Dolphin Emulator - Search results for 'riding' (2024)

Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on Feb. 8, 2022

/ Last update on May 1, 2022 / Short link / Forum thread

This year, we've hit an important milestone that's been in the works for nearly a decade. In late 2012, Sonicadvance1 began work on Dolphin's ARM JIT. Back then, there weren't any devices that had even a sliver of hope of running Dolphin close to full speed, but that wasn't really the goal. All he wanted to do was see if it could be done; it sounded like a fun, challenging project. However, as time passed the idea turned into more than just a passing curiosity. Users were more than happy to donate to cover the hardware cost of staying on the bleeding edge of a rapidly evolving ecosystem, allowing ARM development to flourish. By 2015, Sonicadvance1 astounded developers and the community alike with footage of Mario Kart: Double Dash!!'s time trial mode running close to full speed.

On that note, we're happy to announce that Dolphin's AArch64 JIT has finally reached feature parity with Dolphin's x86-64 JIT. This means that every PowerPC instruction that the x86-64 JIT supports along with every major JIT feature are now supported in the AArch64 JIT! And this is a great time for ARM in general, with each generation of processor pushing the boundaries and companies like Apple adopting the architecture for larger and higher power devices like their M1 Mac line. For those on mobile phones and tablets, Adreno powered devices provide decent enough graphics drivers to get a reasonable experience at this point. And with a critical bottleneck getting fixed just days ago, performance on Adreno GPUs has skyrocketed. You won't have to scroll far for that news, we promise.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg; we've had three months worth of changes pile up and some other important infrastructure news. We've improved the user experience on macOS significantly and restored support for older devices. In fact, enough has happened that we'll be detailing the status of Dolphin's macOS support near the end of the report.

And... we haven't even talked about any emulation fixes yet. The past three months have had tons of changes that would have normally been the highlight of a Progress Report. The three month gap between reports was not because of a lack of changes. Want to take Riivolution games on netplay? You can. Hate the EA VP6 bugs? Make them a thing of the past with a new option. Wish your favorite LogicOp game worked on GLES or MoltenVK? Odds are, it does now! The list goes on, but outlining everything would take way too long, so let's just dive in. Please enjoy the November, December, and January Progress Report!

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Blog series

This article is number 70 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• Factor5
• JIT
• android
• bugfix
• gamebug
• homebrew
• mac
• netplay
• new feature
• performance
• progress report
• technical

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on Feb. 11, 2021

/ Last update on Sept. 10, 2022 / Short link / Forum thread

Welcome to the Dolphin Progress Report for December 2020 and January 2021! Things ended up running a little behind for this report due to some technical details that we needed to hammer out for a few of these entries. We on the blog team are familiar with the emulator, however there are a lot of technical details that are simply beyond our expertise. Going from things like the AArch64 JIT to GUI changes to IOS updates to game patches that go into low-level hardware behavior is enough to make anyone's head spin! More often than not, we rely on core developers and the authors of a specific change to help us understand what a pull request does so that we can express its purpose accurately here on the blog.

With Progress Reports coming at a mostly bimonthly schedule at this point, this means that sometimes authors have moved onto different things or aren't available to talk. As a blog about emulation, getting these details correct about the various changes and how the emulator works is one of our highest priorities. So, with that out of the way, we hope you enjoy this belated Dolphin Progress Report!

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This article is number 64 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• DS
• Ubisoft
• Wiimote
• android
• audio
• bugfix
• new feature
• progress report
• technical
• ui

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on July 6, 2018

/ Last update on Feb. 15, 2023 / Short link

While we prefer to get these progress reports shortly after the turn of the month, sometimes things happen out of our control. June wasn't exactly a slow month, but it was backloaded with tons of changes that we weren't expecting to get merged so soon.

Sometimes delays are inevitable, but the notable changes that we were able to include thanks to extending the deadline should more than make up for the several day wait. You've been waiting long enough - without further delay, please enjoy this month's notable changes.

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This article is number 46 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• Feature Removal
• Qt
• new feature
• progress report
• technical

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on Jan. 3, 2018

/ Last update on Jan. 27, 2018 / Short link / Forum thread

After the massive Hybrid XFB article that hit late November, we at the blog staff went into a bit of a hibernation. But after a short holiday break, we're back and ready for more. Before we get to the rest of November and December's changes, make sure you check out the absolutely massive Hybrid XFB article and the accompanying video.

With both Ubershaders, Hybrid XFB, and many of the other targeted features for the next release merged, a lot of users have started wondering when our next release will be announced. The answer to that is not soon. With these huge changes have come a lot of frustrating and annoying regressions that can't easily be solved without a lot of work. If we enter a feature freeze to work on those regressions, we'd be stagnating Dolphin and delaying the other large new features that are still being worked on without any guarantee that the regressions will be sorted out.

So for now, the plan is to just keep moving and wait for a better opportunity to start the release process.

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This article is number 42 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• XFB
• android
• bugfix
• progress report
• video

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on March 1, 2017

/ Last update on April 3, 2018 / Short link

As most of you know, Dolphin was born a GameCube emulator. A lot of its core design and concepts are based around assumptions made that it would only be a GameCube emulator. And, as a GameCube emulator, Dolphin performs admirably, with the ability to boot every single title and a large portion of the library having no major issues.

But, Dolphin isn't just a GameCube emulator. One of the more incredible things about its history is that it was modified into a Wii emulator around the time it went open source in 2008. While the core of the Wii is a supercharged GameCube, and things like CPU and GPU emulation were fairly easy to modify into working with only some minor details changing, there are a lot of quirks around it that have been problematic. Not only are there emulation challenges associated with the Wii that Dolphin side-stepped with some dirty hacks, it also struggled to add on all of the new features of the Wii. For many years, the Wii Remote, GameCube controllers configuration, and GameCube controller settings were completely split apart because Dolphin's UI was not designed with more than one primary input method in mind!

In terms of actual emulation, the problems mostly come from the Wii's Starlet ARM coprocessor and everything it brings to the table. To give you an idea of how important Starlet and IOS (Internal Operating System) are on Dolphin, it controls features such as disc access, savegames, networking, USB, ES_Launch (aka, booting games,) and other features necessary for the Wii to function.

Last month, we saw a lot of IOS-HLE improvements, resulting in a big uptick in compatibility. But with these accuracy improvements have come some hiccups and regressions as well. When we fixed The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask by using proper, reverse-engineered values for some important IOS-related things, it brought out some regressions too.

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Blog series

This article is number 34 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• Ubisoft
• bugfix
• progress report

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on Feb. 1, 2015

/ Last update on May 3, 2022 / Short link / Forum thread

Let's kick off the new year with a bang! January will finally let Dolphin answer the question that gets asked every progress report: "Does Rogue Squadron work yet?"

Thanks to a ton of work from the staff, tons of testing from the forum users, hardware tests, newcomers and veteran's alike, Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader and Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike are both playable and completable in Dolphin at long last.

Considering just how many big merges were changed and how much work was done that may not even be the biggest news of the month. So hold tight, and please enjoy this month's Notable Changes!

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Blog series

This article is number 10 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• Factor5
• bugfix
• new feature
• progress report

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