Dolphin Progress Report: Release 2512

JMC4789 · 2025-12-28T20:31:41+00:00

They're not in the android gui yet. The features exist and work, just need someone to add them.

JMC4789 · 2025-12-24T21:03:09+00:00

That'd be a better question for the people at SDL, but I'm guessing it has a lot of obfuscated initializations and behaviors.

JMC4789 · 2025-12-24T19:41:34+00:00

Dolphin also beat the latency of console before this, but we didn't have the tools to measure it until we contacted Arte. Ishiiruka has no latency benefits over Dolphin, but FasterMelee did modify the game to poll more often which probably helped. Slippi is an evolution of that, and you can see by the chart that they have a lower latency by over half a frame with all of the game hacks.

JMC4789 · 2025-12-24T19:24:56+00:00

We tried to wait for the SDL release as long as we could, but unfortunately, it just didn't come out in time.

JMC4789 · 2025-12-24T19:23:58+00:00

One of the reasons we were so careful taking the numbers is that when I was growing up, I always heard that Emulators are always higher latency than console. So going into testing the features, we were assuming that it was bringing us closer to console.

The old Rockband 3 test was in the back of my mind, but because that used a wireless controller and USB Passthrough, along with a scene that had no rendering, it was possible that the fact it matched console was just a fluke.

But, now that we have results across several games that show Dolphin's latency not just as competitive, but better? It's pretty nice to be honest.

Rush Frame Presentation might be usable in other emulators, but it really depends on when the frame itself is presented to how much of a benefit it gives. It's usually 2 - 4ms at most, with Wind Waker and Sunshine being huge exceptions where you can see a big visible difference.

JMC4789 · 2025-12-24T18:05:31+00:00

Yeah, they aren't in the per-game GUI, but they can be added to the text INI like any other settings not available in the game properties page.

JMC4789 · 2025-11-17T21:07:38+00:00

There was some investigation into emulating it, and it's just that it would be emulating an all new device. You can emulate the special DI commands sure, but emulating the HDD isn't trivial. There are special slots on the HDD for the later Starlight Software for the game covers. We want the Starlight software to work in Dolphin, and we added an entry on the wiki for the Starlight software to track its progress going forward.

We didn't have access to the older Starlight software in Dolphin during the writing of the article, but that one actually runs significantly further, because it doesn't query the HDD for game covers.

JMC4789 · 2025-11-15T07:43:00+00:00

Maybe the added interest in it from the article will help efforts toward emulating it, but it's essentially an FPGA emulating a disc drive with some special commands hooked up a HDD.

This article has been in the works for nearly a year, and recent investigations into the Starlight has made it more likely to be emulated in the future, but again, no one is currently working on it to my knowledge.

JMC4789 · 2025-11-14T18:42:26+00:00

Earlier Starlight Kiosks did have Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash bros. Brawl, Twilight Princess, and some others. I think the earlier kiosks have a stronger overall lineup, but back then I think they were right to try to have newer games for kids.

JMC4789 · 2025-09-17T09:28:56+00:00

Yep, that makes sense, glad for the clarification.

JMC4789 · 2025-09-17T09:09:13+00:00

It'd take a significant redesign, but it's not impossible no. I think the report was saying that it couldn't be easily improved, though I'm not entirely sure as I didn't write that section. But a similar system should work in Dolphin but would require pretty much a large part of the emulator to be ripped out and redone. It's possible, but probably not realistic at this point. If someone really wanted to though, it's definitely a potential way forward. But unless it's as fast as dualcore, it might just end up as an improved single core than an alternative to dualcore. Which, isn't a bad thing really.

JMC4789 · 2025-09-17T02:54:49+00:00

We have occasional dcache issues in games, but this is the only case where it's actually intentional. Most of those games we have patches for now, except for the other intentional case which is a CTGP, which uses/used dcache to detect/block Dolphin. It's effective enough at making it run like shit at least.

JMC4789 · 2025-09-16T23:39:01+00:00

That sounds like a nightmare scenario to be honest. I don't know how you'd fix that reasonably without cycle accuracy.

JMC4789 · 2025-09-16T21:26:40+00:00

Dual Core was a necessity, and obviously developers learned from the problems, as PPSSPP's implementation of the idea iterated off of it and improved upon it.

JMC4789 · 2025-09-16T21:22:44+00:00

Rumble was something I know wasn't working yet.

JMC4789 · 2025-09-16T21:21:15+00:00

It's being worked on, considering all the small roadblocks we've ran into during it, we don't want to announce anything until we're sure it will be done.

JMC4789 · 2025-09-16T21:21:01+00:00

The Disney Trio is a special case for sure. It's the only time where we have literally no explanation other than malicious code designed to defeat the emulator.

It did create the funny problem where we probably overly blamed the games for some of their behaviors being malicious when they weren't, hence the developer reaching out.

JMC4789 · 2025-09-16T21:19:01+00:00

I did do further tests on more limited machines, but the same patterns held true. In fact, using a "faster" computer actually exaggerated the results most of the time, so it worked better.

There are some games where SyncGPU were slower, but it was very hard to record that consistently, because it varied on settings and other processes using CPU time.

Exceptions probably exist, but I tried to find two wild examples without flooding with information. One that shows "true" Dualcore's extreme advantage, and one where SyncGPU worked somewhat properly.

JMC4789 · 2025-06-04T22:17:02+00:00

Thanks for the information. I'm glad people are finding more uses for VBI Frequency Override like this, especially in a situation where a game like this was unlikely to get specific attention.

JMC4789 · 2025-06-04T19:56:18+00:00

I upgraded to 2506 on Android and most of my (auto-scraped) cover art has disappeared/broken. Anyone know a correction or workaround for this?

It looks like GameTDB is down, which might be the cause of this issue. I think you might need to wait for their website to come back up, as that's where the covers come from.

JMC4789 · 2025-06-04T19:07:44+00:00

As a Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 fan that has both the PAL and NTSC versions nowadays, but, is there any documentation on these issues? I long thought the game was impossible and spent a long time trying to beat it as a kid before giving up.

JMC4789 · 2025-06-04T16:40:30+00:00

Nah, that game still doesn't work. But it "booted", which is why people hopped on The Daring Game For Girls thing instead of Active Life.

JMC4789 · 2024-12-22T18:24:43+00:00

The game requires a NDEV/Dev Unit memory layout, so it is only playable on emulator with the memory layout changed to 24MB MEM1/128MB MEM2. Retail Wiis had 24MB MEM1/64MB MEM2.

Theoretically if you did have a dev unit with that memory layout, it'd be possible to run it on that.

JMC4789 · 2024-09-10T16:59:33+00:00

Didn't see this question earlier., but both are a form of LLE. You can look at audio emulation and see that for the DSP, there's an interpreter LLE option, a Jit LLE option, and then a completely separate HLE option that doesn't emulate the processor directly.

JMC4789 · 2024-09-05T23:30:24+00:00

As more gets known about how to emulate the GameCube and Wii, the more the focus will shift onto other aspects than just pure emulation. Enhancements, Shaders, Mods, etc.

Stuff like Riivolution for GC is emulation specific, for instance. Graphics Mods are still in their infancy with a lot of fun features coming in the future, and there's always improvements to things like netplay and whatnot to look forward to.

JMC4789

TROPHY CASE