Címke archívum: bugfix

Dolphin Progress Report: February 2017


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!


dolphincontrollers-old.png

UI Design 101: More menus = better.

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Putting all of the options in one place looks better and is easier to use.



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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Dolphin Progress Report: January 2017


Sometimes, it's easy to forget how much work there is left to do on a refined emulator. While the rush of getting a new game to boot or discovering a crazy feature hidden within an obscure gem never gets old, those moments do tend to get further and further apart as accuracy increases. As if to defy fate itself, excitement reigned over the month of January as a plethora of ancient bugs were fixed and many unbootable titles finally saw their day of reckoning come to be!

Among the new recruits are the final Virtual Console game, a massive Wii MMO that installs itself to USB, two games where we're almost certain the developers purposefully put code in to defeat Dolphin, and two channels developed by the remnants of Factor 5.



This is a massive Progress Report, so buckle up and enjoy this month's Notable Changes.

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Dolphin Progress Report: December 2016


We have celebrated the 15th anniversary of the GameCube and the 10th anniversary of the Wii in the last few months. As the Wii's successor, and the brand lineage, has been discontinued in the run-up to the release of the Switch, it is a time for reflection. But, this doesn't mean an end for the GameCube and Wii; if anything, it's a new beginning.

This is when emulation and preservation becomes even more important. How many titles in previous generations would have been lost or forgotten if not for emulation? How many of your favorite games were first experienced in an emulator? With Nintendo's NES Classic and Virtual Console lines, it's very likely that the next generation of gamers are going to be more aware of emulation than ever. Favorite games and experiences are not only going to be passed from friend to friend, but across generations. And we here are going to do our best to make sure that not only are those popular games awaiting, but the entire library of highs and lows, knowns and unknowns.

On the note of software that most people probably haven't experienced, we decided to take a look at one of Nintendo's more interesting pack-in titles, The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition. Featuring emulation software for both the NES and N64 Zelda games (With A Link to the Past omitted only because they were trying to sell the Game Boy Player,) and a demo of Wind Waker, it's one of the more sought after GameCube games.


The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition - A Quick Retrospective


With all of that out of the way, we hope you enjoy this month's notable changes!

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Dolphin Progress Report: November 2016


The biggest news of the month regarding Wii emulation has nothing to do with Dolphin. The vehicle for many of our hardware tests and much, much more, The Homebrew Channel, has gone open source. In its heyday, it was stuffed to the brim with anti-reverse engineering code to prevent nefarious entities from selling the free program. Unfortunately, some of those tricks were also designed to prevent Dolphin from running it. This isn't due to a dislike of Dolphin; in recent years, we've even been tipped off to what we'd need to do to get past the anti-Dolphin checks.

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Dolphin Progress Report: October 2016


This month, we have a few very important things to go over before we get to our notable changes, so let's dig right into that.


NVIDIA Vulkan Support Update

Users may remember that we recommended using older versions of the NVIDIA drivers when using Vulkan. Well, this is no longer required as once NVIDIA was aware of the bug, they fixed it in a few minutes and the fix was rolled out in driver version 375.63. Users can now use the latest …

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Dolphin Progress Report: September 2016


There was apparently some big deal this month about getting every GameCube game to boot. But, the increasingly more amusing part of this new found accuracy is emulating game crashes. When using MMU Enabled + Single Core, it should be impossible for a game to crash Dolphin, but, much more likely to emulate a game crashing in situations where it would on console. As such, booting all games is old news, Dolphin is now onto emulating crashes in all games. One infamous one that didn't work in Dolphin is known as the Gotcha Force "Force 20" game glitch.


Gotcha Force "Force 20" Crash

Though not specially highlighted this month, our applause has to go to aldelero5 for continuing to work on and renovate Dolphin's debugger. With Dolphin's increasingly accurate MMU emulation, it's actually become even more useful to poke at and prod games. They are making it so much easier to research and prod bugs like this to delve even deeper into the game logic!

