Dolphin Emulator Progress Report: May, June, and July 2023
dolphin-emu.org
dolphin-emu.org
Probably not things that most people could notice, but the trio is a nice benchmark to aim towards
It's accurate enough for most games, but not accurate enough for those specific three. But if getting them running doesn't give you anything besides getting them running, did you really improve your accuracy? Or just implement workarounds for those games?
In a perfect world with unlimited hardware resources you'd be right. But we don't live in that world and instead have to build non-cycle-accurate emulators, so you aren't.
- the "Disney Trio of Destruction" relies on behavior that isn't accurately emulated which can be emulated accurately without a big performance penalty
- the "Disney Trio of Destruction" is slow due to an inaccuracy which affects other games as well
- the "Disney Trio of Destruction" correct behavior doesn't negatively affect other game performance
Until you've shown this, you're essentially arguing for arguings sake - because I never said anything about "making my own emulator", I'm talking about the way Dolphin works.
But let's keep this spinning, and you build your own cycle-accurate version of Dolphin. Let's see how well that performs.
Yes, the things you said might not be met, which is why it isn’t already fixed. But you seem to be advocating for leaving things unfixed just because it’s unlikely that other games use them. My point is that attempting to fix inaccuracies even if they seem unimportant can often lead to other games being fixed and there have been many examples of this. If the bugs can only be fixed with cycle accurate emulation, then sure, you might have to leave them, but the attitude of “most games probably don’t rely on this so let’s not fix it” will only get you so far and to get the compatibility they have Dolphin had to take a more accurate approach. Of course, it makes sense to fix the things that more games use first
You still seem to be under the impression that I'm somehow arguing for Dolphin to change their development model, or something like that. Why do you think so?
> Yes, the things you said might not be met, which is why it isn’t already fixed. But you seem to be advocating for leaving things unfixed just because it’s unlikely that other games use them.
I have not once done so. Literally, all I've argued for is "fixing the problems these games will have will not necessarily make the emulator better". You seem to acknowledge this given that you agree the three points I've mentioned aren't shown. So what exactly are you trying to argue about? Why are you trying to paint me like I'm telling anyone to change their development model?
You're jumping between acknowledging that Dolphin isn't cycle-accurate and not everything will be 100% accurate, and "But if they fix this it will improve other games!". No, it might, but it might also not. You have to show that it does if you want to argue against my point, because it literally is: it's not guaranteed to improve things beyond these three games".
Mostly because of the hilarious local multiplayer (whether intentional or not -- but the shooter level _was_ pretty fantastic in a household not allowed to play online or non-cartoon shooter games)! Also, the very meme-able voice acting (Buzz Lightyear's iconic "hough-hoiuuuuuuuuuuuuooough" comes to mind. We would go around our day in the house and randomly do our best impression of it to make each other laugh. Sometimes it would start a bizarre stream of disconnected favorite pet quotes from the game between us. Near the peak of sibling bonding, almost as good as the moment one of us beat Super Monkey Ball 1's expert level 7 after midnight during a college break -- more than a cumulative decade of work off and on went into that. We absolutely involuntarily broke the quiet hours rule in the house when it happened. Top 5-10 moments of my life, I think.)
In any case, all that to say, this work is important as there are always people that find these things valuable. Everyone has a story, strange as it is. I'm really glad that attention is being brought to these titles, and once my siblings work through me being trans enough for us to be together, I think we might have a chance at sitting down and reliving some of the good old days together, ala emulator.
Fingers crossed! <3 :))))
Additionally, for more, um, very strong overacting that was the cause of lots of laughter in the house, please see 14:56.
You can see why we spent a near-majority of our time playing together as Buzz Lightyear, and finding the closest pit<->respawn point pairing so we could die as dramatically as possible as quickly as possible.
