Is anybody playing the Dolphin Emulator (Wii/GCN) ?

[BetaWolf47]

The 2 Ghz recommendation for Dolphin is really vague. Clock speed means a lot less now than it did 6 years ago. What kind (line, model) processor and video card would one need to play Dolphin at a decent speed?

[ScourDX]

I doubt it will run perfectly. PS2 Emulator was out for a while and my Quad Core machine still have problems with it. To run the GCN/Wii emulator, you need to find the plugin and bios. Finding those are pain in the ass.

[WCP]

From what I understand over at the official forums they recommend either an i5 750, or a i7 920, along with a GeForce 260 or better. Even then, performance quality is very sketchy.

[JSoup]

His post are always like that.

He's 's either a non native English speaker and is very inconsiderate by not at least running his post through a word processor to try to minimize errors with it's assistance prior to posting it here.

Or he's just barely literate or just doesn't care enough to attempt to properly write something that resembles the English language.

Or...he's a troll.

[heybtbm]

To run the GCN/Wii emulator, you need to find the plugin and bios. Finding those are pain in the ass.

This literally took me 5 seconds to find (+1 second to download). YMMV, matey.

[RunNerdRUn]

It looks like I am a bit late to this conversation, but I had to say something. And before everyone starts their crap... I currently own a Wii, and have had it since 1st gen. I also own several Gamecubes (my wife owns a daycare and somehow we have accumulated half a dozen Gamecubes). But I quit playing the Wii a couple of years ago, because... well... I think you all know why... It sucks. But, I found myself playing around with the Dolphin Emulator due to the fact that I have had a mild obsession (as of late) with MAME and the Hyperspin Front-end. Essentially, I was satisfied with my MAME/Hyperspin setup on my Media Center PC and found myself wanting to add other emulators to my Hyperspin setup. I watched a video from a guy who basically had every game ever made and he mentioned Dolphin. I was suprised to see that there was a working Wii emulator out there and I thought it would be nice to have some Mario games on my Media Center.

Within 15 minutes of messing with it, my jaw dropped. I was playing Soul Caliber for GC at 1080p and it looked friggin beautiful! I then found myself loading all my old ISO's (one of my old GC's, and my Wii have mod chips) into Dolphin and found myself amazed at the quality of the games. This isn't just video upscaling, this is internal resolution doubled to 1280x1056 (and if your PC has the guts up to 4x (2560x2112)) with 9x SSAA Anti-Aliasing, 16x Anisotropic Filtering, Per-Pixel Lighting, and hacked for Widescreen (true widescreen on GC games, not just stretched). If you have a 3D capable NVidia card, it will even turn on 3D Vision. Oh... and surround sound.

You can setup up to 4 controllers (I am using 2 Xbox 360 wireless controllers), turn on gameshark hacks, and on and on...

Dolphin is by far the best and most amazing console emulator out there. I wish that there were a PS2 emu that could work as good as Dolphin.

Did I mention Dolphin is amazing?

Okay, I'm gushing. I will confess that not every game looks amazing... Viewtiful Joe - looks like crap.. any upscaled raster based games don't cut it at high res or on big screens. But 3D games look great. I have also noticed that sound seems to be kind of a pain in the ass to get working right, but it is tweakable and only has problems in some games.

PC Setup:
Windows 7 x64
AMD Phenom II X4 965 @ 3.4 GHz
8 GB RAM
Radeon 6950 w/ 2GB

[SOL BADGUY]

PCSX2 works better on my computer than Dolphin, its not preferable though for either. The wiki faq for Dolphin was so rude I stopped reading after a few sentences. I wish the developers would be nicer and talk like normal humans about their emulators.

[Ed Oscuro]

Haha, some devs are like that. "The plebes are so used to having everything hand fed to them, I can't stand it! Here, read through the commented C code yourselves ya worthless morons."

Tiny GameCube dick is still entirely functional, though, so I'm not going to mess around with this.

[Xander]

PCSX2 works better on my computer than Dolphin, its not preferable though for either. The wiki faq for Dolphin was so rude I stopped reading after a few sentences. I wish the developers would be nicer and talk like normal humans about their emulators.

I think they changed it now. http://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=FAQ looked fairly cordial to me.

