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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_{Stars BG Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Gouliermis (University of Heidelberg). Acknowledgement: Luca Limatola. Edited by MayImilae.}

In the early 1990s, the world found itself at a crossroads of technological change. Electronic entertainment was blowing up just about everywhere, with Nintendo at the forefront of the home video game markets with their Super Nintendo Entertainment System console and Game Boy handheld. But if you were forced into an extended stay at the hospital, you might not have access to any of it. Due to a wave of concerns surrounding electromagnetic interference (EMI) from electronics, many consumer devices were banned from hospitals. If you were lucky enough to have a cell phone at the time, you'd have to go outside of the hospital to make calls.

In 1992, the Starlight Children's Foundation partnered with Nintendo to bring video games into hospitals in a way that complied with stringent hospital regulations. Instead of subjecting children to magazines, books, and daytime television (if they were lucky), the foundation wanted to bring premiere entertainment right into their rooms by creating a hospital approved all-in-one media and gaming station. Their belief was that giving kids a well-needed break from the hardships of treatment, injury, and illness would promote recovery.

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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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It's time for us to again delve into the latest changes hitting the newest release of Dolphin Emulator. If you've been keeping tabs on development channels, you'll know there are some exciting bombshell features waiting for us just over the horizon. Unfortunately, given the close proximity to this release, we've decided to hold a lot of them off so they can get more widespread testing in the development builds before hitting a release. Think of the March 2025 release as an iterative improvement that focuses on user experience and stacking many small iterative improvements instead of swinging for every homerun.

Having said all of that? We do have a few major changes that made the cut.

Probably the most requested of the features in this progress report is the ability to finally set custom graphical settings on a per game basis. Our advanced users may be thinking, "Wait, couldn't we already do that?" and they'd be right. The major change here is that per-game graphical settings has been added directly to the game properties page, allowing for a very easy, visual way to change settings and see what settings are force enabled.

For our achievement hunters out there, RetroAchievements has seen its first major upgrade that will bring a huge amount of quality of life to many games. And if you're into weird old game behaviors? A developer dove into Summoner: A Goddess Reborn to determine why it crashes so much. The catch with this one? Some of these crashes have been confirmed to happen on official hardware!

Additionally, there are a plethora of small, but tangible, changes that are the hallmark of an Open Source project. The desktop versions of Dolphin also saw a lot of improvements to input configuration and a few extra upgrades that might make people who want to track their time spent in games very happy. But, let's not spoil everything and get into the notable changes of the March 2025 release!

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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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Dolphin's users are always looking for new ways to play their favorite games. And when a project called "RetroAchievements" started gaining popularity for adding achievements into retro games, users started wondering if Dolphin would ever add support for the project. Unfortunately for them, Dolphin isn't a retro game emulator. We're a modern emulator that emulates two recent Nintendo consoles! RetroAchievements wouldn't make sense-

Ah shi-

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On the 24th of June, 2016, Dolphin 5.0 was released. The product of a long and hard transition period, the fundamental inaccuracies that plagued Dolphin for over a decade had successfully been undone, and Dolphin was now free of its burdens to swim forward into a new era of accuracy and performance.

Eight years have passed since that great release, and we have seen the dividends of that effort time and time again. Dolphin has seen constant updates, with new features and enhancements coming side by side with bug fixes and stability improvements. Users are now able to upgrade without fear, knowing that even in the unlikely event of a bug it will be fixed within hours. And of the thousands of titles that Dolphin can run, the number that do not function can now be counted on one hand!

All of this was achieved without a new release. In fact, Dolphin has been in the 5.0 era longer than any other, and with almost twenty-two thousand commits over the past eight years, the 5.0 era now makes up over half of Dolphin's entire commit history! But users haven't forgotten our past releases. They have been waiting for years, patiently anticipating when our next release may arrive.

That wait ends today.

However, the purpose of our old stable builds is now no longer relevant to Dolphin Emulator. We no longer need a benchmark to compare against or an anchor to ground us. We have grown beyond them. So in leaving the 5.0 era behind, we are also leaving behind that release scheme and all it offered. In exchange, we're not just giving you a release today, but also a commitment to continuous releases from now on. The long drought of Dolphin releases is no more and will never happen again!

Welcome to a new era of Dolphin Emulator - the Release Era!

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