:
It allows you to play games online with people on your continent damn near lag free. I live in London and i can get games with people in the US comfortably.
Yeah, but you do you own the arcade that you ripped the games from? That's why it's not allowed. It's perfectly possible to rip both Wii and Gamecube games.
 

JADS

Member
THE DARKNESS COMES!



Yeah, I am pretty excited that with a special build the game at least runs, with some issues though and slowdowns.
 

Bleepey

Member
Stallion Free said:
Yeah, but you do you own the arcade that you ripped the games from? That's why it's not allowed. It's perfectly possible to rip both Wii and Gamecube games.

Of course!
 
Has there been any improvements in CPU speed since the 2.0 release? I'm running a Phenom II at 3.9 GHz and still can't get a full 60fps in all games. Really hoping Other M will be compatible.
 
Does anyone know why Wind Waker would crash when taking pictures with the pictograph item? I had made a lot of progress yesterday but the game suddenly crashed as I tried to do the pictograph quest on Windfall Island. :/
Also, based on my PC specs, what settings should I use to get the game to run smoothly? I have an Athlon II X2 245 CPU OC'd to 3.4 GHZ, 2 GB RAM, and a Radeon 4770 OC'd to about 900/900. I have DirectX 9, and OpenGL seems to run much better than the Direct3D 9 setting although there's still some pretty bad slowdown. For the most part, I'm using the recommended settings from this thread.
 

Fitz

Member
ColonelColon said:
Does anyone know why Wind Waker would crash when taking pictures with the pictograph item? I had made a lot of progress yesterday but the game suddenly crashed as I tried to do the pictograph quest on Windfall Island. :/
Also, based on my PC specs, what settings should I use to get the game to run smoothly? I have an Athlon II X2 245 CPU OC'd to 3.4 GHZ, 2 GB RAM, and a Radeon 4770 OC'd to about 900/900. I have DirectX 9, and OpenGL seems to run much better than the Direct3D 9 setting although there's still some pretty bad slowdown. For the most part, I'm using the recommended settings from this thread.

This should help you.
 

Caoz

Member
ColonelColon said:
Does anyone know why Wind Waker would crash when taking pictures with the pictograph item? I had made a lot of progress yesterday but the game suddenly crashed as I tried to do the pictograph quest on Windfall Island. :/
Also, based on my PC specs, what settings should I use to get the game to run smoothly? I have an Athlon II X2 245 CPU OC'd to 3.4 GHZ, 2 GB RAM, and a Radeon 4770 OC'd to about 900/900. I have DirectX 9, and OpenGL seems to run much better than the Direct3D 9 setting although there's still some pretty bad slowdown. For the most part, I'm using the recommended settings from this thread.

I have the same CPU as ColonelColon, 4 GB of RAM and a Radeon 4850 512 MB. Neither are overclocked. When I run my galaxy 2 image on dolphin the machine crashes, shuts down without warning. Any ideas why this is happening ? Today I tried checking the CPU temp with CPU core and It was reading 55 celsius, at 100% utilization for both cores. CPU temp does not seem to be the problem. I recently upgraded to a 400w PSU (from a 300w) any tips on what else to look for would be appreciated.
 

Jin34

Member
Caoz said:
I have the same CPU as ColonelColon, 4 GB of RAM and a Radeon 4850 512 MB. Neither are overclocked. When I run my galaxy 2 image on dolphin the machine crashes, shuts down without warning. Any ideas why this is happening ? Today I tried checking the CPU temp with CPU core and It was reading 55 celsius, at 100% utilization for both cores. CPU temp does not seem to be the problem. I recently upgraded to a 400w PSU (from a 300w) any tips on what else to look for would be appreciated.

Try lowering the resolution, when I run it on my monitor at 1680x1050 it crashes, when I run it on 1368x768 it runs fine minus the slowdowns to 30fps on some parts.
 

Elfish

Member
I think my configuration is a bit to weak for Wii games.

Asus EN9800GTX 512MB DDR3

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+

4GB RAM

Asus M2N-E motherboard

Windows 7 64bit


What kinda cpu is recommended to run it at a decent framerate?
 

Lord Error

Insane For Sony
Is it even possible to get playable framerates with this emulator if you have C2D 8400 / 4GHz and ATI 5750 card, or should I not even bother? For the life of me I can't get any game I tried to run at more than 20FPS no matter how much stuff I disable and at how low resolution I run it :[

The games I tried btw are Twin Snakes, RE1 Remake and RE4 (which I can't even get to run)
 

ultim8p00

Banned
Elfish said:
I think my configuration is a bit to weak for Wii games.

Asus EN9800GTX 512MB DDR3

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+

4GB RAM

Asus M2N-E motherboard

Windows 7 64bit


What kinda cpu is recommended to run it at a decent framerate?

Oboro Muramasa runs like butter on my OCed X2 3800+ with 2GB ram.
 
richisawesome said:
Xbox 360 wired controller.

I suppose I should have clarified... I need something to play Smash Bros on.

The Xbox 360 controller is kind of the worst controller ever for fighting games


Elfish said:
I think my configuration is a bit to weak for Wii games.

Asus EN9800GTX 512MB DDR3

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+

4GB RAM

Asus M2N-E motherboard

Windows 7 64bit


What kinda cpu is recommended to run it at a decent framerate?

Yeah, your cpu is somewhat lame, but not terrible either. If you're not overclocking already, try it out as it may help a lot.

If you're going to go out and buy a CPU specifically because you want to use Dolphin, You'd want to get a modern intel cpu that runs at a minimum of 3 GHz, I'd say. An e8400 would suffice, but I wouldn't recommend investing in a dead platform. Get a Core i5 750 and overclock it a bit. Or perhaps if you're feeling like a high roller, get a i7 930.

I use a phenom II X4 965 @ 3.6 on my main rig and it does a decent job running dolphin. You really want an intel chip since they have the full SSE4 instruction set, but if you don't want to invest in a new motherboard (and new ram) look up on the manufacturer's website as to what is the best AMD chip you can put in your motherboard. If it can take phenom IIs, you could do worse.
 

vgamer1

Member
TouchMyBox said:
I suppose I should have clarified... I need something to play Smash Bros on.

The Xbox 360 controller is kind of the worst controller ever for fighting games

Not smash bros... it's very similar to the GC controller there, actually.
 
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