Does Dolphin show the original graphics?

[ReyVGM]

Hey guys.

I have never used Dolphin before, but I always see HD screenshots of the games on other forums.

However, I love the consoles original graphics and I was wondering if Dolphin allows you to play the games with their original look, meaning: pixel-accurate, original res (640x480), no enhancements, original effects and filters. In other words, can the games look as close as possible to the original thing?

[mbc07]

Yes, use default Dolphin settings with 1x IR and disable Scaled EFB Copy. The game should look almost (if not) identical to a real GameCube/Wii...

[ReyVGM]

Excellent. I'll get right on it!

What about LLE on the DSP? Isn't LLE better for accuracy?

[JosJuice]

LLE is more accurate, but for most games, HLE will be good enough that it's hard to notice a difference. The exception is Zelda µcode games, which in many cases need LLE to get good audio.

[degasus]

Pixelaccurate? No, never ever. We haven't even checked the rasterization resultson the real hardware. Neither does we support rgb565 framebuffer formats for blending. But most guys won't even notice
For more accurate images, you also have to enable real XFB as it reduces the color resolution. But still, imo this isn't needed for the original look and feel of the game.

For LLE vs HLE: HLE may hame some bugs, but when it works fine, the result is identical with the LLE audio. So usually no need for LLE.

[ReyVGM]

Thanks degasus. I'm trying to get screenshots as faithful to the original games as possible, but I'm not taking into account the blurriness and artifacts introduced by composite cables and CRT TVs. I enabled the XFB, I set it on virtual because "real" looks way too bad to be real.

[degasus]

Virtual XFB share the same result as disabled XFB (we see this as enhancement). But if real XFB looks too blur, than you just don't want to get pixel perfect images

[Shonumi]

If you really wanted to get super accurate results, you could play a game up to a certain point, pause Dolphin, make a save state, stop emulation, switch to the Software Renderer, boot the game and load your save state, then take a screenshot. Yes, it's wonderfully convoluted, but it works

[IceStrike256]

Or if you need everything to be super accurate pull out that gamecube.

[ReyVGM]

Virtual XFB share the same result as disabled XFB (we see this as enhancement). But if real XFB looks too blur, than you just don't want to get pixel perfect images

Well, "real" doesn't give me too much blur. It just makes everything more pixelated and the text looks wrong (I'm using the last stable Dolphin, not the in-progress versions).

If you really wanted to get super accurate results, you could play a game up to a certain point, pause Dolphin, make a save state, stop emulation, switch to the Software Renderer, boot the game and load your save state, then take a screenshot. Yes, it's wonderfully convoluted, but it works

I tried that, but it's not working. I made a save state using DX11 and/or OpenGL, then switch to Software and the save won't load.


Naive question:

Setting the frame buffer to "real", is that how the GC really output its graphics? I mean, imagine that the GC had native HDMI output and you could play the game on a HDTV with no upscaling/stretching, would the games still look "blurry"? The emulator is not "faking" it by adding filters or things like that?
If you could take a native frame buffer screenshot from the actual Gamecube, would the graphics come still come out "blurry" as if you were looking at it through a CRT?

I'm not really interested in capturing screenshots that look as if they came from a CRT, I'm interested in screenshots that would look as if the actual gamecube's framebuffer had a direct feed screenshot option. Hopefully I'm explaining this correctly.