During the rapid technological advancements of the early 1990s, the video game industry was on the cusp of a massive addition - another dimension. With console shenanigans like the Super FX chip giving players a taste of 3D, hype was at an all-time high. But the games released for home consoles were nothing compared to what arcade developers were capable of doing. By employing gigantic budgets and cutting-edge hardware, the arcade gave players a chance to see the future, today.
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With the holiday season reaching its apex, we have a few surprises for those of you that have been patiently waiting. The latest release of Dolphin is stuffed with treats. Our first present is presentation - frame presentation, that is. Two new options have arrived and will help users both reduce latency and smooth out games that struggle with frame pacing.
Some games do outright naughty things that make emulation difficult. A slew of them are being coerced onto the nice list this year thanks to a sack full of patches that bypass their troublesome behaviors. Fans of the Broadband Adapter (BBA) have a great present tailored just to them: a new local mode BBA! Designed for allowing multiple instances of Dolphin on the same computer to connect together, it's perfect for use with Parsec or other similar services. And perhaps another gift will have you singing your favorite Wii hits?
But alas, what fun would the holiday season be if we spoiled all the gifts? Read on to unwrap the latest edition of the Dolphin Progress Report.
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Huh? We've received word that apparently the Android users have made the nice list? Really? That can't be right... but this gift is addressed to them.
After more than a couple bumps in the road, RetroAchievements support has finally arrived on the Android version of Dolphin! In Release 2512, the core achievement experience is now available in your pocket. This initial version hasn't quite reached parity yet with the desktop experience, but we didn't want to hold things up any longer. The important thing for Android RetroAchievements users is that you can log in and unlock achievements in supported GameCube games. Because some menus are incomplete, it may be best to have the RetroAchievements website open in the background for achievement lists and other things while we finish up the in-app UI.
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The Dolphin Blog is full of stories surrounding games, their development, and the challenges they present to emulate them. And in these stories, we sometimes have some recurring characters that we gain a better understanding of over time. Factor 5 and their Star Wars: Rogue Squadron games continue to amaze us time and time again as we find different ways that they push the hardware to its limits. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker uses many graphical tricks to create a timeless style, that surprises again and again with just how much care was put into every detail. And, of course the Metroid Prime series shows up often given its sensitivity to even subtle changes to emulation.
However, as with every story, there have to be villains as well. One such villain is the The Disney Trio of Destruction™. For years, users have awaited the final showdown with these games. And guess what? They're finally playable right now. But are these games truly villains? Or were they just misunderstood? In this report, we dive into The Disney Trio of Destruction™ once and for all to determine their true nature.
Not every returning character is a game. Sometimes we also have to deal with our own issues, such as Dual Core mode. It is constantly breaking games, disabled in many popular games by default, and the source of most crashes in Dolphin. But is Dual Core really a hack? Or is Dolphin simply doing something wrong. In this report, we'll dive into the history of Dual Core and make a change that was long overdue.
On top of all of this, several longstanding features in Dolphin also saw some major upgrades, and we'll also get to those throughout the Dolphin Progress Report. With that, let us begin.
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Welcome to the Dolphin Progress Report for Release 2506! As we've alluded to a few times, we've had major changes in the pipeline that we've been very excited to show off. Some of those changes are finally here! Headlining this report are major adjustments to how Dolphin handled audio lag under slowdown by default. No longer will users have to choose between high-latency audio stretching or popping when dealing with small hitches in performance thanks to the new Granule Synthesis Audio System.
If the game is already running full speed, we still have some improvements for you. Dolphin has seen a suite of frame pacing improvements that will give you a smoother experience across almost every game. And, if your system is very powerful, there are a select group of games that can now push past the 60 FPS barrier for high frame rate gaming. Before you get too excited, this feature does not work with most Nintendo developed titles and has incredibly low compatibility in general. For a list of what games support this, we'll get into it later in the report.
If you care about preserving oddball Wii add-ons, we've got you covered here too. Wii Speak emulation is finally here after an incredibly long journey. In addition, long time incompatible game The Daring Game For Girls is finally compatible with Dolphin. We'll get into that game's story and more, but first, we need to get through quite a bit of housekeeping.
