Dolphin Emulator User Manual

[Pringo]

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-WE3IAskDSYRWNTS1VqeWNJSE0/edit?pli=1

I saw this referenced in the Dolphin Wikipedia page. Is this user manual official?

[Shonumi]

No. It's not official. It was a side-project that I started because I felt that a program as large as Dolphin could stand to be better documented in some form or another. The tooltips are great in the Graphics menu, but not every part of Dolphin is thoroughly detailed, either by the GUI, the wiki, or the forum. I felt that users "discovered" all of the little things about Dolphin by pure exploration rather than explanation.

The idea was just to offer this as a PDF for every point release, because chasing after the latest development builds is 1) not how technical books/manuals are published and 2) not worth the extra effort of keeping track of what changes were made on a daily basis. I stopped due to lack of time. If any one wants to pick it up, it's available under the same CC license as the Dolphin wiki (the Google Doc document doesn't show that license because it's an outdated version).

[MayImilae]

I honestly don't think that idea would work anymore. It's too big and too cumbersome. The wiki already has much of what that was trying to achieve anyway. So I'm of the opinion that we need to just fill in any gaps in wiki coverage, and develop a system that conveys options easier (the wiki already has everything in the config template, but that's not exactly formatted for easy viewing).

[Shonumi]

Fwiw, once one version of the manual was complete, updating it for the next point release doesn't take much effort. A vast majority of the features don't really change, and that's where the bulk of the work came from (i.e. documenting everything, down to controller options, GC Memory card management, TAS, FIFO logs, etc). If you look at the stuff that's in the latest Dolphin build vs 4.0.2, a theoretical manual for the stable build wouldn't need much updating, just tweaking.

For those not used to technical documentation though, sure it looks like a cumbersome task, but I write a lot, so I say it's easy given enough time The problem is getting said time. Not only am I coding two emulators atm, I'm also writing a serialized work of fiction every week (100K word count so far, 28 weeks in), and working extra hours at my job. Oh, and I play video games too. My time is anything but free these days.

[Pringo]

Ah, interesting. I was going to say that if this manual was official it needed some updates but I guess it is more of a side project then. Maybe it would be worth updating it for 5.0 when that gets released.

[Shonumi]

Like I said, it's available with a CC license, and the wiki page (where you probably found it) has more up to date info, so all that's really stopping anyone is time and initiative.