Dolphin Complete Setup Guide - UPDATED 2/14/11

[Unknownforce]

OK, so it seems as though some people need a step by step setup guide here... So I'm bored at work and feel like being helpful....

Ripping your games is not discussed in this topic, this is ONLY the setup of dolphin itself. Warez is not supported on this forum, so don't ask where to get them, you'll be banned.

First... Things you need:

- A fast computer. (preferably Core 2 Duo or better, or high Athlon 64 X2(5200+ or better)
- The internet
- Roms to use with Dolphin (gamecube or wii)
- Time
- Two hands (it's possible to do with just one, but much easier with two)
- A Brain (This is very important.)

Now then, assuming you have all of the above, you'll be playing in no time, just follow these easy steps.

1. Download Dolphin from your favorite builder. If you don't know where to get them, they are in the General Discussion sub-forum of the Dolphin-emu SVN Builds forum. Located here: http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/forum-6.html If you're unsure, just click the link in my signature, I update my builds quite often.
2. Most people use 7zip to compress their releases, some use .zip or .rar, for those you can use Winzip or WinRAR, 7-Zip will work with them all, I suggest you download and install 7-zip from http://www.7-zip.org/
3. Now, extract the downloaded compressed file to a new folder, make sure you know where this folder is.
4. When you extract it, you will get several files and folders. Dolphin(Dolphin.exe) is your new friend. Make sure you hug it on a regular basis.
5. You will get the main interface pop up. You could simply load the game from here, but chances are you will want to configure everything, like controls, graphics, sound, hacks and such.
6. Click the options menu and click Configure. There are a lot of options. For the best settings for specific games, see the individual game posts in the Game Discussion forum.
   For most games The best config is as follows:
   - ON: Dual Core, Idle Skipping, Framelimit: Auto, Skip GC Bios (unless you have dumped this and can/want to use it), JIT recompiler (JITIL is supposedly faster, but quite buggy), DSP LLE on Thread (If you use LLE)
   - OFF: Lock threads to cores(This seems to slow down some games), Enable Cheats(Unless you want to cheat)
7. The next tab is your Display tab, Here is where you will configure how you want the game displayed... Video backend you're going to set to one of three options: OpenGL, Direct3D9 or Direct3D11. (Direct3D9 will probably be your best bet.) Next you'll click GFX Config...
8. Here you have options to setup some of the more advanced video settings such as aspect ratio, filtering, vsync, etc. Most of these are going to be your own preferences, If you are setting your own resolution and not using the native one, You should probably set Scale to Fractional or Integral. EFB Copy for the most part should be set to Copy EFB to Texture, But if some things in a game are not working properly, you might want to set it to RAM. If you hover your mouse cursor over most options, there is text that explains what they do.
9. In the other tab of the Graphics configuration, here's where the game discussion forum will come in handy, most people have documented the best settings for certain games.
   - The Rendering portion is where you can enable/disable certain features depending on the game, they require different settings.
   - The Information portion is exactly how it sounds, informational, most of these you'll just leave off, I like to have FPS displayed so I turn that on.
   - XFB is primarily to be left off unless the game requires it. I personally haven't used it in any games that I play, but you might have some games that might use it, if some things are not looking right or working right, this might be another option to mess with.
   - Below these is the Utilities, most of the time you'll just leave these disabled. Free look is kind of fun, but not entirely useful to playing the game.
   - Below that we have the misc section. Most of these you'll leave off as well, Display list Caching can help speed some things up, but it's somewhat buggy, same with OpenCL, I'm not sure what hotkeys it refers to here, nor what Crop does...
10. You can Close out of the GFX Config screen now, Next you'll want to set your display resolution. (720p is 1280x720, 1080p is 1920x1080) Below that is the windowed resolution, if you play in a window, this is where you can set the exact size of that window.(Auto works as well) Below that is a few options, You can choose to start the emulator in fullscreen mode as soon as you start the game, hide the mouse cursor in full screen, render to the main emulator window instead of a seperate window, enable progressive scan or set console to NTSC-J(Japanese ROM Font) Finally there are the interface options, Confirm on stop will prompt you before ending emulation, panic handlers will pop a message on warnings/errors, This is useful if you have a problem with a game so that you can post an issue if there is a specific message that comes up, below this is themes, languages and hotkeys.
11. The next tab is your audio tab, not much options here... DSP HLE is fast, but buggy, DSP LLE is much more accurate, however it relies heavily on the framerate to be CONSTANT, if it's not, it will chop and produce some unwanted effects, LLE interpreter is even more accurate, but extremely slow as it processes every audio sample exactly, which requires extreme cpu usage, this is typically a development/debug setting. You can set Volume on the right... Options that you typically will have Enabled are DTK Music and Audio Throttle, Dump Audio is if you want to dump the audio to a file... Audio Backend will be One of three choices XAudio2, DSound and OpenAL(on non-windows) XAudio2 is probably the best one, DSound most compatible... Sample rate will be generally set to 48000, unless you're experiencing some strange audio.
12. The next tab is the Gamecube tab... You'll set the system language, Memory card options, and controller options, pretty straight foward and you'll probably just use the default options here.
13. Next is the Wii tab... Set the sensor bar location to either the top of your TV/Monitor or the bottom, you can set the IR sensitivity, wiimote motor on/off, and reconnect wiimote on loadstate, defaults will work here. Next is the screen saver, EuRGB60 mode, for some special 60Hz pal games, Aspect Ratio and system language. Below that you can choose to emulate the USB Keyboard and SD Card.
14. The final tab is the Paths Tab. Here you'll want to add the paths to your roms, you might also want to set it to use subfolders depending on how you have your folders setup with your roms. Simply click Add, and browse to the location of your roms and click OK. Below that are a few additional options, which you most likely will not use unless you use the Wii Menu.
15. Click OK on that screen. Now all you have to do is set up your controller settings. (Options -> Gamecube Pad Settings or Wiimote Settings for Wiimote) Those screens are pretty self explanatory Select your controller from the list, and just click the button you want to setup and press the button on your controller or keyboard you want to set it to.
    