While that was merged near the beginning of the month, we had another major change merged at the end of the month. Two hours before the progress report was originally scheduled. Dolphin now has another experimental backend, this time using the Vulkan API. Much like D3D12, it should be considered experimental, with a few features still missing from the backend, and many drivers having their own issues with Vulkan.

With that out of the way, let's get onto this month's notable changes!

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Booting the Final GameCube Game


Every single GameCube game can at least boot in Dolphin 5.0. Except one. Star Wars: The Clone Wars and its complex way of using the PowerPC Memory Management Unit rendered it unplayable in Dolphin up to this day. But finally as of Dolphin 5.0-540, this challenge has come and gone: Dolphin can finally boot every single GameCube game in the official library.


Star Wars: The Clone Wars Running in Dolphin


So what makes Star Wars: The Clone Wars so special? To truly understand what's going on, you need to have some knowledge on how the PowerPC's processor handles memory management and how Dolphin emulates it.

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Dolphin Progress Report: August 2016


Dolphin started solely as a GameCube emulator, focused only on the one console. But, when the Wii was released and it was discovered to have hardware almost identical to its older sibling, Dolphin naturally evolved into a GameCube and Wii emulator. All of our readers are probably familiar with this. However, many people don't know that there is yet another console based on the GameCube, one which Dolphin has emulated - the Triforce. An arcade system board developed in a joint partnership between the three powerhouses Namco, Sega, and Nintendo, the Triforce used the GameCube hardware as the heart of many arcade games. Mario Kart GP and GP2, F-Zero AX, along with many other titles headline the Triforce's release library.

This month, Dolphin developers have removed Triforce emulation as one of Dolphin's notable features by removing the ability to use the AM-Baseboard, which was the key to activating Dolphin's Triforce features. After months of discussion, it was determined that while Dolphin should be able to emulate Triforce titles, there simply isn't anyone around to maintain and update the Triforce code. It was implemented in a different time and more or less bruteforces the Triforce games into working in Dolphin without much care into how it fits in and interfaces with the rest of the emulator. A branch still exists that is capable of booting many Triforce games for those interested in playing them.

Developers decided to disable the current triforce emulation with the intent of spurring interest of having efforts toward emulating it revived. Working from a crippled base isn't going to help anyone. The other reason for disabling it is that it has little to no relevance for users: no one is even sure if it could boot any of the triforce games in the condition that it was left in for master.

While Triforce emulation has been disabled, there have been a lot of changes improving the emulation of GameCube and Wii games this month. It's that time again, for the month's notable changes!

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Dolphin Progress Report: June and July 2016


Now that the festivities surrounding the Dolphin 5.0 (and more importantly the feature freeze) are complete, changes have begun to roll into Dolphin once again. While none of the heavy hitters have gotten in just yet, June and July had more than their fair share of merges, regressions, and reverts that make up the typical Dolphin workflow.

It's good to be back!

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Dolphin Progress Report: May 2016


This will likely be the last Progress Report before Dolphin 5.0 is released for one simple reason: we're running out of fixes and notable changes! From here on out, unless some huge bugs are discovered, all we're left with is a few minor regressions and prepwork for the release.

For those wondering why so much care is being taken into Dolphin 5.0's release, look back at Dolphin 4.0's release. It shipped with several huge day one bugs that required 2 hotfix patches to become what people now see as Dolphin 4.0.2. In order to prevent another debacle, all changes are being carefully checked over and tested before and after being merged. We want the highest possible compatibility for our releases, as they are a benchmark for the next wave of development builds until the next release!

For your viewing pleasure, we have a video of an AI being developed for Dolphin fighting its distant ancestor: the Level 9 AI. It turns out an AI built upon all we've learned about Melee in the past 15 years doesn't exactly feel fair to throw at the original AI.


Smashbot vs Level 9 AI

With that, let's get to what is hopefully the last batch of Notable Changes before the 5.0 release!

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