Question anbout speedrunning using Dolphin

[slax65]

Hello guys,

it would be great if someone's able to help me. So I'm interested into speedrunning and I intend using Dolphin for learning/practising and running the game(s). I'm aware that speedrunning on emulator is very proscribed by the speedrunning scene. So my question is, what game runs pretty glitchless on Dolphin giving me no atvantage or disatvantage? I have following games in mind:

Wind Waker
Paper Mario TTYD
Super Paper Mario
Super Mario Sunshine
Finding Nemo
Kirbys Adventure Wii
Luigis Mansion

Thanks for all your answers!

[Neui]

Most games shouldn't give you a (dis)advanatge with Dolphin. The only disadvanatge you might get is if your computer isn't good enough to handle the game, then you might expirence lag (while emulating, not lag in the game itself).

Looking at the wiki should be enough, as it lists some bugs/glitches/crashes. Many of them are fixed (in popular games, eg. the Mario games or Zelda ones), so only "minor" graphical glitches might be there, eg ugly shadows in Kirby's Return to Dream Land or videos aren't rendered in Finding Nemo

[JosJuice]

All disc-based games will give you a slight advantage in Dolphin (though maybe not in in-game time, depending on how it's measured) because the loading times are a bit faster. They loading times have gotten a lot closer to consoles in the post-4.0 development builds – you might not even be able to notice the difference – but they're still not perfect.

Other than that, I can only think of edge cases like not being able to clip through walls in one of the Spyro games.

(03-01-2016, 05:38 AM)Neui Wrote: The only disadvanatge you might get is if your computer isn't good enough to handle the game, then you might expirence lag (while emulating, not lag in the game itself).

It is actually possible to get lag inside the game when using dual core under specific conditions.

[DrHouse64]

Even real consoles have slightly different loading times depending on very various causes (different models, tired optical lens, game disk condition...). Like JosJuise said, Dolphin have close-to-console loading times now.

Speedrun on emulators is allowed or not depending on where you post it. Speedrun.com, for example, allows it, in an "emulator" category (which is the best thing to do imo), but I don't know all the details or the conditions. AFAIK Project64 2.X is way too fast and banned.

Anyway, "an acceptable time is one did with the real console and the real game" is an old precept of the speedrun community that tends to be destroyed : some console models are faster than others. What about HDD, SSD or even RamDisk unfairness on PC? The HDD, SSD unfairness on PS3? What about DIOS MIOS on Wii (allowed in some places)? What about virtual console versions? What about one emulator be faster than others? What about the "unlock disk read speed" option?
All these things are decided by arbitrary decisions that don't even make sense. Some will only allow official methods, some will only allow unmodified hardware (no SSD on PS3), some will allow unofficial faster USB loading softmods, some will allow "accurate" emulators (but what exactly is accurate?)...

Also, Shader Compilation can be a big disadvantage for RTA games (games that don't have a embedded official timer, like Mario Sunshine, so you have to use a real time stopwatch), because when Dolphin freezes to compile shaders (stopping the "virtual GameCube"), the real timer still goes on. To avoid this, you might want to use the Ishiiruka build that avoid freezing when shaders are compiling.
For IGT games (like Resident Evil 4), it's not a problem, the timer stops when Dolphin is freezing.

Idk if reading isos from HDD or SSD makes a difference...

[Kurausukun]

Reading ISOs from HDD vs SSD makes almost no difference at all, but your other points are correct--for example, Cosmo did a test using Wind Waker on both a Wii purchased at launch in 2006 and a Wii he bought recently, and the read speeds were way different--just by exiting and entering the same room multiple times, there were full seconds of difference. What this means is it's pretty much pointless to account for the small inaccuracies of Dolphin load times vs. console load times.

If you want to get around the shader compilation error, you can always dump your frames from boot to finish and time it that way instead (in fact, I can't really think of another way to do this accurately).

[JosJuice]

(03-01-2016, 08:38 AM)Kurausukun Wrote: If you want to get around the shader compilation error, you can always dump your frames from boot to finish and time it that way instead (in fact, I can't really think of another way to do this accurately).

There is a way to count the number of frames and VIs that have passed when recording input. I'm not sure if it's possible to do this without recording input, but having to enable input recording while speedrunning doesn't sound like a big problem.

[slax65]

Ok thanks for all your great replies!

[slax65]

There is one more question. I decided to run Wind Waker (J). To do so it's necessary for me to use the tingle tuner. Is there any good tutorial of how to connect the visual boy advance with Dolphin?

[Kurausukun]

Luckily, Tingle Tuner is one of the games that works with Dolphin. All you need to do is download VBA-M from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vbam/files/Win32-Wx/VisualBoyAdvance-M-WX-2.0.0-beta2.7z/download, (I think this is the right one?), set the link type in the options menu to GameCube, and connect the way you would on console from there. Note that I'm pretty sure you need a GBA bios file for this to work. You might also need DSP dumps from your Wii/GC, but I'm not sure on that.

[slax65]

Thanks for your fast reply!

So there is no tutorial on Youtube or somewhere else? I'm really not familiar with this. Since I play the Japanese verison of Wind Waker, would I need a Japanese bios file?