I'm testing every GameCube game and so far only found two which don't work at all

[Kostas Gangstar]

Bought a redmi note 9 pro and after seeing how fast it is with Dolphin I decided to test every single game slowly while I'm going to be in quarantine 2.0 with the official Dolphin dev build (All USA games + those which are exclusive only for 1 non-USA region)

I tested about 50 so far with OpenGL because Vulkan is slower in Android 10 and I have to report that graphical artifacts are nearly extinct and games run at fullspeed with 2x resolution with some cases like James Bond and Call of Duty running fullspeed only at 1x, however Crash Bandicoot even lags a little at 1x

Modded Dolphins works faster for whatever reasons while also not having any visible graphical artifacts just like the Official, maybe you could add the things which make them so fast in the hack options and turn them off by default in the Official Dolphin or in another section? Just a suggestion.

Anyway while most games run great I found two which don't boot or are unplayable in the official Dolphin!

1. Eternal Darkness, a horror game has black screens at many parts from booting the game to launching a new game then the game will go completely black when it's the first time you control any character in the game, in the part where you shoot a few skeletons and wake up from a nightmare making it completely unplayable, this happens in both OpenGL and Vulkan. Last time I tested it on a Huawei it barely even showed the main menu so I guess thats an improvement. Game is playable without any glitches in the Modded Dolphins for whatever reasons and runs extremely fast even on high resolutions for such a good looking game.

2. Harry Potter Prisoner of Azkaban, this one just won't boot at all neither in the Official or Modded Dolphins. Tried OpenGL and Vulkan with different settings and different game dumps but nothing happens.

[JosJuice]

(08-12-2020, 03:15 PM)Kostas Gangstar Wrote: Modded Dolphins works faster for whatever reasons while also not having any visible graphical artifacts just like the Official, maybe you could add the things which make them so fast in the hack options and turn them off by default in the Official Dolphin or in another section? Just a suggestion.

Assuming you mean MMJ and builds based on MMJ, Dolphin already has the main option that lets them gain speed: disabling "SyncOnSkipIdle". However, this option makes games so unstable and prone to crashing that we don't want to expose it in the GUI. If you really want to use it, you'll have to edit the Dolphin.ini file.

(08-12-2020, 03:15 PM)Kostas Gangstar Wrote: 1. Eternal Darkness, a horror game has black screens at many parts from booting the game to launching a new game then the game will go completely black when it's the first time you control any character in the game, in the part where you shoot a few skeletons and wake up from a nightmare making it completely unplayable, this happens in both OpenGL and Vulkan. Last time I tested it on a Huawei it barely even showed the main menu so I guess thats an improvement. Game is playable without any glitches in the Modded Dolphins for whatever reasons and runs extremely fast even on high resolutions for such a good looking game.

weihuoya tracked this down to a certain broken instruction in the JIT a good while ago, but I don't think anyone knows exactly what's wrong with the instruction. I did make a little change to that instruction in 5.0-12394, so please try that build if you haven't already. Maybe it helps, or maybe it doesn't.

(08-12-2020, 03:15 PM)Kostas Gangstar Wrote: 2. Harry Potter Prisoner of Azkaban, this one just won't boot at all neither in the Official or Modded Dolphins. Tried OpenGL and Vulkan with different settings and different game dumps but nothing happens.

I don't think I've seen this one before. Could you test it it works when using Cached Interpreter? If it does, it should be possible to track down the problem to a certain JIT instruction, just like with Eternal Darkness.

[Kostas Gangstar]

(08-12-2020, 06:24 PM)JosJuice Wrote: Assuming you mean MMJ and builds based on MMJ, Dolphin already has the main option that lets them gain speed: disabling "SyncOnSkipIdle". However, this option makes games so unstable and prone to crashing that we don't want to expose it in the GUI. If you really want to use it, you'll have to edit the Dolphin.ini file.


weihuoya tracked this down to a certain broken instruction in the JIT a good while ago, but I don't think anyone knows exactly what's wrong with the instruction. I did make a little change to that instruction in 5.0-12394, so please try that build if you haven't already. Maybe it helps, or maybe it doesn't.


I don't think I've seen this one before. Could you test it it works when using Cached Interpreter? If it does, it should be possible to track down the problem to a certain JIT instruction, just like with Eternal Darkness.

Thanks for the ini file hint but maybe you could add it to the GUI after all and add a note below the setting to warn this SkipIdle option will break too much stuff, there are many hack options which break games already there anyway.

The dev version I tried with Eternal Darkness was released before 12394, I tried that new version and the more recent latest one and they both work! OpenGL has a black screen 1 second after the Edgar quote but the opening videos and company logos after it work, then the main menu is black but I could navigate from memory and selected to start a new game and after the intro I fought the skeletons for the first time in the official version! The cutscene after the fight also worked, I don't have much time to test the rest of the game right now. Vulkan doesn't have the black screens but the speed is slower by around 5 fps. 2x resolution and default hacks are giving me around 55-56 fps while with most hacks I get 60fps but a few graphical artifacts here and there.

As for Harry Potter I tried it with those new latest versions with Cached Interpreter and Interpreter but it still doesn't boot at all in both Vulkan and OpenGL. Strange how the rest Harry Potter games work without trouble, I would expect the game to be made in the same engine and not cause those weird things.

I noticed two things about this game, the fps counter appears only when I enabled the "Immediately Present XFB" option in the hacks section and stays at 0 fps with the black screen forever, pressing buttons does nothing, if I disable it the fps counter won't even appear.
The second thing is I tried the latest MMJ again and this time saw a yellow message on the top of the screen saying "bounding box is not available"

I hope this helps in any way.