Dolphin, the popular emulator for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii, just received a major upgrade.Dolphin version 2603 is now available with more Triforce emulation improvements, more playable games, a helpful change for NAS owners, and much more.First, this update introduces a new trick for “fastmem,” a long-standing feature in Dolphin that moves most RAM and MMIO emulation operations to native CPU calls, which is required for acceptable performance in many Wii and GameCube games.
The fastmem feature only worked with games using Block Address Translation (BAT)—titles that used page table addresses, such as the and , couldn’t be optimized in the same way.Dolphin’s fastmem feature now has full support for page table addresses, thanks to some clever workarounds based on monitoring page table modifications during emulation.The blog post explained, “This secret sauce is still heavy, but it's faster than manually translating every page table access! At least, usually.
It depends on the game and how often it uses [the cpu instruction] tlbie.and especially III hit ARAM so hard that they will always see a performance boost from page table fastmem.Meanwhile, some games with custom memory handlers, like , actually lose a little bit of performance due to the overhead of tracking page table updates.” Dolphin also implemented other enhancements that help the games, like texture optimizations, efficiency improvements in CPU emulation, and turning off Branch Following.
That last feature is a significant improvement for most games, but for those games' engine, it causes stuttering issues.With all these changes, the games still require powerful hardware to run at playable speeds, but performance has been doubled in .You might have seen Dolphin’s recent release of Triforce emulation support, which allows arcade games built with GameCube-like hardware to be playable, such as and .
This latest release fixes some problems related to Magnetic Cards and multi-cabinet modes in Triforce games, and more reverse-engineering work is ongoing to solve the remaining issues.For those of you playing games from NAS drives, Dolphin has a new ‘Load Whole Game Into Memory’ setting on desktop platforms.This copies the entire game to your computer’s RAM during gameplay, allowing the source drive to return to an idle state, and removing possible slowdowns from network file access.
As for the other changes, emulation of floating point numbers has been updated to improve online multiplayer in Wii games, there are more options for SDL controller input mapping, and the emulated Wii Menu now loads faster.Finally, games like and now have better performance.Subscribe to the newsletter for deeper Dolphin analysis Joining the newsletter gives you in-depth Dolphin and emulation coverage, technical deep dives, compatibility and performance guidance, and clear explanations of new features so readers can better understand emulator changes and impacts.
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There are binaries available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.Source: Dolphin Blog
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