Dolphin Progress Release 2603
dolphin-emu.org
dolphin-emu.org
Knowing there's people out that who have such absurd levels of dedication makes me so happy.
Such a shame that it’ll probably just mean more inequality, at least in the short term.
If robots/AI work out we will need to use 100% of our spare time to work what few jobs are still available to humans so we can earn enough money to pay rent.
If the game is fully or even partially unplayable due to an a bug in the emulator, this really impacts the ability for future generations to experience these games, or these modes in these games.
As you said, its fantastic that people care this much.
There were even things I thought I had to manually optimize in the early 2000s that the GCC optimizer was already taking care of in the mid-90s.
As an example of the kinds of optimisations that the best human programmers were doing before compilers took over, see Michael Abrash's Black Book: https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/index.html - you can intuit how a human might organise their code to make the most of these while still keeping it maintainable.
games/gb didn't save the sram in the emulator save files, so upon restoring the snapshot and saving in the cartridge memory you got a mismatch. It got fixed really fast, the emulators are really simple plan9 C compared to anything else.
TL;DR if you open source a project prone to hype before you are established with a community, identity, and results to speak for, you risk entitled and uninformed users demanding more than you can deliver. Others may take your half-baked feature branches and release them (to fanfare from users who were able to use it with the exact one game it worked with), taking your credit.
Running these projects ain't easy and the Dolphin team deserves a lot of credit for doing it with a level of professionalism I'm sure many in here don't even see at work. The social work involved in this kind of project should not be taken for granted either.
Because some time ago I had multiple incompatible branches of Dolphin to support the games I played.
I'm not sure it was a half baked triforce fork but it was definitely not as polished as the main branch
Dolphin runs its own VM. Obviously anything is possible, but developing some kind of breakout-ROM which would infect the host machine is just way more engineering than I could imagine ever being worth it. The vector is just too complex, and the target (nerds downloading retro games) just isn't worth the squeeze.
Archive.org actually hosts a good chunk of the major Gamecube ROMs. Good luck!
* https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2016/11/13/exploiting-dolphin...
* https://gist.github.com/hthh/502ae16db55612f64d3966769a154c3...
That said, ROMs are basically never a malware vector as they have to exploit an issue in the emulators themselves and historically that hasn't really been seen. Typically malware related to roms happens with files included in the zip archives or by sites offering "downloaders" with embedded malware.
For verification you generally want the Redump database, which has checksums for most disc-based console releases. Unfortunately they seem to be offline at the moment, or I'd share a canonical link. Look around for that.
I think this is referring to the Japanese rail payment cards? I know you can use them on things like vending machines, but from the article it seems like the Triforce cabinets let you save game progress on them too, which would be a great feature I've never seen in US arcades.
Source with photos: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2026/02/16/rise-of-the-triforce...
Sounds like a good opportunity for differential fuzzing!
Chuckled out loud at that one. Figures they went for an ol' reliable when they built the arcade cabinets for The Key of Avalon.
Dolphin is bringing back support for the Triforce arcade cabinet that was jointly developed by Nintendo, Sega and Namco that was dropped by Dolphin in 2016.
Notably games includes F-Zero AX (not to be confused with F-Zero GX on Gamecube) and Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 and 2.
This is pretty big!
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2026/02/16/rise-of-the-triforce...
Though I don't know if you can count it as a "buried lede" if the first paragraph of the article is dedicated to it, with a big clickable banner, haha!
I've seen many a fine volonteer project become enshittified because they started optimizing for financial income rather than for having fun.
Nintendo's lawsuits they won against emulator projects in the past had donation systems as one of, if not the sole main point they drove to win the case.
NoA sued the Yuzu devs and settled out of court, with the devs paying $2.4 million and shutting down the Yuzu and Citra projects. The $2.4 million was noted as being a reasonable estimate of what Nintendo's lawyers would have billed if the case went to trial, not a reflection of Yuzu's collection of donations.
NoA used some combination of carrot-and-stick to get the Ryujinx developers to shut that project down as well, but we won't know what that combination was because they never filed a lawsuit, so there are no public records, and there was likely an NDA.
Although I suspect the other sibling comment is the real reason.