Why bother having an Android port of Dolphin?

[biomedical1010]

You obviously don't care about it and you have expressed how much disdain most of you have for mobile gaming. And this is the reason nobody bothers working on it and making it playable.

So why does it exist in the first place? Is it just an experiment? Or maybe it's just for the lulz?

[JMC47]

I care about the Android port. Some of the users are insufferable, entitled brats, though.

[biomedical1010]

I care about the Android port.

That's not what most people here would say.

[JonnyH]

Dolphin devs are a loose collection of volunteers working on what interests them. There's not really any centralised planning on what people work on.

The simple fact is that the Android port exists because an individual was interested enough to put the time into making it. And there's just enough continuing interest to maintain it.

And for many games on the latest devices it does actually work pretty well. Most of the problems are due to limited hardware performance, which naturally improves over time, and stuff like driver bugs, which too has the possibility of improving in the future.

But the sheer amount of work required to work around each performance issue or driver bug would be huge, so gains little interest as the benefits are considered small as the targeted devices will likely be old and outdated by the time you've finished it (assuming all possible cases can be worked around). And other devices will likely have different issues that need different workarounds.

So sitting there and whining does nothing. Who are you whining to? If you want to see changes, make it more interesting or reduce the amount of work to make the cost/benefit ratio better.

[JMC47]

Well yeah, because the users treat them like shit, expect their mediocre phones with sometimes broken drivers to play GameCube/Wii games full speed. Some developers are completely disillusioned to the Android port. Others work on it, care about it, but they can't stand the forum so they stick to their own work, submit pull requests, and do their own thing.

If you look at the progress reports, you'll see people are working on the Android port, we're maintaining it, it gets fixed. But there are so many users being total jackasses forums, reporting useless issues with missing information, demanding literally impossible features, berating the developers trying to help them that you end up with this situation.

It's only us masochists that still come here to try and help out the remaining users that show up. And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of decent android users that end up drowned out by the others. I try to give honest support to those who need it.

[biomedical1010]

And for many games on the latest devices it does actually work pretty well. Most of the problems are due to limited hardware performance, which naturally improves over time, and stuff like driver bugs, which too has the possibility of improving in the future.

Define "pretty well". If you mean having to choose between garbled stretched sound and 15 fps then yeah that's pretty well. And this includes the best SD chips.

[degasus]

So why does it exist in the first place? Is it just an experiment? Or maybe it's just for the lulz?

I'd vote for "just for the lulz", just like any other part of the emulator as well. At least that was my reason to contribute to any Android related stuff.

I don't want to be offensive here, but please get used to the motivation of voluntary contributors. They either want to improve the application for their usage, or they are looking some funny challenges. Bad luck, only the latter may yield new projects or new targets like the Android support, and "for the lulz" fits quite well here.

To make it even worse, neither of those two groups of contributors actually want to provide support to other people. They want to work together with other contributors to either improve the application for their usages, or to find and beat even greater challenges. But this requires other contributors, so they have to be active in the public to gain new contributors.

This is at least my motivation here. So if you tell me, that you just want to complain and that you never want to contribute, you have just wasted my time.

But fun fact, this worked out quite well. Maybe not for you, but I think there are lots of people enjoying dolphin. Most of them on their desktops, some of them on their laptops, and very few of them on their mobiles. But the ratio is shifting to the latter

Edit: After lookup up your other threads, it seems like I have wasted my time again by answering them. 3 times complaining, 3 times got suggestions how to improve it, 3 times no step forward to actually trying to contribute. Honestly, go away, please delete your forum account. I don't want such people in here!

[JMC47]

Well yeah, the latest SD chips are literal garbage compared to a modern desktop PC. Compare the specs, the drivers, the thermal profile, etc.

The fact you get 15 FPS is pretty incredible.

If you think that this is unfair, or that we're doing a bad job, feel free to leave the community. Maybe you can find a PS2 emulator that works on your phone, or an Xbox emulator, or hell, why not shoot for the stars and see if you can get a Wii U emulator working or bother PS3 emulator devs.

[degasus]

or bother PS3 emulator devs.

Oh no! Please don't do so. Please write your own emulator before you are going to bother another emulation team. You'll notice that your expections of emulation are totally wrong!

[JMC47]

The RPCS3 team can handle it, I'm sure. They have enough users since they're the hot commodity right now.