One of the most impressive things that happened not too long ago was the support for the Wii shop channel shortly before it was scheduled to shutdown purchases. On top of that, it supports many features that would have seemed like a pipe dream less than a decade ago.
Not only can it boot pretty much any game, most games run extremely well, even very obscure games. It’s hard to believe that just seven years ago it was a total mess. It just unpleasant to use in general.īut in 2018, not only has it improved, but it has improved at an outstanding rate. The experience basically sucked, audio was a garbled mess, and many games had severe issues. This was 7 years ago and I remember I briefly used it and 3.5 which was released 6 months later. Still, things weren’t all that great with Dolphin 3.0 when it released in 2011. While they did continue to optimize, the project shifted from trying to be good enough to trying to be correct whenever possible. It started as an experimental emulator that only ran at single digit framerates even on the most powerful of hardware, then expanded into to a much faster plugin based emulator (more on that later), before finally going open source in 2008 and COMPLETELY changing the vision of the project by dropping the plugins system. The reasoning behind that statement is that Dolphin is a project that has been through A LOT. even on things that seems to not have much case, as long as it’s worth it performance wise and what it brings, as long as the question is asked, it’s always better than ignoring it and “just make it work”. So, Dolphin has learned me a lesson, even though it’s a very hard decision and it would certainly seem like it’s not that beneficial, it is always always always better to have a high focus on accuracy.
Dolphin, a Wii/GameCube emulator, was used as an example to explain that even though it might seem like a weird choice at first, it’s always better to go for accuracy and have a certain balance with performance, enough so that modern PC can run most of the things relatively well while older ones might have problems. In newer emulators, it’s often a balancing act of trying to be accurate enough to run games correctly while having enough performance to run well on newer computers. Namely, how accurate is it trying to be and how fast can emulate the target system within that goal.Įssentially, the idea is that you can have the correct and accurate implementation which is more correct, but that will need a lot more computing power than if you approximated it “well enough” to just run the games. While this may all sound great, there’s actually a lot of hard decisions an emulator must make when targeting a system. Emulators even make modding games easier because it’s much easier to poke at the internals of a game from within an emulator than on a closed system. They’ve become a way to more easily push games to their limits, with savestates and other features allowing for easier glitch hunting and tool assisted speedrunning. As the game is running in a contained environment, a lot of neat use cases for emulators have popped up.
For example, an Nintendo 64 emulator for PC allows you to play Nintendo 64 games on your PC because this program simulates it using several resources from your machine to recreate this environment as best as it can.
To summarize, an emulator is a software that simulates a hardware environment that is completely incompatible with the environment it is run on. This post gets into the details about what are emulators for and what they can do. Some of you might have read a previous post I made about the difficulties and usefulness of an emulator. It’s all about the state of the Nintendo 64 emulation: all its problems, all its pain to deal with and most importantly, how much of a problem it is to research Nintendo 64 games. More precisely, the problem and pain that comes with trying to use them to research Nintendo 64 games. The subject of this rant? Nintendo 64 emulation. Be warned this blog post will be a bit more like a rant than usual because I’m literally at my wit’s end and have nothing more I can do but write about my issues and try to inform everyone else of the situation. It’s time to rectify that with this huge blogpost on a problem that’s been constantly frustrating me even more than the issues with Dolphin’s ram search. So, I have been neglecting the blog for quite a while.