Dolphin Emulator - Search results for 'basic dolphin drawing' (2024)

Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on Feb. 12, 2023

/ Last update on Feb. 12, 2023 / Short link / Forum thread

We've got a lot of exciting news and features packed into this Progress Report. On top of the normal emulator development, Dolphin's infrastructure has seen a massive overhaul. While most of the work has gone into optimizing our backend and hardware to meet new demands, users may notice some upgrades to user facing features like the Dolphin Wiki and FifoCI.

Some focus on the infrastructure doesn't mean there was a slowdown in progress for the actual emulator, though! A bevy of new contributors to the project mixed with the efforts of stalwarts has brought together some massive new features no one will want to miss. Headlining this Progress Report is a massive new performance hack called VBI Skip. If you're on a weak device that can't consistently play a game full-speed, VBI Skip is a powerful tool that can help make the game more playable and keep audio crisp and clear. If you're looking for higher performance overall, a ton of Vulkan optimizations and general emulator optimizations have given Dolphin a pretty large performance increase. A new option called Cull Vertices on the CPU can also greatly improve the framerate in many games.

If you're instead looking to enjoy some unique games, the Skylanders games can now be played without needing a physical Portal of Power connected. You can even use your own figurine data to continue where you left off with powerful Skylanders!

We have a lot to get through... but first.

It's that time again - we have to warn users of a rather annoying problem that can decimate Dolphin's performance, particularly in mobile devices. The culprit this time is NVIDIA based Optimus laptops - users have been reporting that the discrete NVIDIA graphics card has been giving them a fraction of the performance of Intel's onboard graphics!

We're unsure of what is wrong and haven't been able to determine exactly when it started happening. However, if you find that Dolphin is suddenly running slower than before, you can work-around the issue! Simply add Dolphin to the 3D Settings in the Nvidia Control Panel and set our Power Management setting to "Prefer Maximum Performance." That has been the only way to consistently fix performance.

We also have one more announcement to make. For Android users who want the latest development builds on their phone without wanting to wait, we now have an Open Testing Program on the Play Store app.

Selecting this option will keep your Dolphin up to date with the latest development builds. This means you'll have access to the latest optimizations and features immediately, without having to wait for the next beta update. However, as with our development builds on desktop, there is always the risk of bugs and/or regressions slipping in and going unnoticed for a bit. If you want to live on the bleeding edge, Dolphin's Open Testing Program is here.

Now with all of that out of the way, let's finally get on with December and January's Notable Changes.

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Blog series

This article is number 75 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• Accessory
• Feature Removal
• bugfix
• mod
• new feature
• performance
• progress report

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on May 17, 2022

/ Last update on May 19, 2022 / Short link / Forum thread

After a long wait, the Progress Report is back! This time it wasn't so much from a lack of content, but from a lack of content creators. The past three months had illnesses hit one of our writers and the other had a very challenging move. Even with these major hurdles jumped, we're not even close to 100% yet. It's been a battle to get caught up with all of the big changes to Dolphin the past couple of months and because of that this report is a tad late.

Needless to say, there's only one way to start catching up, and that's to get to digging through the past three months of Notable Changes. Enjoy!

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This article is number 71 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• Disney Trio of Destruction
• Factor5
• Steam Deck
• android
• bugfix
• controller
• driver
• new feature
• progress report
• technical

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on Sept. 7, 2021

/ Last update on Sept. 7, 2021 / Short link / Forum thread

Many gaming communities over the years have reached out to thank emulator developers for their efforts. Emulators are an important part of many classic game communities and give players access to features like netplay multiplayer, modding, and savestates, while also opening up the doors to enhancements not possible on console. Sometimes it's simply more convenient to use an emulator that runs on your desktop, tablet, or phone rather than to dig out and hook up the original console every time you want to play one of your favorite games. However, it's important to state that our relationship with gaming communities is mutual, and without the help of players and fans, there's no way we could handle maintaining a library of thousands of games.

In this Progress Report, the gaming communities were the direct catalyst to many of the changes. They went on difficult debugging adventures, caught small issues that would be invisible to anyone who wasn't extremely familiar with the game, and even came up with patches to make games friendlier to emulator enhancements. All of these contributions, even if it's not code, are appreciated and help make Dolphin what it is today.

So, without further delay, let's get started with the August Progress Report! Enjoy.

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This article is number 68 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• Graphics
• JIT
• Netplay
• bugfix
• performance
• progress report
• speedrun
• technical
• video

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Written by JMC47, MayImilae on June 6, 2021

/ Last update on July 31, 2021 / Short link / Forum thread

After finishing up the macOS M1 article the blog staff took a little break. Then they saw the date.

