Official website of Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator. Download the latest version (2609-182) now or ask questions on our forums for help.
Visit dolphin-emu.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Sep 2013 – Jun 2026
Games & Graphics 36Software Engineering 33Tech Industry & Business 2Open Source 1
When you're playing your favorite game on Dolphin with a powerful computer, things should run fairly well. The game is running full speed, there are no graphical glitches, and you can use your favorite controller if you want. Yet, every time you go to a new area, or load a new effect, there's a very slight but…
From the announcement made on November 10th, 2020, users have had high hopes for the new Apple M1 devices. With its powerful Apple Silicon processor smashing benchmarks all over the place, users and developers were both asking if a native Dolphin build would be possible. Now we have the answer. Apple's M1 hardware is…
During the rapid technological advancements of the early 1990s, the video game industry was on the cusp of a massive addition - another dimension. With console shenanigans like the Super FX chip giving players a taste of 3D, hype was at an all-time high. But the games released for home consoles were nothing compared…
Dolphin started out as a GameCube emulator in 2003. In 2008, experimental Wii support was added. And now, in 2026, Dolphin enters the realm of arcade emulation with support for the Sega, Namco, and Nintendo arcade effort, the Triforce, finally arriving. Want to learn more about the Triforce? Check out our deep dive…
Every single GameCube game can at least boot in Dolphin 5.0. Except one. Star Wars: The Clone Wars and its complex way of using the PowerPC Memory Management Unit rendered it unplayable in Dolphin up to this day. But finally as of Dolphin 5.0-540, this challenge has come and gone: Dolphin can finally boot every single…
On the Dolphin Forums, one of the more common questions that come up is "How come I can emulate this Wii game just fine but this GameCube game is slow?" While those more knowledgeable about the intricacies of emulation may roll their eyes, it does warrant some explanation. Usually when...
In light of the recent announcements by NVIDIA and AMD in support of Linux for their graphics drivers, we would like to share with the world some of the experience we had developing our open source project, Dolphin, a GameCube and Wii emulator for Windows, Linux, Mac and recently Android....
The GameCube GPU is a complex, tight-knit piece of hardware with impressive features for its time. It is so powerful and so flexible, it was used unmodified within the Wii architecture. For a comparison, just imagine a SNES running with an NES's graphics system. This is completely unheard of, before...
After finishing up the macOS M1 article the blog staff took a little break. Then they saw the date. Upon looking at the actual changelog, however, something became readily apparent: this wasn't going to be just a progress report; this was going to be a MEGA Progress Report. The long rumored time era of developers…
A project cannot survive for nearly fourteen years without making some difficult decisions. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong, but, to be successful you have to learn from each and every one. One of the most difficult decisions made for Dolphin was the deprecation and removal of D3D9 despite it being the…
Many gaming communities over the years have reached out to thank emulator developers for their efforts. Emulators are an important part of many classic game communities and give players access to features like netplay multiplayer, modding, and savestates, while also opening up the doors to enhancements not possible on…
Welcome to the Progress Report for Dolphin Release 2606. We usually prefer to launch toward the beginning of the month, but a slew of important, large, and technically challenging changes had us working overtime. Strap in, because we have a lot to cover! For April Fool's we teased that Dolphin now had support for the…
It's been a hectic past few months for the project. In addition to the upcoming release on Steam, a lot of focus has gone into other major features. While not everything has landed yet, two very important changes to Android did arrive, one of which has been in the works for a couple years! We're talking about a large…
The Summer tends to consistently be one of the busiest times for Dolphin's development. While sometimes the question is what do we put into the Progress Report, during the summer months it's usually how much can we fit into the Progress Report? This summer's congestion was then compounded by us blog staff having a few…
This has been a bit of a tumultuous summer for the project, but now things are returning to normalcy. For those who somehow missed it, the Dolphin on Steam project has ceased after contact between Valve and Nintendo. Though we disagree with their stance and decision, we respect Valve's right to impose whatever…
June was a month where a lot of important features were merged, but few of them had to do with actual emulation. Every emulator has its own philosophy and goals. While the primary goal is usually to emulate the console at hand, many emulators place secondary goals on various features...
As we hit the holiday season, our Progress Report might be considered a bit late. A two month report became a three month report as we realized just how much work we had to catch up on. While the usual summer burst of activity didn't come, it seems instead everyone poured their time in throughout the autumn months!…
We've got a lot to get through the past two months. Headlining it all is that we're happy to announce support for a new compressed disc format developed specifically for Dolphin: RVZ. This lossless format allows for near top of the line game compression without compromising the integrity of ISOs,…
There is a whole chunk of the Dolphin project that most users don't know about and have no interactions with. Most of the blog's articles focus on user visible features: improvements in the emulator core, or accuracy changes that allow non playable games to finally work properly. We seldom talk...
The past few months have been quite hectic with a slew of gigantic changes requiring lengthy articles alongside them. These big features all hitting together seems to have brought up a talking point in the community would be irresponsible to ignore. Everyone wants to know when Dolphin 6.0 is coming. After all, Dolphin…
Your eyes are not deceiving you. As of 5.0-14690, Dolphin now has mGBA directly built into it as a new way to handle Game Boy Advance connectivity with GameCube titles. For those who don't know, mGBA is the most renowned and accurate GBA emulator of this era and has been…
While an emulator's primary job is to emulate, there's usually a lot more that goes into a good emulator. For Dolphin, it may feel like a lot of work has gone toward luxury features and optimizations rather than improving accuracy and compatibility. For example, Ubershaders is a wonderful, game-changing feature, but…
Dolphin started solely as a GameCube emulator, focused only on the one console. But, when the Wii was released and it was discovered to have hardware almost identical to its older sibling, Dolphin naturally evolved into a GameCube and Wii emulator. All of our readers are probably familiar with this....
The Progress Report has come and with it some major changes and decisions. However, before we get into new things, we need to go over an ongoing change as we've seen some users struggling. In the last progress report, we updated our project solutions to Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2019. We thought there would be no…
With the holiday season reaching its apex, we have a few surprises for those of you that have been patiently waiting. The latest release of Dolphin is stuffed with treats. Our first present is presentation - frame presentation, that is. Two new options have arrived and will help users both…
This past October, Dolphin turned 20 years old since its initial release to the public as an experimental GameCube emulator. It's been a long ride, with twists and turns. I don't know if anyone back in 2003 expected Dolphin not only to still be under active development 20 years later, but to also support the…
We have celebrated the 15th anniversary of the GameCube and the 10th anniversary of the Wii in the last few months. As the Wii's successor, and the brand lineage, has been discontinued in the run-up to the release of the Switch, it is a time for reflection. But, this doesn't mean an end for the GameCube and Wii; if…
After a long wait, the Progress Report is back! This time it wasn't so much from a lack of content, but from a lack of content creators. The past three months had illnesses hit one of our writers and the other had a very challenging move. Even with these major hurdles jumped, we're not even close to 100% yet. It's…
It's been a very hectic two months. Dolphin's development builds officially dropped support for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 in 5.0-16393 when the Windows buildbots were updated to use Qt6. If you read the last Progress Report, you'd know that Windows 7 was already on shaky terms due…
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is one of the most popular Gamecube games, if not Nintendo games, in existence. Its mixture of an open world, sharp dungeons, and an inventive art style turned heads more than ten years ago when it was released. Dolphin has had its...