Dolphin to run all Nintendo systems

[Wolfieee]

Wondering if one day you might consider making Dolphin work with all the Nintendo systems. I understand that the Wii U would be out of the question for a while but systems like the NES, SNES and N64 all have open source projects and I know I'm not a programmer/coder but I wouldn't think it would be too hard to add it in. It would be great to not have so many emulators on my computer. Retro arch has done a fantastic job of getting most things to work but still doesn't do a few Nintendo games justice. Programs like mupen64 and project64 are good for playing my old N64 games but they are still very broken with most of the games I like to play.

I'm sure others out there would love to see this happen and I understand it's a big ask but we all have our dreams I guess.

[Helios]

No. Dolphin is not retroarch.

[MayImilae]

We do not take code from other projects and obfuscate the source/authors away, like retroarch does.

[Shonumi]

No. Dolphin is not retroarch.

Feels like deja vu with that Dreamcast thread

Anyway @Wolfieee, supporting multiple systems like that isn't just something that can casually happen. Your entire codebase has to be written in such a way that systems can be "abstracted", e.g. as "cores" of a sort. Each core is practically its own emulator but maintains a standard interface for things like running the a game, pausing a game, etc. The point is, making Dolphin (or any project) like that is a non-trivial effort, especially as the systems differ more and more from each other. Supporting one or more additional systems generally happens because the hardware is relatively close in design (e.g. a GB emulator may support GBC games as well, a DS emulator may support GBA games as well, a GG emulator may support the SMS as well, etc). But things like the SNES are pretty far off from the GC, or even the N64.

Libretro does what it does because from the start it was an effort aimed to make "cores", and many stand-alone emulators have had ports created for the project. What you're asking is for Dolphin to change its codebase to become more adaptable for an architecture that runs cores, but as stated above, that's a lot of work, even if each of the cores is taken from existing projects rather than scratch.

So, I don't think it will happen, at least not by most of the Dolphin devs. Dolphin is Libre/Open Source Software, so anyone can fork it to make it how they'd like. The current direction of the official Dolphin project, however, is focused solely on GC and Wii emulation. It'll probably stay that way (forever?)

[degasus]

I agree, dolphin won't support other plattforms than Gamecube and Wii, ever. But it's possible to include dolphin in retroarch Dolphin is more like a "core" than a plattform which handles many cores. So just let's drop the GUI and only provide a retroarch core. But this would lead to some issues with configurations, controller configurations, video presentation, ... So a lot of work, but possible - maybe even the only way to keep dolphin alive in a *very* long turn.

[KHg8m3r]

Couldn't you start Dolphin from command line, and add an option for no gui?

[JMC47]

Technically you can run all of the Open Source emulators ported to Wii in Dolphin, except Not64 for some reason.