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Comment by kzrdude | Hacker News Reader

How well does dolphin run on Rpi 4 now?

Look for a second hand Wii U. Plays GC wii and Wii U games with hdmi!

Does it upscale GameCube games? If not do the still look ok? Dreamcast VGA 480p still looks great.

Yes, Gamecube (and Wii) games are upscaled right up to 4K and they look great. Many games work in 16:9 widescreen also (Gamecube was originally 4:3).

For many games there are even community high-def texture packs that you can add to make them look even better.

[Edit: Sorry, was talking about Dolphin here, not Wii U!]

[Edit: seems like you're talking about Dolphin. flatiron upthread mentioned a Wii U so that's what the question you replied to is about.]

Wii U's max HDMI output is 1080p. Also I have not seen any information that it does upscaling at all, so if you have a source for that, I'd like to know it.

Yes, the GP misspoke. However, I'd expect any half-decent TV to have no trouble upscaling the Wii U's 1080p signal → 4K.

> Many games work in 16:9 widescreen also (Gamecube was originally 4:3).

There are a handful of GameCube titles that were 16:9 native widescreen on the original console. The one that comes to mind for me is Serious Sam: The Next Encounter

F-Zero GX has a widescreen option as well. It's probably one of the better looking games when you can pump it at 1080p or higher, but I don't think a Pi is quite ready for that level of abuse yet. Maybe another 2-3 generations of new Pi hardware.

Wii U keeps the original Wii/Gamecube GPU. It has another chip behind it that scales it to HDMI. This is also why Wii 240p doesn't work on the Wii U. Instead old VC games will be a slightly blurry 480p at best.

If you want the clearest 480p, the original Wii will do. With component cables and a compatible TV, it should be just as clear as DreamCast VGA.

Not well. If you don't have a PC you'd be better off running it on your phone with HDMI out to a monitor.

Is there a listing of which hardware can run games at full speed at native/upscaled resolution?

Not as such, but there are a lot of YouTube videos where people test a series of games on a particular phone. There are some general rules though. Snapdragon always outperforms other platforms of a particular generation due to driver issues. More popular games like Mario and Zelda will run better because they get more developer attention. There are multiple forks with different goals, eg, Dolphin MMJR has much higher performance than official Dolphin at the cost of stability and accuracy.

Snapdragon 845 is the entry level where you can play maybe 50 percent of games at full speed, and a few at full speed and higher than native resolution. If you want to run at double or triple native gamecube resolution I'd recommend at least an 865.

Also keep in mind some phones like Pixels disable video out. Get an HDMI+PD adapter to keep your phone charged while outputting to a TV. If your phone's USB port is limited to USB 2.0 speeds you'll have to get a DisplayLink adapter.

If you have specific games in mind you can often find comparable test results for similar hardware on the game's wiki page. https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=The_Legend_of_Z... (you can click "expand" to get a ton more results but they may be on very old versions and not representative of current performance).

Raspberry Pi hardware is way, way too weak.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is on the order of 10 - 20X more powerful than the Gamecube's 20 year old, single core ~400 Mhz 32-bit CPU. The GPU is a bit more difficult to compare, but I'd guess a well optimised emulator with JIT/code translation ought to run very well on Pi 4 hardware.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gekko_(microprocessor)

It actually struggles to hit 30 FPS in most GC titles still. Accurate emulation between vastly different platform stacks generally does not care about the raw performance ratio rather how "lucky" some of the hardware functionality can be efficiently mapped.

Yes, in terms of Dolphin's performance today, I don't doubt it. There are probably many more optimisations that can be made: Dolphin's AArch64 JIT is still pretty incomplete and inefficient compared to the x86-64 JIT, for example.

My point is in theory, given enough time and effort, the Pi 4 should have more than enough power to emulate a 20-year old device. I'd argue that it's certainly not "way way too weak" as the reply above suggested.

The RPi4 GPU is very weak for the tricks that Dolphin does. Good luck to get Ubershaders running on that for example.

The CPU isn't much of an issue.

Emulating a platform at such a low level in real-time is very heavy resource-wise, by design.

To elaborate a bit more on the GPU peak FP32 perf:

> VideoCore VI @ 500MHz: 500 [MHz] x 2 [slice] x 4 [qpu/slice] x 4 [processor] x 2 [op/clock] = 32 Gflop/s

which is the RPi4 config.

compared to a Snapdragon 800: 147.9Gflops FP32, and that's still a very old part.

And about the Wii itself:

> With the Wii, Nintendo opted to go with an innovative control scheme, rather than to focus on processing power. It offered 12 gigaflops, which represents a 1.27x improvement over its GameCube predecessor

The margins are way too slim when counting emulation overhead.

Ok, sounds like the Pi’s VideoCore VI is a lot less performant than I thought. I’d imagined it’d be closer to other mobile GPUs.

It was probably a sane technical choice for them. RPi4 is made on the same node as the Snapdragon 800 (28nm), but with a much more recent (and bigger) CPU complex, using the Cortex-A72.

As a bunch of RPis are headless anyway...

My understanding is that the VideoCore architecture was initially designed as more of a "media codec coprocessor", and was incidentally able to grow enough matrix math throughput to be pressed into service as a GPU.

The differences aren't just raw CPU and GPU power though. The GC, Wii, and Wii U had a couple different high bandwidth and low latency RAM[0] types in the GPU. The low latency and speed likely led to access patterns that are harder to emulate with a Pi's unified and relatively slow DRAM.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1T-SRAM

There is a 2019 video where there is some "mixed" success with gamecube on Rpi 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4TyYU9Xhcs

I figured with Rpi improvements (kernel/settings) and dolphin improvements, it was time to ask if it's going better now. Everyone seems negative (without data) here though.

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