And that's it, you're all setup to play, your games should be listed in the window and you can open them by just double clicking them.

[Diddy Kong]

lol, this is nice.

[Unknownforce]

Like I said, I was really bored at work... I was going to make it into a "Little Timmy" type guide, but I thought that would be a little over the edge...


Little Timmy: "OmgZ0rZ dolphin not work, PLZZZ HAAALLP!!!"

Whoa there Timmy, don't post in the forum yet... have you read the stickies yet? You don't want to be THAT guy, do you Timmy? Good, now do this this and this...

But I thought I might get lynched for that...

[James333]

lol

*kills Timmy*

[jedikevin20]

Might as well add in the Performance tweaks with gamebooster and the explore.bat maker.

[James333]

(08-14-2009, 05:55 AM)Unknownforce Wrote: - The Rendering portion is where you can disable certain features depending on the game, they require different settings. EFB Copy for the most part should be set to Copy EFB to system RAM. But again some games require this to be different.

Most of the time ( always ) I use Copy EFB to OGL

[cmccmc3illbegoodplzdon'tban]

it's supposed to be copy efb to gl hack

[Unknownforce]

EFB to RAM does it more accurately. the hack adds slight speed increase, yes, but on a higher end computer the speed difference is negligible. I actually need to update this guide a little bit, as the DX plugin works now and it's faster in some cases. I'll do it when I get some more boredom.

[SoulClaw]

I have njoy and padsimple but dolphin doesn't recognize it. do u know how to fix this?

[krypking]

(09-27-2009, 11:17 AM)SoulClaw Wrote: I have njoy and padsimple but dolphin doesn't recognize it. do u know how to fix this?

update your directx and visual c++