I recently tried running Dolphin on my Macbook after a long hiatus, and was shocked to discover that my games were now running at a buttery 60fps. What's more, there are practically no glitches to be seen or heard anymore. When I last tried booting up my games about a year ago, all I could get was about 45fps at 1x resolution. Now I can have my Wii games with me wherever I go. It's stunning how quickly the Dolphin team is jumping over these technical hurdles. I find it almost impossible to visualize how a bunch of young, eager amateurs (at the time) took an insanely complicated black box and created an almost perfect software version of it!

If you follow the (extremely well written) monthly progress updates on the blog, Dolphin has been seeing speedups in the range of 100% per month in some of the past few months. Pretty incredible.

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/

I guess they’ve hit stage three of make it work, make it correct, make it fast.

Well we were once at a point where we had fast+working, as we added correct we lost speed. Now some of the devs are just re-adding that speed and others are making it even more correct :)

If I recall correctly they are very much focusing on making it /work/ rather than making it /correct/. Which seems to be a very important distinction in emulators.

I know you probably didn't even mean that, but still.

> seeing speedups in the range of 100% per month

Not for all games, as far as I can remember.

Wow, I wished mine is as good. My average is between 40-50fps, and sometimes glitches happened. May I know what's your MBP's specs?

It's a late-2013 retina 15" Macbook Pro with a 2.3GHz i7 and integrated Nvidia graphics. Currently playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid Prime Trilogy (Prime 2) with barely any issues, minus a few very minor ones for the latter: occasional shader generation stuttering and having to set "EFB to Ram" to fix the visor.

Amazing writeup as always. The quality of Dolphin's blog posts is really impressive. Now I want to go play some Wind Waker.

Does Dolphin use JIT like PPSSPP? I have a crappy 2008 Macbook,and PSP games run incredibly well on it. I understand the Gamecube has more powerfull specs,but even on my PC Dolphin games were quite slow 2/3 years ago. I need to try running MSG 1 again to check the progress.

Dolphin indeed has a JIT ( https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/tree/master/Source/Co... ). Fiora has also done her magic in the past few months to make the JIT better and faster than ever.

All this is about fixing a bug in some emulator for an 2001-vintage video game console.

This is about the same thing that the Internet Archive is about: Preserving culture. That is also why the developers prefer accuracy over anything else.

At some point in the future the actual machines that run these games, along with the data stores for these games, will all be broken or otherwise incapable of functioning. However as long as there is machinery that can run these emulators, or emulate an OS that can run these, they will be preserved.

TBH for most people I would say it's more about the technical challenge than preserving culture. It's a fun side project that is difficult enough without being impossible. Lots of these small bugs require tens of hours of intensive debugging and reverse engineering to root cause.

It's not just that they might all break, but that most people don't currently have access to one. Now everyone can see those games and systems.

I'm a longtime emulator fanatic, but have seriously never considered this idea that emulation ensures future generations can experience a part of culture.

So insightful. Thanks for sharing.

I recommend you to read up on byuu's work. He's the author of bSNES, an accuracy-oriented emulator for the SNES.

This article is a bit old, but it's a good start: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

Seriously?

I'll start off with what should be the obvious - Dolphin runs Gamecube and Wii games. Not only does it run said games, but it runs them INCREDIBLY well. Much better than it did a year ago, and arguably better than the consoles run the games itself.

Hell, running some games at 4x resolution will get better performance than the consoles would at their default resolution. That's insane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UouyVg70kRM

That's 1080p and 60fps. Yes, there are some dropped frames but that's a given seeing how he's recording. It's still WAY higher than the Wii generally runs games - I don't even think the Wii plays games in 720p even (stretching the image doesn't really count here).

Anyways, this is a great example of how having a project like this being open sourced can help development. Dolphin is a great emulator and you can't deny that.

Also worth a quick read: http://www.pcgamer.com/how-gamecubewii-emulator-dolphin-got-...

Dolphin is a wii emulator too.

Quite an appropriate topic here, wouldn't you agree?