It's the beginning of the month and time for another Dolphin Progress Report! ...That line doesn't exactly work when it's midway through the month, huh? This Progress Report ended up being a very technically challenging report to write with several huge rabbit holes that go through the history of Dolphin and the games themselves. The first rabbit hole showcases TMEM, the GameCube and Wii's texture cache. Dolphin's approach to emulating this bit of the hardware has been to effectively ignore it exists. Trying to even begin to rectify the problems with …
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Many gaming communities over the years have reached out to thank emulator developers for their efforts. Emulators are an important part of many classic game communities and give players access to features like netplay multiplayer, modding, and savestates, while also opening up the doors to enhancements not possible on console. Sometimes it's simply more convenient to use an emulator that runs on your desktop, tablet, or phone rather than to dig out and hook up the original console every time you want to play one of your favorite games. However, it's …
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After finishing up the macOS M1 article the blog staff took a little break. Then they saw the date.
Upon looking at the actual changelog, however, something became readily apparent: this wasn't going to be just a Progress Report; this was going to be a MEGA Progress Report. The long rumored time era of developers merging everything at once had finally come to pass. We have graphical fixes for Super Mario Galaxy and Luigi's Mansion, crash fixes for …
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Connecting multiple emulators together is a complicated and difficult task. This task becomes even more difficult when you consider connecting two different emulators together. You have to understand two different consoles, how these systems communicate with each other, adapt to latency restrictions, and have expertise across two different projects. In the case of GameCube to Game Boy Advance connectivity, we are incredibly lucky to have had talented developers from both GBA and GameCube circles create our current protocol for supporting "GBA" controllers. Dolphin's GBA connectivity has stagnated for some time with …
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Sometimes the introductions to the Progress Reports are the hardest part to write. The Dolphin Blog has been running for many years, and we've gone through hundreds of changes that affect thousands of titles. We've gone into detail on all kinds of games, from top sellers on the consoles to obscure titles that most of us wouldn't have known existed if not for some random bug report. Despite all of these exciting changes, despite seemingly seeing it all over the years, we still see things that amaze us. The GameCube and …
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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 …
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The past two months have been quite busy with a lot of features and fixes spread out between a lot of contributors, new and old. It's only fitting then that we've seen some important fixes for ancient bugs and new ideas bringing in new features. Even if the game you've been playing is already running fine, developers are hard at work coming up with ways to make things even better. Take for instance a new infrastructure that allows Custom Texture Packs to customize what controls show up in games depending on …
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Kept you waiting, huh? This summer we had our longest break since we started writing these Progress Reports. Some other obligations came up and a bit of a lull in development gave us the opportunity to postpone things for an extra month. As it turned out, pushing things back might have been a bad idea, as the floodgates opened and now there's a gigantic backlog spanning three months to get through! To put things into perspective, since our last Progress Report, the last Nintendo Wii games were released, Dolphin Android had …
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