Archivi del tag: controller

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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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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With the conclusion of the holiday season, it's time for us at the blog to get back to work. And this time around, we have a smattering of changes covering just about everything you could imagine. For those looking to enjoy some of the latest homebrew with DSP-HLE, Dolphin now has support for the latest homebrew microcodes! For retail games, we also have a minor update to the Zelda-HLE microcode to fix a missing effect that's long overdue.

In some more important news, for those of you having disk space issues when running Dolphin on Windows since the last beta, a fix is now available. And for those looking for the clearest picture possible, Dolphin's mipmap heuristic has been backed down to allow for higher resolution mipmaps across more textures. And of course, if you're wanting that perfect image, Custom Aspect Ratios will allow for easier use of ultra-widescreen hacks and more!

Add to all of that a huge bugfix for older revision Steam Decks, another chapter in the Bounding Box saga, seeing a classic in an all new way, and yet another chapter in broken GPU drivers, and you've got yourself a Dolphin Progress Report.

Enjoy.

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This past October, Dolphin turned 20 years old since its initial release to the public as an experimental GameCube emulator. It's been a long ride, with twists and turns. I don't know if anyone back in 2003 expected Dolphin not only to still be under active development 20 years later, but to also support the GameCube's successor in the Wii.

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. For now, development will continue as normal, but we promise that there is some excitement to be had on the horizon.

In the meantime, we have some great changes for you this in Dolphin Progress Report!

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It has been a bit of a tumultuous summer for the project, but now things are returning to normalcy. For those who somehow missed it, the Dolphin on Steam project has ceased after contact between Valve and Nintendo. Though we disagree with their stance and decision, we respect Valve's right to impose whatever restrictions they want within their private storefront. Please read the full article for details.

Fortunately, all that means is that nothing is going to change. We're going to continue working hard to improve Dolphin and make it the best emulator it can be.

Speaking of which, we hope you enjoy this Dolphin Progress Report!

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It's been a hectic past few months for the project. In addition to the upcoming release on Steam, a lot of focus has gone into other major features. While not everything has landed yet, two very important changes to Android did arrive, one of which has been in the works for a couple years!

We're talking about a large scale rewrite to Dolphin's Android Input Handling that will eventually allow it to match the feature set users on Desktop Dolphin builds enjoy. Android users also get another major quality of life upgrade - Dolphin is now a Document Provider on Android. This means you can use Dolphin to directly copy files into and out of its per-app directory on the latest versions of Android.

In this report, we'll be going through both of these and several other important changes. Enjoy!

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The Summer tends to consistently be one of the busiest times for Dolphin's development. While sometimes the question is what do we put into the Progress Report, during the summer months it's usually how much can we fit into the Progress Report? This summer's congestion was then compounded by us blog staff having a few things we've been planning coming into fruition. Still, the show must go on, and we're here... albeit a bit delayed.

As such, we've got a huge smattering of changes to go over and many smaller ones that we couldn't quite fit in. macOS users in general will be able to rejoice with the addition of a brand new Metal backend brought to us by veteran developer TellowKrinkle. They also brought their graphics expertise to improve things for everyone, greatly reducing the remaining causes of shader based delays/stuttering when using Ubershaders. If you're looking for an easier way to setup a wide variety of controllers, a new SDL2 controller backend has been added for all OSes, and even brings native motion control support without the use of a DSU server to non-Linux operating systems. We also have a wide variety of emulation fixes, more graphics mods added, and the long awaited SD card "folder" feature!

All of that and it's our job to write about it. We've got our work cut out for us.

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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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Emulation is often seen as this suspect gray area of gaming that is tolerated but always on the edge. There's a lot of negativity and questions around the merit and purpose of emulation. In contrast to that narrative, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to some of the features added the last few months, including heartfelt reactions from users, make all of the challenges and struggles so much easier.

As we drift further from the heyday of the GameCube and Wii, we've been seeing a greater impact not only on the past generations of gamers, but the current one. It was heartwarming to see long-time users able to play Four Swords Adventures with their kids or friends across the world. The gratitude we received from users finally able to try previously hard-to-access features in their favorite games was so appreciated. We love these games and consoles the same as you, and we want to make sure that they live on.

Sometimes with all the negativity in emulation, it's refreshing to have something that makes both the developers and the users happy. And while we'd love to revel in past accomplishments, there's still so much more work to be done. We graciously thank everyone for their kind words over the past few months, and hope you continue to enjoy using Dolphin Emulator. With that said, it is about time that we get started with the June and July Progress Report.

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