[rkotm]

I LOVE THIS EMULATOR.It plays Wii and GCN games perfectly (most, a few klunkers every now and then) and the games look amazing. My specs are:

AMD Quad Core A8 5500 3.5 ghz processor
Generic GeFORCE GTX 610 card (2 gig) video card
6 gig DDR3 ram
1 TB
Windows 8

Looks better graphically than my Wii does on the same tv, as i use a 32" flat screen tv as a monitor, best purhchase i ever made, and by the way, why doesnt EVERYONE buy a 32" tv for their computers?? Why waste your money on a monitor that costs 200$ for a 24 inch monitor when you could spend the same on a 32" tv?? It's HD and everything. Hell, even a 24" tv is much cheaper to buy than a monitor of the same size. Doesn't hurt my eyes at all, and it's a no name brand (E Tec).
Anyway, i just can't get the shake function to emulate on my controller. I assigned different combinations, and nothing works.

I also have trouble syncing a Wii Mote to the computer. It's Blue tooth ready, but apparently i dont have the right "stacks" or whatever the hell.

[StealthLurker]

I've been using Dolphin for a while now. Maybe 2+ years? Yes it's amazing.

The lowest spec PC I've run it was a Core2Duo 3Ghz, 4GB RAM and some profile radeon card (I forgot what it was). Ran things pretty nicely at around 720p.

Also run it at much higher settings on my i7 @ 4.3Ghz, 16GB RAM, etc.

Most of the games I want to play run great on it. The only one that's glitchy for me is the Gunblade/LA Machine Guns combo pack. Most other gun games run great and look stunning. Also like to bust out a lot of Super Mario Kart, Sin & Punishment, Tatsunoko vs Capcom... Deadspace looks like a PS3 game when running in 1080p. Muramasa looks pretty good too.

Using whatever controllers you want for games that don't require motion controls is great too. Using a wireless 360 pad or one of my Hori RAP joysticks. However real wiimotes for Mario Kart, New Super Mario Bros and gun games is great too.

You can run WiiWare games too which is nice.

I still buy Wii games though to support Nintendo. Also have 3 Wiis hooked up around the house (also got 3 ps3s & 3 360s, so don't think I'm a nintendo fanboy). However, most of my actual Wii/GC playtime these days is spent on Dolphin haha. Looks just too damn good!

.

[StealthLurker]

I LOVE THIS EMULATOR.It plays Wii and GCN games perfectly (most, a few klunkers every now and then) and the games look amazing. My specs are:

AMD Quad Core A8 5500 3.5 ghz processor
Generic GeFORCE GTX 610 card (2 gig) video card
6 gig DDR3 ram
1 TB
Windows 8

Looks better graphically than my Wii does on the same tv, as i use a 32" flat screen tv as a monitor, best purhchase i ever made, and by the way, why doesnt EVERYONE buy a 32" tv for their computers?? Why waste your money on a monitor that costs 200$ for a 24 inch monitor when you could spend the same on a 32" tv?? It's HD and everything. Hell, even a 24" tv is much cheaper to buy than a monitor of the same size. Doesn't hurt my eyes at all, and it's a no name brand (E Tec).
Anyway, i just can't get the shake function to emulate on my controller. I assigned different combinations, and nothing works.

I also have trouble syncing a Wii Mote to the computer. It's Blue tooth ready, but apparently i dont have the right "stacks" or whatever the hell.

Yeah. I've got a dedicated "gaming level" PC hooked up to most of my HDTVs. I'm running a PC on a 50" in the master bedroom. Another PC on another 50" upstairs. Another PC (my main "sit down at a desk" PC) double screened to a 40" and 46". Then another PC hooked up to a 37" in vertical orientation for shmups.

The BlueSoleil BT stack works the best. That's the only stack that allowed me to reliably connect 2 real wiimotes to Dolphin. However I have very stable results with the Microsoft built-in bluetooth stack in Windows 7 for a single real wiimote.


.

[PreZZ]

I have it and played it a couple of times, but for the most part its just not as fluid as the original and has lots of glitches. I really wanted the mario kart GP arcade game, and let me tell you, its bad!! The tracks and powerups are not good.

