8 ms·
Dolphin Emulator: Progress Report February, March, and April 2023
- countrymile 3y agoI wonder why people contribute to these stand alone emulators rather than making mess work? I'd be very interested in the reasoning
- JBorrow 3y agoBecause MAME is effectively an emulator for arcade games and dolphin is a state-of-the-art console emulator? It is generally not be possible to get the level of fidelity and performance of a custom emulator out of a general-purpose framework like MAME.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoI don't know about mess. Is it an emulator collection? Dolphin is a Gamecube emulator. Would that be a good addition to mess? Maybe one good reason is to constrain project goals in scope.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoIt's an emulator collection but their goal is perfect compatibility over any effort to optimize performance. As an example, with MAME (the arcade counterpart of MESS), when trying to emulate analogue circuits, they'd rather strive for near perfect emulation via very expensive maths operations rather than just use a first or second order approximation. So a significant portion of what makes Dolphin so good would be rejected from MESS on principle. That isn't an inherently bad thing because MESS/MAME isn't really intending to be efficient & "fun" but rather is an archival project designed to allow perfect reproduction of the works indefinitely into the future.
- lostgame 3y ago>> It's an emulator collection but their goal is perfect compatibility over any effort to optimize performance. Then I can easily see why Dolphin would have no interest in joining such a project; what with the incredible focus on and borderline unbelievable achievements with performance they’ve made. Totally different projects, totally different goals.
- nubinetwork 3y ago[flagged]
- Sesse__ 3y agoMAME/MESS has different goals; in particular, it strives for accuracy first and foremost. Hacks that reduce accuracy but improve playability and/or performance are generally not accepted by MAME, AFAIK, whereas something like Dolphin would have tons of them. (MAME is fundamentally a preservation project; the fact that you can actually play the games is secondary.)
- Kwpolska 3y agoWould MESS provide anything useful to an emulator of modern (21st-century) 3D consoles like the GameCube and Wii? Would MESS help or hinder in supporting the use of physical Wii Remotes? Could MESS support netplay between users of the emulator on different computers (as Dolphin does)? Could it support integration between GameCube and GBA (as Dolphin does)?
- flatiron 3y agoThe mame architecture is not friendly to dynarec which is necessary for GameCube and wii.
- rowanG077 3y agoWhat an odd comment. Why would they integrate with MESS? At a glance MESS wouldn't provide anything of use.
- bluescrn 3y agoRetroArch has become the more popular multi-emulator system, and many emulators have now been integrated into it.
- wiz21c 3y agoI know its difficult to be objective, but could you somehow explain in which way it is more popular ? I ask because I'd be happy to contribute my emulator as a core to RetroArch but I'll do it only if I know it will increase the number of my users significantly (which will be quite easy to be honest :-) ).
- apetresc 3y ago> I know its difficult to be objective, but could you somehow explain in which way it is more popular ? I ask because I'd be happy to contribute my emulator as a core to RetroArch but I'll do it only if I know it will increase the number of my users significantly (which will be quite easy to be honest :-) ). It's so obviously true that it's difficult to know where to begin "proving" it. I guess the easiest way is to refer to all the emulation-adjacent projects which essentially rely on RetroArch for the majority of their intregations. LaunchBox can spin up any emulator, but by default it recommends (and auto-configures) RetroArch for all RA-compatible systems. RetroAchievements.org used to only support a few standalone emulators, but once it added RetroArch it blew up in popularity and nowadays the documentation basically just points you to RetroArch. There are entire hardware platforms like RetroPi that rely on RetroArch. The list goes on and on. It's impossible to do almost anything in the emulation ecosystem without bumping headfirst into RetroArch at every turn.
- wiz21c 3y agoOk, that's rather convincing :-)
- sersi 3y agoWhich emulator is that? Posting it on hn would probably also increase the number of users :)
- LocalH 3y agoMESS is a low level emulator. Dolphin is not. Low-level emulation of consoles even like the N64 is mostly infeasible at the moment. MESS works as designed, and doesn't use "speed hacks" or other performance optimizations, by design.
- bdhcuidbebe 3y agoperhaps related to MESS not existing for several years, idk.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoDolphin is amazing. I remember its progress performance-wise. It used to use multiple cores at high load, which to me was understandable, because it emulated a gamecube after all. But at some point they found some intermediate language optimization and performance became superb. I was then able to run it on a nowadays rather weak laptop at low cpu load to play Metroid Prime flawlessly.
