[Unofficial] Dolphin Emulator Portable

[Jhonn]

Well, I generally carry my install of Dolphin on my external HDD alongside with my dumped ISOs, mainly focused in portability (and also to save some gigabytes of space on my laptop). However, whenever I move to a different computer I'll certainly get error messages of missing libraries and I don't always have elevated privileges to install them. Also, most of the time my HDD will get a different letter assigned to it, completely messing all Dolphin settings that relies on paths (ISO directory, Wii NAND root, etc).

I'm a long time user of the Portable Apps Platform and so I made a portable launcher for Dolphin, following the PortableApps Format Specification. The result is a small Dolphin package guaranteed to work on whatever computer you use it (well, as long as it runs a 64-bit OS and it's Windows Vista or later) and that takes care of your paths so they never get messed, even if you change the location or the drive letter assigned to your storage device.

It's also fully compatible with the PortableApps Platform and it's currently submitted for official release at PortableApps.com. You can download the portable launcher from the forum topic at PortableApps.com (current version is bundled with Dolphin 5.0 stable).

Why installer?
The PortableApps apps are distributed in NSIS-based installers for easy integration with the PortableApps Platform (which includes a menu, backup and restore tools and an updater, among other features), but the installer itself doesn't modify anything in your computer (think of them more as self-extracting ZIP files than real installers). If you just want Dolphin Emulator Portable without any PortableApps Platform dependency, just run the installer and choose a folder like your desktop as destination. You'll then get a folder named "DolphinEmulatorPortable" with all required content inside, and you can just carry this folder with you to an external HDD or flash drive and move to any computer, the launcher will take care of the rest.

[AnyOldName3]

Didn't neobrain say last time this was suggested that you just needed to put copies of the DLLs dolphin relies on in the folder dolphin is stored in, and you wouldn't need the redistributables? That's the whole reason I'd not already done something like this with cameyo.

[neobrain]

Uh, actually I'm not really sure if you can just go ahead and redistribute those dlls arbitrarily. Especially when we're talking about GPL stuff...

That said, we could just create some sort of launcher application which executes the actual Dolphin exe when all required DLLs are found. The launcher application itself wouldn't have any dependencies and so could run anywhere.

[Jhonn]

Well, I'll do a little research about redistributing those DLLs... I'm pretty sure that I already seen at least one GPL application that redistributed DirectX runtimes arbitrarily, but I'll take a look at Microsoft EULAs...

[lamedude]

The vcomp100.dll is okay but its look like only the DX installer itself is redistributable not that has stoppped anyone. I hope the GPL doesn't care about linking against a system library from a system folder instead of the parent folder, but until the cg dlls are at least delay loaded so they aren't required to run the program we're going to incur the wrath of rms anyway.

[cluthz]

Have you tried vcomp100.dll from wine?
The function set is not complete on those reverse engineered dlls, but you'll have no licensing issues.

[Jhonn]

Well, the thing is getting closer to an official release at PortableApps.com: we have now a Portable DirectX that download the required files from Microsoft and make the user accept the Microsoft EULA, so, no more issues regarding this... Something similar can be done with vcomp100.dll too, and will be implemented in Dev Test 4. Also, for a more recent information, refer to the topic in PortableApps forums: http://portableapps.com/node/35614

[lamedude]

Most of the C runtime dll's (including vcomp100) can be redistributed with the program.

[Jhonn]

This thread got old but the development is still active: just pushed Dolphin 4.0 at PortableApps.com, if everything goes well I can say that by the end of year Dolphin release at PortableApps.com will be official...

Regarding licensing, both PortableApps launcher and Dolphin shares the same license, GPLv2. Redistributing vcomp100.dll doesn't seem to break the EULA and redistributing the DirectX runtimes with the portable app by using the MS installer and making the users accept DirectX EULA seems to fix the last one. So, perhaps asking the devs if they approve it, everything is good to go, right? Is there something else that I should consider?

[delroth]

I personally have no problems with that. You might want to wait for 4.0.1 (should release it by the end of the week).