[StealthLurker]

I have it and played it a couple of times, but for the most part its just not as fluid as the original and has lots of glitches. I really wanted the mario kart GP arcade game, and let me tell you, its bad!! The tracks and powerups are not good.

Well...

The version you're running, which architecture version, what build number, who's the builder, what are your emu settings and what are your PC specs?

Lots of things affect the performance. Definitely isn't simple plug and play. Sometimes you need to tweak settings for diff games. Sometimes you even need different versions of the emulator for particular games. I keep about 5-6 different builds of Dolphin on each PC (but they all share the same ISO folder).

The Dolphin forums have several threads, one for each person compiling it. There they post their latest running development build which is usually much, much more up to date than the official builds.

However when you do get it all dialed in correctly, it's really tough to go back to a real Wii... unless you leave your Wii hooked up to a nice CRT.... BUT, it's nice to play on a much larger screen in crisp higher internal resolution at a fluid framerate.

.

[Ed Oscuro]

Why waste your money on a monitor that costs 200$ for a 24 inch monitor when you could spend the same on a 32" tv??

Well, it depends on the person, but a few things to consider: Beyond a certain size HDTVs tend to have nutso lag. $200 probably goes a bit further than it used to for monitors, though I'm not sure even that's enough to get a really nice one - right now the standouts use in-plane switching, IPS panels (or similar). TN technology is pretty much dead; CFL backlights are next (god, I hate my monitor's CFL whine on black images).

If you're using a monitor to take the place of a TV, of course getting a TV instead might make more sense. But good monitors remain more flexible than any HDTV, both for sharp viewing of images close-up for serious applications (office work, drawing, photo editing) or just for gaming, and in terms of absolute resolution as well (my own monitor is getting to be a bit older, and its 1920x1200 resolution makes it an odd duck out, but monitors with even higher resolution than this are starting to become more common).

[Zthun]

I didn't see anyone talk about this, but I tried out this emulator but didn't get the chance to run any games on it. You have to make sure to check the dvd drive that your system has. Not many drives have the capabilities to read Wii and Gamecube discs, and if you don't want to store large ISO files, then you'll be SOL. Otherwise, you have two options:

1. Download the game you want using torrents or some file hosting service
2. You need to put the homebrew channel and install an app to rip the games for you (this is the legal option).

Just an fyi if you're still thinking about building a rig for this.

[SOL BADGUY]

I didn't see anyone talk about this, but I tried out this emulator but didn't get the chance to run any games on it. You have to make sure to check the dvd drive that your system has the capabilities to read Wii and Gamecube discs if you don't want to store ISO files. Otherwise, you have two options:

1. Download the game you want using torrents or some file hosting service
2. You need to put the homebrew channel and install an app to rip the games for you (this is the legal option).

Just an fyi if you're still thinking about building a rig for this.

Theyre less than 10 gigs each, pretty big, but not too much room. I downloaded Xenoblade Chronicles(8 gigabytes), Tatsunoku Vs Capcom(2 gigabytes) and Last Story(5 gigabytes), and the Game Cube games are around 1.5 gigabytes or less.

Its the same deal with any emulator, its just easier to have the game files on your computer than have disks in your drive. I downloaded 38 Dreamcast games, 54 Saturn games, well over 150 PS1 games, 90 PS2 games, and a looooot of other games for older systems which take up far less space on my hard drives.

[Zthun]

Theyre less than 10 gigs each, pretty big, but not too much room. I downloaded Xenoblade Chronicles(8 gigabytes), Tatsunoku Vs Capcom(2 gigabytes) and Last Story(5 gigabytes), and the Game Cube games are around 1.5 gigabytes or less.

Its the same deal with any emulator, its just easier to have the game files on your computer than have disks in your drive. I downloaded 38 Dreamcast games, 54 Saturn games, well over 150 PS1 games, 90 PS2 games, and a looooot of other games for older systems which take up far less space on my hard drives.

8 gigs is a pretty large file, especially when you start amassing a collection of them. It's not really an instant download and even a corporate network will take awhile to grab a file of that size through torrents. My HD is only 500 GB and I'm sure not everyone here has TB drives. That 500 GB also includes the OS and all my steam games as well. I guess if you're going to build a rig for this, then I would recommend one or 2 3TB hard drives to store the ISO's.