- rottencupcakes 3y agoSo is Yuzu, which nearly flawlessly emulates the switch and whose community had the new Zelda game running before the game even launched. I wonder if Nintendo cares enough to do something differently with future consoles - nobody is able to emulate playstation games well, even many generations ago.
- no_time 3y agoEven Nintendo isn't petty enough to sink billions into R&D'ing a novel architecture to ruin the prospect of emulation for a couple a few hundred thousand people at most.
- Ygg2 3y agoYou'd think that. But Nintendo is incredibly petty when it comes to YouTube strikes and prosecution of people pirating 30 year old games.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoTrust me, they are ABSOLUTELY petty enough. They ruined a man’s life in part because he had the last name of “Bowser”. (Yes, I know the case is more complex, but there were bigger fish to fry and Gary was only tech support.) The problem is, and why we’ll never see this, is because Nintendo is highly risk-averse after the Wii U, and unlike tacking a second monitor on (which is relatively cheap), building a custom architecture is expensive and raises major problems, like we saw with Sony grabbing IBM’s CELL architecture. It was amazingly powerful, but difficult to code for and rather expensive to use, which made adoption difficult for devs. Though on the flip side, Nintendo would have much stronger first-party titles, which frankly sell most Switches anyway. I do still believe it’s unlikely due to cost though.
- wiz21c 3y agoDo you know if Dolhpin devs makes money out of it ? I ask because their progress reports are so professional that I wonder where they find the time/energy to do them :-)
- boomboomsubban 3y agoThere are ads on the site, but not enough that I'd expect them to cover much more than hosting.
- bombcar 3y agoIf you want to do release notes, these are quite the goal to copy. Explain the issue, what the developer did to solve it, and what is now enabled. Probably the best I’ve ever read and I’ve not used dolphin in a decade, but I still read each one.
- flatiron 3y agoIs that scalable to real stuff though? At work we pretend out stuff is perfect and nobody is going to put their name on fixes because they are now the next support person for said fix. Open source has no expectation of support.
- capableweb 3y agoUnreal Engine could be said to do "real stuff" and their release notes are quite similar and very expansive. There is no names attached to anything, if I recall correctly, but otherwise the release notes they do are similar.
- maccard 3y agoRelease notes for unreal are auto generated from commit messages. Before the release, you are expected to go through your changes and exclude/clean up any commit messages, and tag them with a major and minor category. Tech writers (I believe) handle the "top of the page" docs. Source: I worked for epic and contributed to a few engine versions.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoSeems like a culture problem more than a scaling problem.
- atoav 3y agoI am not sure it gets more real than a emulator. This is putely a question of organization and how much you care about explaining your releases.
- lvass 3y ago
- vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago[dead]
- wiradikusuma 3y agoWhere do people get the ROMs? For research purpose.
- bdhcuidbebe 3y agohttps://r-roms.github.io/ https://r-roms.github.io/
- Rhedox 3y agoThe only legal way is to dump them from your own hacked Wii.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- haunter 3y agoArchive.org
- pvillano 3y agoFor sharp bilinear, if you set the multiplication factor higher, it approaches nearest-neighbor. And, if the resolutions are very close, you still get softening on half the screen
- snailmailman 3y agoDolphin is an impressive piece of software. And I always enjoy reading their thorough progress reports. I still have my old Wii laying around, with all my old Wii and GameCube games. I followed the dumping guide on dolphin’s site (and a wii hacking guide) and it was shockingly simple. I successfully dumped my entire Wii and GameCube library. And even backed up the Wii onboard memory to dolphin on my PC. And even got dumps of my GameCube memory cards. Dolphin now exactly matches my physical wii, including the complete home menu and all game saves. I was surprised that all of this was possible. I click a button in dolphin and it’s exactly the same as my wii. All the Miis are there, all of the channels. Main difference is that I can swap disks with a click. I was shocked at how simple doing all of this was. The hardest part was just swapping disks and coming back every 15 minutes to swap another disk. I didn’t really play these games anymore on the wii, and I don’t play them in dolphin now either, but it does give me comfort that I could go back and keep playing if my Wii finally bites the dust. I can connect my original Wiimotes via Bluetooth too. It’s really impressive what the dolphin team has done. It’s identical to my console. I could plug my pc into the TV and set the resolution lower and you probably couldn’t tell the difference.
- zerocrates 3y agoI've done the same... I think I had hacked the Wii long ago just because I could, back when a save that used a really long horse name in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess to do a buffer overflow was the usual process. Was still in a good place to dump discs many years later, though. The only snag in my having a really nice library from the dumping method was that I'd sold a bunch of my games by then.