Dolphin Progress May and June 2022 | Hacker News Reader

Dolphin Progress May and June 2022

dolphin-emu.org

129 pointsdriscoll4224 comments

Hands down the best emulator I've ever used. Ever since they added GBA link compatibility I've been amazed at the passion and dedication poured into Dolphin.

> Ever since they added GBA link compatibility

Wow.

If all progress reports were as technical and interesting as dolphins I would just be reading them all week.

Always fun to see what they have been working on and it's a bit inspirational to see such dedication long after the emulator had accomplished near total coverage at native framerates and has at this point implemented even it's userbases stretch goals. Now it's just building out features to understand and help teach us mere mortals, and I'm thankful for each lesson my lizard brain holds onto.

I'd love to know more about the people working on this and their motivations. Extremely, extremely talented hackers working on open source emulation of video game systems from 21 and 16 years ago.

Are they financially independent? Do they have a day job?

The ones I know have day jobs but many are students and contribute out of a combination of passion and a desire to learn. Often the emulator work is put to pasture when they leverage it to get hired unfortunately.

Dolphin has been around since 2003. Don’t think it’s been the same devs, but there’s definitely more commitment here than just a college side project

Whatever their motivations they are such a gift to humanity. Preserving art for generations to come, it's incredible!

How many old iphone games are just completely lost now because it's a closed system?

One datapoint: I follow one of the devs on Twitter and he was - until very recently - a software engineer working on security infra at Google.

Im not familiar with dolphin or dolphin-emu and thought this was going to be a wildlife conservation report or simething

Edit: since this is being downvoted I’ll add more constructive thoughts. While I was unfamiliar with dolphin/dolphin-emu before visiting the posted link im very glad GameCube emulators for pc/Mac exist. Will know how to play Wind Waker if the desire ever arises, until then I’ll stick to the n64!

Excellent work as always! I like the humourous ending ;)

Something I always wondered: the Gamecube had an IBM PowerPC processor with a RISC instruction set. ARM is also a RISC instruction set. Is there some performance boost in running Dolphin on ARM-powered hardware, or is it more or less the same as running it on an x86-based chip? My sense is that RISC -> RISC potentially would be more straightforward?

The way I remember is that RISC is just a class of computer design. The different architectures aren't necessarily close to each other (only that they have a reduced instruction set compared to other systems), so I can't imagine that this helps.

To my understanding the only way you'd see a performance benefit is if Dolphin were running on a machine with a PowerPC or some other POWER-based CPU, since most or all instructions would no longer need to be emulated, making it closer to virtualization.

It'd be interesting to see old G3, G4, and G5-based Macs repurposed as deluxe GameCube and Wii emulators. Potentially Wii U too, but I'd imagine that would be restricted to tail-end models of multi-CPU G5 towers with the best GPUs those machines can handle.

Correct, plus big-endian, plus any emulation for opcodes not supported by the host CPU (like paired singles, or mcrxr on G5 and up), plus any cacheline size impedance mismatches. It should be possible to run such code in the standard PowerPC problem state but it wouldn't be trivial.

They elaborated on this a little more in their post about Dolphin on the M1: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2021/05/24/temptation-of-the-ap...

> AArch64 does have its advantages, though. Namely, the processors have 31 registers, compared to the 16 available in x86-64 processors. The PowerPC processor we are emulating has 32 registers, and while it is rare for all of them to be used within a single code block, more registers is always nice to have. Another difference is that AArch64 and PowerPC have 3 operand instructions while x86-64 only has two.

    PPC:     A = B + C  
    AArch64: A = B + C  
    x86-64:  A = B, A = A + C

> As you can see, it makes emulating some instructions much cleaner and easier than on our x86-64 JIT.

So yes, it is certainly more straightforward: the JIT can do something closer to a one-to-one translation without having to spill registers as often. But they don't go into detail about how much of a performance benefit that is; I'd imagine a small boost but not something too drastic.

Love the color scheme in the banner at the top! Great update!

They say there are too few Windows 7 users to justify support. But the way they measure that is with the automated usage reporting. Here's the problem with that, people using Windows 7 are still doing so because they don't like sending automated usage reports. They're not going to show up in your telemetry. In addition to that, because this is a retro game application, the reason to stick with Windows 7 may be to preserve compatibility with older games. Knowing that the operating system is unsupported and lacking in security, one would be wise to only use it in offline mode. That means, again, your application won't be sending automated usage reports.

I don't doubt that Windows 7 usage is dwindling, but it's largely a self-fulfilling prophecy as developers miscount the size of their legacy user base which makes the application break on older systems and then the users either stop updating which means developers see fewer users in their metrics. It's unfortunate that the Dolphin team couldn't see the value in continuing legacy support and even more unfortunate that it's Qt's fault they had to abandon it.

Old versions of Dolphin will presumably still work, so it's not a huge blow to the Windows 7 users.

Good points, but I do feel like people who turn off telemetry should understand and accept that this means their use cases won't be considered for product development.

>In addition to that, because this is a retro game application, the reason to stick with Windows 7 may be to preserve compatibility with older games

How does Windows 7 preserve compatibility with older games? Dolphin's goal is to be compatible with all Gamecube (and Wii) games. If Windows 7 is impeding that goal, I don't see how Windows 7 will have better compatibility with older gamecube game.

Also, from the perspective of Windows 7, every Gamecube game had already been released by the time Windows 7 was generally available (the Gamecube's EOL was in 2007; Windows 7 came out in 2010). No game could have "targeted" windows 7.

It's about compatibility with older PC games, something a Windows 7 box dedicated to retro gaming might run besides Dolphin.

> Here's the problem with that, people using Windows 7 are still doing so because they don't like sending automated usage reports. They're not going to show up in your telemetry.

At this point - that's the users problem. Don't say you don't want to engage with the developers of your software and then be flabbergasted when they stop supporting you.

The Dolphin team is comprised of volunteers, and a single guy was supporting Windows 7 up until a little while ago presumably for personal reasons like lack of time. I don't think the Dolphin team can really be put at fault in good faith.

If there's a lot of demand, I bet it wouldn't be that difficult for someone to maintain a Windows 7 fork of Dolphin.

I personally have a fork of Dolphin that retains compatibility with OS X 10.9 Mavericks. The hardest part was building QT 5.9 with Mavericks compatibility.

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