Dolphin Progress Report: November and December 2023, January 2024

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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Dolphin Progress Report: August, September, and October 2023

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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Dolphin Progress Report: May, June, and July 2023

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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What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?

Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first to make sure that our understanding of the situation was legally sound. That took some time, which was frustrating to ourselves and to our users, but now we are educated and ready to give an informed response.

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Dolphin on Steam Indefinitely Postponed

It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been indefinitely postponed. We were notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin's Steam page, and have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is settled. We are currently investigating our options and will have a more in-depth response in the near future.

We appreciate your patience in the meantime.

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Dolphin Progress Report: February, March, and April 2023

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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We heard you! Announcing Steam Achievements for Dolphin (April Fools 2023)

Since we announced the release of Dolphin on Steam a few days ago, many of you have speculated about features we will be supporting at launch. Steam Cloud saves support? Yes. Steam Deck support? Of course. But you have all exceeded our expectations with your enthusiasm for one Steam feature we hadn't originally planned to integrate.

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Coming Soon: Dolphin on Steam!

We are pleased to announce our great experiment - Dolphin is coming to Steam! Our store page is now live, and you can visit it with the handy widget below. However, due to how Steam works, you won't be able to download the emulator through Steam just yet. Feel free to wishlist us to be notified when Dolphin is available to download on Steam!



When we launch on Steam, we'll have a feature article detailing the process and features of the Steam release. We're …

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Dolphin Progress Report: December 2022 and January 2023

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.

A global Maximum Performance Profile does not work, you can only work around the issue by creating a profile specifically for Dolphin Emulator and setting it to Maximum 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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Announcing the Official Dolphin Discord

Over the past four years, the Community Dolphin Discord Server, which was unaffiliated with the project itself, has become a fantastic community that has been providing support and a hub for Dolphin users. While it started out small, the server now boasts over 10,000 users and several of Dolphin's developers interact and help users directly on the server. The immediate nature of Discord is beneficial in that it allows for quick bug reports and support for various issues. Many users in the Discord community are experts in specific facets, like tricky controller mappings, motion controls, netplay, and more.

It has become an important pillar of the Dolphin community and Dolphin development, as a new generation of developers have originated from the Discord server. Recognizing its importance, many of the veteran developers have started monitoring the server as well, providing support and getting feedback for new fixes and experimental changes. It also allows developers and support staff to walk unsure users through making better bug reports on the issue tracker.

So we as a project have discussed among ourselves and with the Community Dolphin Discord members, and have come to a conclusion. The unofficial Dolphin Discord is already a core pillar of our community. It's about time we embraced it. We are pleased to announce that the Dolphin Discord is now the Official Dolphin Discord Server!

Join the Dolphin Discord

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