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Dolphin 2412 is here and we've got the details for what's new in the latest release. The biggest thing to note is that there's a lot of polishing to help make playing games a little more pleasant. Several key fixes to Dolphin's HLE audio helps bring a few more games toward audio perfection, and adjustments to Dolphin's CPU <-> GPU syncing reduces the number of harmless, but annoying, popup errors that happen in certain games.
That isn't to say there aren't any titles seeing significant improvements. LIT (School of Darkness) had a unique problem that exposed yet another unemulated hardware behavior. And if you're looking for a deep dive into problematic behavior in a game? We have one of those as well. Eternal Darkness has been a thorn in our side the past couple of months and required some special attention to get working again in time for this release.
For details on all that and more, join us for Release 2412's Notable Changes!
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After an exciting round of feature articles, it's Progress Report time once again! However, a lot has changed. Dolphin has finally left the 5.0 era behind, and has entered the Release Era. Not only did we get our first release in eight years, but we also established a commitment to continuous releases going forward.
For the Reports, things will be more or less the same, but with a few changes.
Progress Reports are now also release changelogs. We'll be going over the notable additions and changes between each release in every Progress Report going forward, rather than within a range of dates. As such, the name of the Reports will reflect the release accompanying it - if you want the new features, just update to the version at the top or higher and you'll have them! (However, since 2407 had a release article without a changelog, this Report will be covering the changes in both Release 2407 and Release 2409.)
That also means that the next release is happening right now! Accompanying this report is Dolphin 2409. It is now rolling out via our updater, and is available for download here on our website.
But there was also another feature article since our last Report. Dolphin now has RetroAchievements support!
For those waiting for it to show up in a release build, the wait is now over. Throughout the past couple of months, we've ironed out one major issue alongside many smaller issues with RetroAchievements. The first iteration of RetroAchievements in a release build is stable, but not all that flashy. The groundwork is there for future improvements, but many features and options are yet to be finished. As well, Android support is still deadlocked with a few issues. Please pardon our progress!
We have a bunch of cool statistics from the RetroAchievements team regarding the launch, however, we need to get on with the Report! So just click this handy link to be taken to the bottom of the Report if you'd like to read more!
But before we get to the Notable Changes, we have a couple of things to cover.
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In late 2012, Dolphin moved to a brand new website - dolphin-emu.org. With complete control of our own home and infrastructure for the first time, we noticed the accessibility to users that it gave us. Not only did we get a new home, but we also got a platform, one that allowed us to communicate directly to our users! We used it to great effect, explaining big changes to the emulator such as tev_fixes_new, getting ahead of controversy when we removed the popular D3D9 graphics backend, calling out broken drivers, and more! The Dolphin Blog was born!
However, we quickly realized that while single dedicated articles were great for big changes, Dolphin was improving all the time and tons of important and/or interesting changes were being overlooked simply because they weren't "big enough" to warrant a feature article. We needed something that would let us cover the continuing development of the emulator. Something like, a periodical article filled with a collection of notable changes, so we could report on the progress of Dolphin within a set window of time. And after much experimentation, we built a format to fulfill this role, and released the first of its kind to the world on the 30th of April, 2014.
Ten years ago today, the first Dolphin Progress Report was launched! Since then, our blog has exploded in popularity, and tens of thousands of people read every Report! And in that time, we've made 79 Dolphin Progress Reports, with 797 Notable Changes, 54 special sections, and 301,807 words! Thanks for reading!
As the writers of the Dolphin blog, we are proud of what we have accomplished here. We've highlighted tons of cool changes, educated our users (and ourselves!) on how Dolphin works, we've helped reel in fresh talent for the emulator, we've helped people get into universities and launch their careers, and even helped a few people meet their life partners! Progress Reports have been so impactful, that they have reached far beyond Dolphin. The once novel concept of emulator Progress Reports has become a standard means of user communication throughout emulation!
But of course, ten years is a long time, and we've changed along the way and will continue to change over time. The Reports may grow or shrink, become more or less frequent, structure and style may change, and writers may come and go. And truth be told, this is hard, and we nearly reached the breaking point a few times along the way. But no matter what happens, as the writers of the Dolphin Blog, it is our goal and our hope that for as long there are Notable Changes being made to Dolphin, there will be Progress Reports to feature them!
Speaking of which, anniversary or not, this is a Progress Report. We have Notable Changes to cover! So without further ado, please enjoy the Tenth Anniversary Dolphin Progress Report, and the last Dolphin Progress Report of the 5.0 era.
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