Emudeck and Dolphin

[Livedeht]

Hi all -

Was informed by one of the users of our discord that the support volunteers close threads because Emudeck uses Retroarch. I just want to clear up the confusion. We do use Retroarch, but not for Dolphin.

Dolphin is used as the flatpak from flathub ( https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.Dol...olphin-emu ). Is there a problem with this build / release and support?

(here's an example thread: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-st...cing-issue )

It's frustrating because it then increases our support load and we then have to combat misinformation on version usage.

Thanks, Feel free to let me know if you need more info about what we do.

--Livedeht

[MayImilae]

Yea that was me, and I was incorrect. I jumped the gun a bit there. We've been hella burned by a certain fork (you know the one) made without our permission or involvement and that does horrible, horrible things to Dolphin. After first learning about Emudeck, I looked at your source code and saw you know what, then I didn't look deeper and just nope'd out of the whole thing. If I had probed further I would have noticed that Emudeck is not using it for Dolphin.

Don't worry, I already learned about this error some time ago and we won't be telling this to users again. If that thread is becoming a support issue for you guys I can add a note that it was incorrect.

-

However... While I'm glad Emudeck isn't using that gods awful fork, I don't consider it a good way to play Dolphin on the Deck. Dolphin ships with a lot of default setting preconfigured, both in a general sense and per-game via our GameINIs. All of our shipped defaults are weighed very carefully and set to be as fast as possible while still being stable - we don't take away performance away unless we have a bloody good reason to. Emudeck just discards all of that.

For example, immediately present XFB is a hack that is intended specifically for competitive play, where lower-latency-at-all-costs is desirable. But for just playing games casually, gameplay is actually less smooth with Immediately Presents XFB than without in most cases, plus it introduces TONS of visual bugs. We leave that off by default very deliberately, but Emudeck just turns that on for everyone.

Worst of all though (unless you are getting them from flatpak somehow that is not clear from the source), you ship a tiny, tiny fraction of our gameINIs, and what you do ship appears to be stripped of all of our configuration options and only includes cheat codes. That's no good. Dolphin has tons of hacks to make GC/Wii emulation as fast as possible, and these hacks are very dangerous. Dolphin balances on the knife's edge through our GameINIs, where we tailor each and every game to only turn off hacks as required to make it stable. The GameINIs are the product of thousands and thousands of hours of testing by us and our community, and the experience of developers who have been working on GC/Wii emulation for years. Not only are you losing a tremendous value by not including them, you are exposing Emudeck Dolphin users to some terrible bugs by doing this. You NEED to include them.

Due to these issues, we still do not recommend Emudeck to our users.

[Livedeht]

I made a reply on my phone, and i think that i screwed it up. I have moved to a computer where I can type better. Feel free to delete anything prior to this.


So to address your points:

1) We can change that option. I don't remember who suggested it, but if it should be off, no problem. Latency can be a bit of sore spot on the deck because of it's multiple layers of vsync and presentation buffers via gamescope / x-wayland.

2) Game inis. It's important that you understand that we don't do anything special to remove these in any way. The only thing we do is add some widescreen patches for the deck, which go in the user config portion. (also these are not activated by default, they are up the user to enable. They are provided for their convenience)
Upon review of the flatpak the gameini files appear to be here on the deck:

Code:

/var/lib/flatpak/app/org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu/current/active/files/share/dolphin-emu/sys/GameSettings

This location is part of the flatpak sandbox. It seems to contain all the gameini's you mentioned. If i open a game in Dolphin and go to its properties, then game config, then editor i do see the hacks and settings applied by dolphin's team in Default Config. I don't know where the idea that these weren't shipped with it came from, but they are certainly there.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Livedeht

[Livedeht]

I never did get a reply here, but I want to let you know that we have changed the specific setting that you didn't like for next release. I would also like to reiterate, as stated, the dolphin flatpak does use the gameini's and they are absolutely not discarded (nor have they ever been by Emudeck).

Anything else you would like me to change before our next release, aside from immediately present XFB? I want this to be a good experience for both you and our users.

[MayImilae]

Sorry for the lack of reply, I've been super busy!

I'm super relieved that you are shipping our GameINIs. That was potentially a massive issue for Emudeck users, so I'm glad it wasn't the case. But if you are getting our GameINIs, what are the INIs that your source is adding doing exactly? Are they overwriting our INIs?

As for Immediately Present XFB, thank you for changing that. That will definitely give your/our users a better experience. As for other settings, I really need to just fire up Emudeck on a Deck and poke around, but every deck I have has flatpak Dolphin on it already and the aforementioned me being busy and bweh. I'll try to get to it as soon as I can and post here.

[Livedeht]

No worries. I appreciate you taking the time. I also got busy and didn't follow up when I meant to.

The original intent of the gamesettings which are in the repository was automatic application of widescreen hacks for the user, should they want it during the installation. That never panned out (but maybe one day - need to write a method to merge the user's gameini with the widescreenhack). Currently they just sit in a folder which is not used by the emulator and do nothing.

The Flatpak version of the emulator uses GameSettings from here (inside the flatpak sandbox, read-only..ish): 

Code:

/var/lib/flatpak/app/org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu/current/active/files/share/dolphin-emu/sys/GameSettings/

The users configured settings go here:

Code:

$HOME/.var/app/org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu/data/dolphin-emu/GameSettings

The files we copied in go here:

Code:

$HOME/.var/app/org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu/config/dolphin-emu/GameSettings

If you poke around, please be sure to look at the beta branch.