Emulator noob question, I'm interested in getting a Wii and ripping some GC games. Now does using a PAL version of the games affect the frame rate in Dolphin? I made the mistake of buying PAL PS2 games recently that run at 50hz in PCSX2. Just wondering if thats the same case with GC games.
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Dolphin - Emulating Wii and Gamecube Games
- Thread starter Stallion Free
- Start date
DonMigs85
Member
Dolphin does have a PAL60 mode in Settings but not sure if all games support that.
jediyoshi
Member
Yes, it's recognized natively, so under the device dropdown just make sure you've got the right one selected. For me, mine appears as 'DInput/0/Wireless Controller'.
Ah ok. Hmm, Rogue Squadron 2/3 and Luigi's Mansion is my first port of call so I'll do some Googling!
Yes, it's recognized natively, so under the device dropdown just make sure you've got the right one selected. For me, mine appears as 'DInput/0/Wireless Controller'.
Cool - I'll probably keep it plugged in via USB but it's good to know there's no jiggery-pokery you have to fiddle around with to get it working.
For GC games Wikipedia has a good compatibility list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GameCube_games_with_alternate_display_modes
In short PAL60 support was the exception on GC, and the rule on Wii (though there were exceptions like Little King's Story that didn't support it).
Thanks! Well Rogue Squadron has PAL60 support from that list, which is good! Looks like Luigi's Mansion ran at 30fps according to DF Retro so wasn't getting that anyway.
Pancakes R Us
Member
Thanks both. Is it possible to make / buy a relatively small PC that would be 4GHz+? I'm not keen on getting a super-massive gaming tower. The smaller the better.
ss_lemonade
Member
Is that what you currently use? I could test it later on my Surface Book but that one has an i7 6600u, to give you an idea.
lostsupper
Banned
Extremely possible. There's really no good reason to build on ATX at all anymore.
jediyoshi
Member
Well, if to the extent that you'd have to ask the difference between the two to begin with. Most people don't actually need cars either but the distinction between owning a vehicle and using public transportation is self apparent.
TC McQueen
Member
This would be true if M-ATX board designers would stop putting the short PCI-E slot that's ideal for WiFi cards below the main PCI-E x16 slot.
Also, if you live in a hot climate, you might want a big case that can accommodate big fans for maximum air flow.
DonMigs85
Member
There are Z170 mini-ITX boards with built-in wifi
Also look at this beauty with a GTX 1070 mini
lostsupper
Banned
What the what?
SLI is dead. If you need a pcie card, mATX has two full-size slots. Or like the other poster mentioned, get an ITX or mATX board with built-in wifi. There are tons of ITX cases with tons of airflow.
Pancakes R Us
Member
I'm considering buying a SP4 at the moment.
Has anyone managed to get a smooth framerate in Wave Race Blue Storm? Or maybe it's just me, but despite the emulator saying it's running at 100% it feels like its constantly skipping frames here and there, like a judder/stuttering. Despite running at 20fps, Wave Race 64 feels a lot smoother thanks to its steady framerate. 
StrategyFan
Member
Has anyone managed to get a smooth framerate in Wave Race Blue Storm? Or maybe it's just me, but despite the emulator saying it's running at 100% it feels like its constantly skipping frames here and there, like a judder/stuttering. Despite running at 20fps, Wave Race 64 feels a lot smoother thanks to its steady framerate.
the races run at a steady 30fps for me
i have a very fast pc though
wowbaggerBR
Member
I'm just here to report that, contrary to what people have told me in this thread, Intel integrated GPUs work very well emulating the GameCube. I've bought a Intel NUC and will use its motherboard on an old console (PS2, PS1 or GameCube, it all depends on air circulation ATM) as a retrogaming machine.
DonMigs85
Member
Depends on the game, oftentimes you have to stick to 720p on anything without the L4 cache and you can't use fancy MSAA or SSAA.
Fantastical
Death Prophet
Which NUC do you have?
-shadow-
Member
I'm a bit shocked at how few games support PAL 60Hz (and more so that you can for 480p out of some PAL games). Any reason why companies didn't jist include the option in so many games? Seems like a rather simple fix in that time.
BlazeHedgehog
Member
Wow, Ishiiruka is great. A lot of games run a lot smoother for me on that than they do vanilla Dolphin
The shader pop in is a bit of a bummer, though
The shader pop in is a bit of a bummer, though
mikezilla2
Member
edit: wrong thread
On GC there is no system wide way to set the screen format so the game itself had to offer some setting (hidden or not) on game boot up (usually even before the memory card is accessed, so it has to be done at every single boot up). Most developers just didn't bother with such a hack.
wowbaggerBR
Member
Yep. Everything that I've tried worked on 720p at full speed (and some games even in Full HD) so far. I don't really care about going Full HD because the system will also run a lot of even older consoles, so HD resolution is fine. The lack of fancy filtering don't bother me either, it's a sacrifice that I'm willing to do in order to not have to deal with a massive, inefficient and cumbersome PC.