Upon looking at the actual changelog, however, something became readily apparent: this wasn't going to be just a Progress Report; this was going to be a MEGA Progress Report. The long rumored time era of developers merging everything at once had finally come to pass. We have graphical fixes for Super Mario Galaxy and Luigi's Mansion, crash fixes for Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III, Xenoblade Chronicles, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (AArch64), and new features that make playing games more pleasant! And about AArch64, there are a litany of optimizations and fixes that will change things across most of the library.

And we could go on: Bounding Box, Interpreter, GBA to GCN connectivity, GPU Syncing, Mouse Locking, and still more! There's even a lengthy dev diary at the end for good measure explaining how the great mystery of Pokemon Box's was finally solved. The only way to do it justice is to do it right. So buckle up and get ready for the April and May MEGA Progress Report.

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This article is number 66 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• DevDiary
• Factor5
• GBA
• JIT
• android
• arm
• bounding box
• bugfix
• performance
• progress report
• technical
• video

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on May 5, 2020

/ Last update on May 5, 2020 / Short link / Forum thread

It feels like it's been some time since we've had actually had a monthly Progress Report. This is because there haven't been as many major changes landing, making it harder to fill out a substantial article. That isn't to say that things have slowed down, these smaller changes increase the quality of life for users and add up, especially when jumping from older builds to the latest. However, these changes are a lot harder to show and feature in a Progress Report compared to things that actually affect the core emulation and games. This time around, we had more than enough on our plate to write about, including support in the latest builds for a very interesting game: The Metroid Prime 3's E3 2006 Beta.

But before we get to the new changes, we need to cover something we missed last month. So, without further delay, please enjoy the mostly April Progress Report!

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This article is number 60 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• Netplay
• Qt
• android
• bugfix
• new feature
• progress report
• ui
• video

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on April 1, 2019

/ Last update on April 5, 2019 / Short link / Forum thread

It's not common for a rewrite to be something that warrants an article, but, this is one of the exceptions. Over the past few years, parts of Dolphin's video core have seen renovations to make way for new features, but a fundamental problem remained. Dolphin's video backends suffered from both having too many unique features while also duplicating tons of code from the other backends, making it difficult to add new features and maintain old ones.

Those that have followed Dolphin from the very beginning may remember that its video backends …

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Tags

• D3D
• Graphics
• bugfix
• new feature
• performance
• technical

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on July 30, 2017

/ Last update on July 6, 2023 / Short link / Forum thread

When you're playing your favorite game on Dolphin with a powerful computer, things should run fairly well. The game is running full speed, there are no graphical glitches, and you can use your favorite controller if you want. Yet, every time you go to a new area, or load a new effect, there's a very slight but noticeable "stutter." You turn off the framelimiter to check and your computer can run the game at well over full speed. What's going on?

The slowdown when loading new areas, effects, …

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Tags

• bugfix
• driver
• new feature
• performance
• technical
• ubershaders

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Written by MayImilae, JMC47 on Feb. 1, 2017

/ Last update on April 3, 2018 / Short link

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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This article is number 33 within the blog series Dolphin Progress Report. ‹ Previous article in series / Next article in series ›

Tags

• Factor5
• bugfix
• new feature
• performance
• progress report
• video

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Written by JMC47 on March 9, 2015

/ Last update on March 10, 2015 / Short link / Forum thread

Software licensing has been a way to control not only the quality of products for game consoles, but also limit what developers could do. From the Nintendo Entertainment System onward, Nintendo has used a variety of lockout chips and DRM in order to make sure all of the products on their consoles had the Nintendo Seal of Approval. Their efforts kept quality much higher than in the previous era of gaming, but did not completely stomp out all unlicensed products and games. For the GameCube, Wii, and many other consoles, Datel has been the most prominent producer of unlicensed hardware and software. They have survived a rough market to make a claim to fame with popular products such as Action Replay!

These range from extremely interesting utilities to minigame collections. So, enjoy a quick look at some of this rarely emulated software!

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Tags

• Accessory
• Cheats
• Datel
• Unlicensed
• video

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Written by MayImilae on Aug. 23, 2014

/ Last update on Sept. 11, 2020 / Short link / Forum thread

Update: Since the creation of this article, Bluetooth Passthrough has been created as a new option for Wii Remote connectivity. By taking over the drivers of a Bluetooth Adapter, it allows unprecedented support for Wii Remote features, including the speaker and even 3rd party Wiimotes. However it doesn't work on all bluetooth adapters, and requires some setup to work. Even though it may not be the best option anymore, the DolphinBar remains a very easy all-in-one option for Wii Remote functionality, and we still recommend it for users. The DolphinBar does not current work with Bluetooth Passthrough.

When we first heard about the Mayflash DolphinBar, we were immediately intrigued. Hardware that complements emulators has always existed in some form, like the various controller adapters we commonly use, but never has one benefited an emulator quite this directly. A USB sensor bar, with integrated Bluetooth? A fascinating opportunity! The devs immediately purchased one and sent it to a tester for analysis.

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Tags

• Accessory
• Analysis
• Hardware
• Review

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