Hello,
I've yet to have the opportunity to try Dolphin out, but I was looking for some insight on the specs. I'm a competitive Super Smash Bros tournament player, and we run in to a lot of problems playing the Smash games competitively on HDTVs. There are just a few frames of lag that most people don't notice that occur when playing a Wii/GameCube game on an HDTV, because the Wii maxes out at an analog 480p signal, and this has to be converted to the native resolution of the TV (usually a digital 1080p signal with modern TVs).
For most games, people can't see a 3-4 frame lag, but to a competitive player, it is unacceptable. The amount of lag that is produced by the conversion varies from TV to TV as well, and there's no way to know prior to purchase without bringing your Wii to the store and hooking it up. Most competitive players just keep old SDTVs around for Smash tournaments. If only there was a way to get the Wii to output in 1080p natively, eh?
tl;dr version: I think Dolphin can solve the problem.
I was thinking of building a dedicated Dolphin box (complete with GameCube controller to USB adapters) just to hook up to HDTV's via HDMI/DVI. It would, however, have to be able to run Super Smash Bros Melee and Brawl in 1080p, at a smooth 60 FPS. I'd strip down the Windows install as much as possible, disable most services, and remove all other applications from the PC to keep performance stable.
What kind of hardware would I be looking at? My existing (aging) PC is a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Quad (Kentsfield) w/Geforce 8800 GT. Would I be looking at similar specs? Higher? I'm not sure how taxing Dolphin is, or how stable it runs.
Thanks for any insight!
I've yet to have the opportunity to try Dolphin out, but I was looking for some insight on the specs. I'm a competitive Super Smash Bros tournament player, and we run in to a lot of problems playing the Smash games competitively on HDTVs. There are just a few frames of lag that most people don't notice that occur when playing a Wii/GameCube game on an HDTV, because the Wii maxes out at an analog 480p signal, and this has to be converted to the native resolution of the TV (usually a digital 1080p signal with modern TVs).
For most games, people can't see a 3-4 frame lag, but to a competitive player, it is unacceptable. The amount of lag that is produced by the conversion varies from TV to TV as well, and there's no way to know prior to purchase without bringing your Wii to the store and hooking it up. Most competitive players just keep old SDTVs around for Smash tournaments. If only there was a way to get the Wii to output in 1080p natively, eh?
tl;dr version: I think Dolphin can solve the problem.
I was thinking of building a dedicated Dolphin box (complete with GameCube controller to USB adapters) just to hook up to HDTV's via HDMI/DVI. It would, however, have to be able to run Super Smash Bros Melee and Brawl in 1080p, at a smooth 60 FPS. I'd strip down the Windows install as much as possible, disable most services, and remove all other applications from the PC to keep performance stable.
What kind of hardware would I be looking at? My existing (aging) PC is a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Quad (Kentsfield) w/Geforce 8800 GT. Would I be looking at similar specs? Higher? I'm not sure how taxing Dolphin is, or how stable it runs.
Thanks for any insight!