Man, I spent a lot of time comparing options from MSI, Gigabyte and Intel, which are the ones you could get here, in Brazil. In the end, I got the one with the Core i7 5557U, which have an Iris GPU (although I run some tests on a notebook with a i7 5500U with a lesser GPU and everything runs fine at 720p - fine being a variable here, but if you enable Directx 12 in that system the improvements were noticeable).
If you are in the market for something like this, I'd suggest you wait some more because Intel should release new ones in january, with Kaby Lake processors. But, if you don't want to wait, look for versions with Iris GPU (the Skull Canyon one has a great one, far better than mine, with a quad-core i7 for good measure, but costs a fortune). Or you could look for Zotacs Zboxes and Gigabyte BRIXes with dedicated GPUs.
In my case, a dedicated GPU wasn't a viable option because I'll stuff the motherboard on a console, so space and air flow is crucial. Besides, I'll run it with Recalbox OS, which is a Linux distro and the Intel drivers for Linux are fine, something you can't say about Nvidia and AMD.
And finally, don't believe people saying it won't work. If you have doubts, try it on a notebook: NUCs have the same processors used in a lot of mid range laptops and if it runs in a much more thermal constraint notebook, it certainy will in a NUC.
Theonik
Member
It's also an extra mode to validate with PAL50 being mandatory and a massive pain already.
-shadow-
Member
Shame that this was such a lazy (yes lazy considering you can activate it in a whole bunch of games through Action Replay) way of handling things. But whatever, the from the previous generation 50Hz is pretty much dead so not a problem anymore anyway!
Fantastical
Death Prophet
Thanks! I'm not really in the market right now but I do find that market pretty fascinating. I used to work in a lab on my college campus and they needed a small computer, and I ended up ordering a bunch of Gigabyte Brix for them. I got the most powerful version at the time and I would play around with those a bit. Pretty cool little boxes, but they were loud as fuck.
I actually have an Intel NUC from about 3 years ago I think. Yours looks nice, mine is significantly less capable. Really at the time I was looking for a box to stream with Steam and do some media stuff. For those purposes it worked well, but yeah I was eyeing the higher end models at the time.
Yo dawgs, is Vulkan mode just super experimental? When I try it out I just get varying shades of blue covering the entire screen, games run though, evident by the music and sound effects, no errors in the log either. AMD GPU if that matters. I get that there's zero reason to even use it over DX11, just curious.
DonMigs85
Member
You have the latest driver? Once they iron out the bugs and add more features Vulkan will be the best API for AMD cards.
Yes I am, I even DDU'd them (twice) to see if it was some driver error, but nope, odd. Various games give various degrees of various shades of flashing blue. Tried looking elsewhere for answers but I haven't seen anyone else with the same issue, I even got the DOOM demo to see if Vulkan worked properly, which it does, so I'm at a loss.
Edit: I'm so dumb, all I had to do was disable the External Framebuffer for it to work lol. Cool to know it's not something with my hardware setup at least
. The implementation obviously needs some time to mature, noticing visible seams between polygons and such, good thing DX11/12 both work fine in the meantime.Cow Mengde
Banned
I have a 960m for my laptop. Am I out of luck with Vulkan?
I think he's referring to how AMD cards don't do nearly as well in OpenGL as Nvidia cards. Nvidia has a performance advantage in DX11 in general as well.
DonMigs85
Member
Yes, there's the odd game that really needs OpenGL for the best quality/performance or even just to run at all, but OpenGL is horrible on AMD GPUs. Vulkan will help solve that. I think the external framebuffer also works in Virtual Mode. A few games like Auto Modellista need it to display properly.
KojiKnight
Member
Besides games that tie 16:9 to progressive scan, is there even a reason to use it? GCN games are rendered internally in progressive than converted to interlace aren't they? Which is skipped entirely when emulating on pc. At least I can't remember running any gcn games in dolphin in interlaced, versus ps2 games which can be quite troublesome.
New article: Dolphin Progress Report: November 2016
Aw yeah, 30K 500 megapixels screenshots are the future.
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
Holy crap at those captures.
Also, if we're talking about <10 second penalty at startup, this new method of generating shaders by caching shader instructions sounds like the way to go.
Barrow Roll
Member
So does this new method of generating shaders eliminate stuttering? Because I'd gladly take a longer boot for a completely smooth experience.
stan423321
Member
It's not Ubershaders, so not by itself. BUT maybe you could take someone else's prefilled UID cache (not sure how legal would that be) or perhaps count on someone writing a cache generator? Anyway it looks like this is not really ready yet.
This method still needs you to compile the shader once before you gain the benefits. So this won't eliminate shader compilation stuttering on initial play throughs. One of the benefits is that the shader cache should need to be invalidated far less often.
Barrow Roll
Member
The GUI setting is limited to 8x but you can manually set higher values with the GameINI.