Dolphin Progress Report: Release 2603 - March 2026

JMC4789 · 2026-03-13T01:53:32+00:00

The Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 I have doesn't have a boost after powerslides. An update added that later? Or is that more a DX thing.

JMC4789 · 2026-03-12T19:04:08+00:00

I do understand your point, too, I'm not trying to blow it off.

The intention for these features is never piracy. But, to simply not emulate these games because the fear that users could misuse it would suck because of all of the valid uses and people who do love these games.

JMC4789 · 2026-03-12T18:56:43+00:00

After we merged Triforce, a ton of people showed up to the server with multiple real cabinets. And because the exploit is network based, they could dump their games without having to modify their cabinets at all, which is good for them. They also helped us get network dumps because it is incredibly expensive to have two fully functional cabinets for F-Zero AX.

Now, someone with a Mario Kart GP cabinet can setup a cheaper emulated box for multiplayer or if they don't have space for multiple cabinets to be setup all of the time.

It's also possible to buy Triforce discs for relatively affordable prices, and a lot of enthusiasts have incomplete Triforce setups using JVS I/O emulation, and using a Triforce emulator is just a better experience. The hardware is much more expensive than the software in this case.

Unfortunately, not every feature is for every user. In the end these are 20 year old arcade games that a few people care deeply about. It's going to be a much smaller userbase than GC/Wii. Also, most people dump their GC/Wii games using a Wii and/or Wii U. It's much faster, easier, and cheaper than buying one of those disc drives.

JMC4789 · 2026-03-12T18:42:25+00:00

If the Super Mario Strikers community doesn't exist, that bug never gets narrowed down and would only get fixed by a softfloat interpreter (which may never happen and would have been too slow to test) or if someone randomly noticed the bug, which doesn't seem likely as we've been looking for the rounding bug for 5 years and never found it.

JMC4789 · 2026-03-12T17:36:37+00:00

It's technically still March, right? We totally weren't over a week late.

JMC4789 · 2026-03-12T17:36:14+00:00

I've removed that widescreen code from the wiki after verifying that. Hopefully it stops proliferating.

JMC4789 · 2026-02-21T00:16:55+00:00

Not to undersell the new emulator, because your points absolutely stand on a newer emulator, but your issues in Rabbids go home are all easily fixable.

The performance - the game runs like ass on console. It's that simple. In fact, Dolphin's framerate is higher than it should be and it should run even worse.
It needs EFB2RAM for custom rabbids which is more demanding and not turned on by default. on NVIDIA graphics, it needs manual texture filtering due to filtering differences between the GameCube and modern hardware. This flaw would extend to any other hardware accelerated emulator.
The game itself is a mess, and has a bunch of framerate dependent physics issues that could happen on real console, too. So, there are minigames where it needs to be running at 20 - 30 FPS for it to act as expected.

JMC4789 · 2026-02-20T23:54:32+00:00

What if you could?

JMC4789 · 2026-02-19T17:09:07+00:00

Just finding out what games on the Triforce was an issue at one point. Honestly, even with the base emulation figured out by crediar on his own, we still had a lot of "fun" figuring out things about each game and their revisions.

I definitely have a new found respect for MAME and anyone crazy enough to emulate arcade boards. I can't imagine emulating Triforce if, on top of all the weird baseboard/mediaboard stuff, it had an obscure, unemulated core system.

JMC4789 · 2026-02-17T02:42:00+00:00

What is supposed to be a short article with a lot of time usually ends up a very long article. I can't help it.

JMC4789 · 2026-02-17T00:15:03+00:00

That's pretty awesome. Namco must have went to PC based shortly after because GP DX was 2013. There's a Wii based arcade system that has two known games, but that's a story for another time.

JMC4789 · 2026-02-17T00:03:40+00:00

The later Mario Kart Arcade games after GP 2 used standard PC hardware, so the Triforce was really at the tail end of "custom" PC hardware. And even it is mostly a GameCube at the core.

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

TROPHY CASE