Dolphin is probably one of the biggest game emulation projects out there. It started years ago, and while the task of emulating most Wii and GameCube games is a hard one, developers have made great progress to the point that most computers and smartphones can play these old, but gold, titles. Now, the latest progress report has shown it’s gotten a lot better recently.
Dolphin’s latest progress report is out, and it shows many of the things Dolphin has rolled out but hasn’t individually announced. The biggest thing in here, for me, is the fact that the team has changed the default CPU emulation mode on desktop PCs from Dual Core to Single Core. For years, Dual Core mode has been the default choice because it splits the emulation workload across two CPU cores—emulation is very CPU-reliant, so the emulator will naturally try and take the most advantage possible out of the CPU. However, it was also the leading cause of random crashes, instability, and lost save data.
The developers noted that as PC hardware has become more powerful, many no longer need the extra speed from Dual Core mode to achieve full-speed emulation—one core can get the job done. The team decided that the stability and reliability of Single Core mode provide a better out-of-the-box experience for the majority of users. Those with less powerful hardware can still manually enable Dual Core mode at their own risk. This change only applies to the Windows version—the Android version of the emulator will continue to use Dual Core mode as there’s a wide variety of Android phones out there, a lot of which can’t pull it off on one core alone.
It was also announced that three games from developer Avalanche Software—Toy Story 3, Cars 2, and Disney Infinity—which have long been thorns in the side of the Dolphin project are now fully compatible. The primary culprit was what developers called a “dcache suicide pill.” On a real console, the game would write garbage data to a memory region containing critical code, but it would do so in a way that the data only existed in the CPU’s temporary data cache (dcache), which isn’t emulated by Dolphin. Even after this trick was understood and hacked around, the games performed abysmally. The games intentionally used a slower memory access method (Page Tables) instead of the faster default (BATs). Developers have now implemented a game-specific patch that forces all three titles to use the faster BATs, making the games fully playable.
There are other smaller changes in here. The emulator can now load firmware for modern Realtek chipsets, making many previously incompatible Bluetooth dongles fully compatible. A new Resource Manager has been implemented to handle custom HD texture packs more efficiently. Finally, a new option designed for online play and speedrunning, “Correct Time Drift,” now allows the emulator to slightly speed up after a lag spike to catch up with real-world time.
Check out the full list of changes. This is a progress report, so all these changes are live as of the latest Dolphin update.
Source: Dolphin