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Dolphin Emulator Progress Report: August, September, and October 2023 (dolphin-emu.org)
137 points by thepbone 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments



> You might be wondering, where is all the pageantry? The honest truth is that things aren't ready yet. We have a few massive changes on the horizon that we wanted to be ready for the 20th anniversary, but that date was not an excuse to release something in a broken and incomplete state.

Awesome.


> This past October, Dolphin turned 20 years old.

Incredible.

First thing : I’m old.

Second thing : Just a thought but it’s amazing that the best Wii emulator is older than the Wii itself. I know it’s logical since the Wii was basically an overclocked GameCube with WiFi and Bluetooth but it’s still impressive that this project managed to follow this evolution in real time.

And last but not least, I’m frankly amazed by this piece of software. It works incredibly well and I’m very grateful of what those people did, it’s a really important thing for video game preservation.


There's also been work on getting Windows NT 4.0 running on Wii. The dev is using Dolphin for testing

https://haqueers.com/@Rairii/111472418904748866


>If you're in the TAS community or relying on constant savestate usage for your project, this is a huge optimization that might make your life a lot easier. Malleo noticed that Dolphin was using LZO for savestates, which has a good compression ratio, but is quite a bit slower than LZ4 when it comes to decompression. By moving Dolphin's savestate compression to LZ4, savestate loading is now ~72% faster.

>For the casual users, savestate loads are now snappier. For speedrunners this will make practicing a single trick over and over again take a little less time. But for people using hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of savestate loads for TAS creation or AI projects, the savings really start to add up.

This makes me incredibly happy.

This is the kind of stuff that developers should care about. A tiny thing that most people don't even notice, but has a huge impact on those who actually use your software.


Dolphin is one of those projects you point to when talking about how great open source software is.


Incredible the variety of scaling techniques. I'd prefer higher native resolutions where possible, but maybe that requires too many per game hacks?


Many of the scaling techniques are used to run games at native resolutions higher than the computer monitor (eg. combined with MSAA which is faster than SSAA, and smooths geometry but not textures/alpha), then downscale it to the screen's native resolution.


Yup. This was particularly important when your monitor resolution was 1024x800 or lower. Without AA, everything was staircases.


So 20 years in: at what point would the developers consider the emulator "feature complete"?


Wow amazing? What's even left to do major feature wise ? VR ?


It's not mainline but there is a fork of Dolphin with VR support and it's pretty OK for a few games!

https://dolphinvr.wordpress.com/downloads/


I thought it was like the Goat Simulator, but for dolphins.


I would play that game.




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