Tag archives: bugfix

To the Screen with Hybrid XFB

Dolphin has been around for over 14 long years at this point. Goals, expectations and standards have shifted quite a bit since the beginning. At one point, just booting a game at all was good enough, regardless of what you would see or hear! Compatibility has gone from a few select titles to almost every game released across two consoles. Considering all of that, it should be no surprise that some solutions that worked in the past slowly came to be a burden going forward. In this case, we're talking about …

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Dolphin Progress Report: October 2017

The October Progress Report is here! ...A little late, but, all here in one piece. While on the outside it may have looked like October was a slow month, the blog staff and devs have been busy behind the scenes. A big feature (and blog article) was being worked on right up until the end of the month... and then we realized it wasn't going to be done in time. We shifted gears a bit too late and resulted in a tardy Progress Report. Fortunately, there are still many very important …

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Dolphin Progress Report: September 2017

While an emulator's primary job is to emulate, there's usually a lot more that goes into a good emulator. For Dolphin, it may feel like a lot of work has gone toward luxury features and optimizations rather than improving accuracy and compatibility. For example, Ubershaders is a wonderful, game-changing feature, but it can't fix any bugs in emulation. With another of those huge features on the brink, it's important to highlight that no one has forgotten about Dolphin's weaknesses - it's just getting harder to fix them. Most of the games …

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Dolphin Mega Progress Report: July and August 2017

July and August have been busy on the blog. On top of working on this Mega Progress Report, two feature length articles had to be made after developers selfishly merged several huge, highly anticipated features without considering that it makes work for us here at the blog! Well, the extra work-load is well worth having the incredible Ubershaders and support for Dragon Quest X!

But even beyond those two massive articles, we've been hard at work keeping up with everything else going on because this is going to be a big …

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Emulating Dragon Quest X Online

In modern times, preservation efforts are running on an ever dwindling timer. Every year, it seems as though more and more games lose their online components. And with games increasingly relying on interactivity and other online features, even a single player game can lose a sizable portion of its content when servers go down. While the Wii mostly dodged that bullet by having a relatively lackluster online infrastructure, we too have seen experiences disappear before our eyes.

Four years ago, Wii Network was merged into Dolphin after over two years …

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Ubershaders: A Ridiculous Solution to an Impossible Problem


When you're playing your favorite game on Dolphin with a powerful computer, things should run fairly well. The game is running full speed, there are no graphical glitches, and you can use your favorite controller if you want. Yet, every time you go to a new area, or load a new effect, there's a very slight but noticeable "stutter." You turn off the framelimiter to check and your computer can run the game at well over full speed. What's going on?

The slowdown when loading new areas, effects, …

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Dolphin Progress Report: June 2017


June was a month where a lot of important features were merged, but few of them had to do with actual emulation. Every emulator has its own philosophy and goals. While the primary goal is usually to emulate the console at hand, many emulators place secondary goals on various features and ideas. One of Dolphin's secondary goals is to make using the emulator as simple of a process as possible. There are lots of features that try to simplify things, like the Game INI system, support for real …

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Dolphin Progress Report: May 2017


A project cannot survive for nearly fourteen years without making some difficult decisions. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong, but, to be successful you have to learn from each and every one. One of the most difficult decisions made for Dolphin was the deprecation and removal of D3D9 despite it being the fastest backend at the time. The promise was that we would take a step back then, and make huge gains in accuracy thanks to being able to use integers throughout VideoCommon.

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Dolphin Progress Report: April 2017


One of the more difficult parts of being an emulator is balancing accuracy, performance and presentation. When Dolphin replaced the hacky, broken asynchronous audio with the synchronous New AX-HLE and New Zelda-HLE implementations, audio accuracy greatly increased! It came as quite the shock when users started complaining about this change and demanding asynchronous audio's return. Some of the criticisms were valid; there were bugs in early synchronous audio causing increased latency that weren't present in asynchronous audio.

All of these growing pains were eventually fixed, but, one complaint …

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Dolphin Progress Report: March 2017


In case you missed it, we had a special April Fools announcement on our Youtube Channel that blog writer JMC47 retired due to his failed bid to sing well in American Idol on Wii. If you want to catch up on the ridiculousness, the video is still up for all to gaze at in utter confusion.


April Fools 2017 - Retirement


With that out of the way, some delays to get everything ready have given us more time …

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