Dolphin OS (My suggestion)

Moline · 12-20-2019, 10:54 AM #1

Do you guys think a Dolphin OS would work and be a good idea? Basically, this would be an OS that runs exclusively Dolphin emulator. You could dual boot this alongside Windows, or you could have it replace Windows if you'd like. Depending on the difficulty of doing so, it may even support the option of ripping your actual wii and gamecube disks. Of course you could plug in a USB to bring games over, especially if you don't have the actual game disk, or ripping just won't plain work. I have no idea if having an exclusive OS for dolphin would offer any significant speed boost on 4GB systems, but it could as you wouldn't be running Dolphin within Windows, you'd be running it by itself as its own OS meaning you won't have an underlying OS such as Windows to bog it down. It would also require an internet connection so it can auto update itself a la Windows Update, and it would also have a bare bones control panel that allows changing of certain display settings, power options (such as your power plan), mouse/keyboard settings, a very basic device manager that allows you to manage USB game controllers, and even add in Bluetooth devices such as a Wii remote, which can work with your computer's built-in bluetooth (if applicable) or with any external adapter including the Dolphin Bluetooth dongle. I feel like this has the potential to be something big, and should be looked into. I have two "junk" laptop's that I could try this on. One has 2GB of RAM and is from the Windows Vista era, while the other one has 4GB of RAM, is from the Windows 10 era, but downgraded to Windows 7 a few months ago. I seriously hope you guys consider this. I think this has potential, especially for those that can't afford a good laptop/desktop to run Dolphin. I'm hoping this offers a speed boost as on the very computer I am running, I could not run the Android emulator Bluestacks without severe lag, so I booted Phoenix OS, an Android emulator, from a USB (that is Linux based) to run the game I tried to from Bluestacks, and it ran lightning fast, leading me to believe that if something similar to Phoenix OS can be made out of Dolphin, a similar effect can be achieved, especially on lower powered machines. And obviously, you can still download Dolphin onto Windows/Mac OS etc if you can't run the OS itself.

***Shonumi*** · 12-20-2019, 11:11 AM #2

Some discussion on this subject happened years ago: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-bootable-emulator-so-it-runs-faster

It seems to me that the closest you'd get to such an idea is a custom Linux distro with a bunch of stuff striped out and focused solely on running Dolphin. But the OS is largely not in the way of Dolphin. It mostly comes down to CPU and GPU power that drive Dolphin's performance at various settings. There's no getting around underpowered hardware.

But, if you're just looking for something that you could dedicate to running Dolphin (say for a machine hooked up to your TV, a PC acting as custom console) that boots up right away to Dolphin and has everything setup and etc, that would be an attainable goal by modding a Linux distro. You can make somewhat custom installations of Windows 10 too, but not nearly to the extent of what you'd want here.

Moline · 12-20-2019, 03:10 PM #3

(12-20-2019, 11:11 AM)Shonumi Wrote: Some discussion on this subject happened years ago: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-bootable-emulator-so-it-runs-faster

It seems to me that the closest you'd get to such an idea is a custom Linux distro with a bunch of stuff striped out and focused solely on running Dolphin. But the OS is largely not in the way of Dolphin. It mostly comes down to CPU and GPU power that drive Dolphin's performance at various settings. There's no getting around underpowered hardware.

But, if you're just looking for something that you could dedicate to running Dolphin (say for a machine hooked up to your TV, a PC acting as custom console) that boots up right away to Dolphin and has everything setup and etc, that would be an attainable goal by modding a Linux distro. You can make somewhat custom installations of Windows 10 too, but not nearly to the extent of what you'd want here.

So, what you're saying is having an OS exclusively for Dolphin wouldn't be much beneficial? I do have a desktop that runs Gamecube and Wii games very well, but it is a hassle to set it up, plus I can't play from my bed unless I invest in a portable monitor, which I may do. I did read the older post, and someone thought that by completely removing the OS and having just Dolphin run would be better performance-wise as in that case Dolphin would be the only thing running, like how the Wii and Gamecube only run one thing at a time compared to Windows where you can have multiple things running at any given time, but he was completely debunked.

***Shonumi*** · 12-20-2019, 04:13 PM #4

Moline Wrote:So, what you're saying is having an OS exclusively for Dolphin wouldn't be much beneficial?

Yes, it's not very beneficial from a performance point of view. A lot of people forget just how good OSes actually are at multitasking and scheduling processes. Even if that weren't the case, Dolphin can hog a couple of core/threads all to itself nowadays when modern low-end hardware tends to offer 4 cores. Even just 2 cores is sufficient when Dolphin is put into single-core mode. Any recent OS has such negligible overhead that it really shouldn't significantly affect Dolphin unless something goes terribly, terribly wrong. So looking at the OS as a means of optimization is probably a waste of time.

I think a lot of people may get the impression that removing all but the most essential parts of the OS in order to run Dolphin somehow brings it closer to the hardware. There are so-called "bare-metal" emulators that more or less run "directly" on the hardware platform and bypass an OS. Goomba is an old example on the GBA, and a host of others for the Raspberry Pi exist, but it's not likely to happen for Dolphin any time soon, if ever.