Tag archieven: Cheats

Dolphin Progress Report: May and June 2022

It's been a very hectic two months. Dolphin's development builds officially dropped support for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 in 5.0-16393 when the Windows buildbots were updated to use Qt6. If you read the last Progress Report, you'd know that Windows 7 was already on shaky terms due to rampant breakages, but it was Qt6 that finally ended the legacy operating systems. We wrote an entire article about this, so be sure to read that here if you haven't already.

But with loss, some new has also come. We now have a new builder for Windows on ARM! Dolphin has supported Windows on ARM for a couple of years now, but we haven't provided builds due to a lack of prospective users and a lack of space on the buildbot server. But times have changed - the buildbot has seen some upgrades with a new, bigger harddisk and shuffle2 has renovated parts of the infrastructure to make supporting Windows ARM64 builds easier. With those two hurdles out of the way, we've now configured our buildbot to provide Windows ARM64 builds on our Downloads page. We're not exactly sure how much use these builds will get, but we're hopeful for the future of the platform.

But by this point, you're probably as sick of hearing about the gives and takes of supporting various operating systems as we are of writing about them, so let's get to some emulation goodness. We've got some highly technical changes, including a new "Graphics Mod" system that allows modders and users to create graphical mods. If you're into the edge of emulation, we've also seen support for the annoying Datel Loader used for Action Replay discs and a few very odd unlicensed devices without needing an original GameCube BIOS or swapping to DSP-LLE. This is somewhat significant for reasons we'll get into later, because using real Action Replay discs does make a difference!

For those who love creative homebrew, we've also added support for the homebrew libasnd microcode to HLE audio, meaning that you no longer need to switch to LLE audio for many homebrew titles. We go into the details of all of this and more on this Dolphin Progress Report!

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Dolphin Progress Report: September and October 2018

Since the Dolphin 5.0 release, Dolphin has had opt-in usage statistics reporting to help us determine what hardware and builds users are using. Recently, this feature was also added to Dolphin Android, letting us see that around 10% of our users on development builds are using the Android version of Dolphin. Obviously, Dolphin on Android isn't going to be a perfect experience for quite some time, but in the meantime we will continue to add features and try to make the Android experience as clean as possible, even if the hardware is going to struggle with emulating GameCube and Wii games.

As a part of that, a lot of the major GUI features from the desktop version of Dolphin have been ported over. Just this year, we've seen important features like INI support, INI configuration, auto-update support, and even statistics reporting. Unfortunately, trying to bring the desktop experience to phones has caused some confusion that would seem like second nature to desktop users. Savestates in Dolphin are not compatible between builds and a lot of phone users that had been solely relying on savestates were in for a rude awakening during the next auto-update.

An unfortunate series of events lead to some deserved negative reviews on the Appstore and other mediums. With the brand-new auto-update feature came a bunch of broken savestates for users with no warning whatsoever. Unlike the desktop builds, savestates are immediately available directly from the context menu during emulation without any warnings or other information. Regardless of auto-update, relying solely on savestates for your progress is a risky proposition and we highly recommend using in-game saves as a more permanent way to save your game.


"Updated without warning and my save states were completely lost. The game's save function broke, so those were the only saves I had. For a GameCube emulator on Android it was working really well, but losing all my progress because they couldn't make old save states work with the update was really disappointing." -- User review on the Dolphin App within the Google Play Store


Dolphin's design doesn't really allow for savestates to work between different builds safely, so we were left with a difficult decision. Users randomly losing their save data is not acceptable, but removing savestates on Android would be awful. So as a compromise, we've added an option to enable savestates in the configuration menu, with an explanation of how they are intended to be used so users can understand the risks. We're sorry to anyone who ran into issues in the meantime, but as Dolphin on Android becomes a more legitimate option in the future, we're likely to run into more of these growing pains. All we can do is ask users to be patient and continue to report issues as we go forward.

Now that we've got that out of the way, there's plenty of other notable changes to get through this month so let's start chewing through them!

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Datel: Unlicensed Product Showcase

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Software licensing has been a way to control not only the quality of products for game consoles, but also limit what developers could do. From the Nintendo Entertainment System onward, Nintendo has used a variety of lockout chips and DRM in order to make sure all of the products on their consoles had the Nintendo Seal of Approval. Their efforts kept quality much higher than in the previous era of gaming, but did not completely stomp out all unlicensed products and games. For the GameCube, Wii, and many other consoles, Datel has been the most prominent producer of unlicensed hardware and software. They have survived a rough market to make a claim to fame with popular products such as Action Replay!

These range from extremely interesting utilities to minigame collections. So, enjoy a quick look at some of this rarely emulated software!


Unlicensed Datel Software Showcase

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