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Comment by Apofis | Hacker News Reader

For someone that's been following Dolphin's progress for so long it's really amazing that there's already a pretty well done Nintendo Switch emulator.

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It shouldn't be. The hardware and software development toolsets used by modern game systems get ever-so-closer to commodity PC hardware with every market cycle. Older hardware is actually harder to emulate than newer. NES cartridges had their memory controllers built into the cartridge. The newer ones used by games such as Castlevania 3 are imperfectly understood and many games still have crash glitches. Only roughly half of these controllers were made by Nintendo and not all of the ones that weren't were licensed. The situation with the SNES is in some ways better and some ways worse.

The wii and gamecube had only CDs for storage so it doesn't run in to that issue.

They have their own very special requirements. For instance their equivalent of shaders are able to be changed much more quickly than PC architectures's GPUs generally allow.

But dolphin emulator enthusiasts mitigated that by creating huge shader caches by playing the games for hours, and then saving the shaders.

I don’t think they use shader caches anymore? Unless something changed since 2017?

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/

Great story, I enjoyed reading this, thanks for sharing.

> Mali on Android: Not tested. We can safely say it wouldn't end well, though.

This brings memories; my canvas webpage had a number of problems with android mali devices.

The gamecube used mini-dvd and the wii used dvd

bsnes is the gold standard in accurate emulation.

There are even two actually! Yuzu and Ryujinx. They are both unique codebases and both support games to differing degrees.

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