We spent many, many, many hours doing this. Some of the hardest times I've laughed in my life. Good times. Thanks to the above commenter who brought up this trio, you've brought a lot of nostalgia that has brightened a rather rocky week! <3 :)
(I didn't even know Dolphin existed for Android, nothing on the web page points to that. Not that I've ever even used Dolphin, they just have so good release notes that I always check them)
BTW, the NVIDIA opensource vulkan driver was dropped in mesa...
No other operating system does it this way, nor will this work on Nvidia proprietary drivers. Everywhere else, the point of demarcation for graphics is OpenGL, DirectX, Metal, or Vulkan entrypoints in userspace. To be clear, there IS a UAPI here too - hardware isolation demands it - but it breaks constantly and nobody bats an eye. If you were willing to deal with that fragility, you could do the same trick on Windows or macOS.
[0] For those unaware, Linux has a very explicit policy of never breaking userspace. That means no ABI changes whatsoever.
And when someone tries to do it - Linus gets very angry. https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
But has no qualm with constantly refactoring the kernel side of the coin for the most minor of reasons, which causes endless trouble when it comes to supporting out of tree drivers and is the true reason why Android will never be able to provide long term support. SOC manufacturers are not interested in the churn involved in updating their drivers to support the newer kernels that come with new android versions. Most often, it's because they want to keep their driver proprietary, but it is not the only reason, there is a cold hard truth about the nature of the market: new phones are released at a high cadence, while the process of mainlining a driver into upstream linux kernel is arduous, depending on the attitudes of kernel maintainers, truly painful, and no company out there could see any value in waiting for this process to end before releasing their hardware onto the market. Since they're already going to make it out of tree and release it as is, why would they bother? a year later, they'll repeat this process again, and again. Then Android updates, and the devices are obsoleted.
On the other hand, you can install the latest GPU driver on Windows 10 just fine, and it is the same driver as the one on 11. Windows doesn't constantly break your not-maintained-by-microsoft drivers with newer versions of their kernel.
>>you can install the latest GPU driver on Windows 10 just fine, and it is the same driver as the one on 11
MS is certainly well known for breaking Windows drivers across major releases. The only reason that Win10 and 11 driver is the same is because Win10 and 11 are more or less the same thing.
Not quite accurate, it depends on whether a new version of Windows has a significantly newer kernel.
Windows 2000 and Windows XP (and all its derivatives) share the NT5.x kernel, and thus drivers for any of them generally work in the others. Likewise Windows Vista/7/8/8.1 which all share the NT6.x kernel, and Windows 10 and 11 which share the NT10.0 kernel.
This is really a high level arguing in bad faith here. Windows XP was released in 2001 and mainstream support ended in 2009 with the last security update in extended support being in 2014. Vista to 8.1 covers 2006 to 2023, that's 17 years of having compatible drivers. Windows 10 was released in 2015, 8 years ago, with 11 having a compatible driver model and will go for many years still.
What does "common" to experience breakage is supposed to mean here? you call this common? meanwhile you can't even get a Google Pixel, the official Google phone, to be supported more than 3 years of feature update, with 2 more years of security updates. This is all because supporting the linux kernel is a pain in the ass.
It is very seldom when you actually come across hardware without drivers, unless the hardware is so old that the manufacturer isn't selling (and thus isn't supporting) it anymore.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...
[1] A year afterwards of trying to convince people that Vista was good now (which it was), Microsoft threw up their hands and released Windows 7.
Walled gardens, eh?
With a jailbreaked iPhone device, you can possibly install Dolphin through a separate package manager (Cydia, Sileo, etc.)
The caveat for enabling JIT support is you have to “attach a debugger” first. AltServer automates this process…provided your iOS device can communicate with it when launching the app.
DolphinIOS exists though it’s a fork and requires somewhat unfriendly steps to get installed just due to iOS as a platform.
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2021/05/24/temptation-of-the-ap...
I wish! Have you seen phones nowadays? They're bigger than tablets were in 2014!
We're really in the golden age of emulation on mobile devices.