Would anyone mind bringing me up-to-date...?

[NKF98]

Absolutely. Anything really, your system is outstanding in terms of Dolphin

[dh2005]

Last time I was using Dolphin, everything was just a bit hitchy and irritating - at the heart of it, the emulator 'worked' - but everything I tried to run had some problem or another. Be that that skydome issue in Rogue Leader, or the OpenGL rainwater crisis in Metroid Prime...

... so, things are much, much better now? Remarkable.

[dh2005]

So, the inevitable follow-up question... does all this make me a chump for dropping more than £500 on GameCube stuff since February?!

Nah, in all sincerity, I don't mind - I'm a collector anyway, and it looks lovely all set-up.

[JMC47]

You're pretty silly for investing in the component cables, since you can just use a Wii's component cables and boot discs via homebrew to make them detect it as a GameCube component cable. other than that, it's great to have the games, there are games that Dolphin still doesn't play well, and you need to dump the games anyway for legal use in Dolphin, so, none of the games are wasted money.

[dh2005]

(04-14-2015, 07:46 AM)JMC47 Wrote: You're pretty silly for investing in the component cables, since you can just use a Wii's component cables and boot discs via homebrew to make them detect it as a GameCube component cable.  other than that, it's great to have the games, there are games that Dolphin still doesn't play well, and you need to dump the games anyway for legal use in Dolphin, so, none of the games are wasted money.

Point taken, although I picked-up the component cable for a (comparative) song. I've seen them change hands on eBay.co.uk for £145; whereas, for £230, I acquired a multi-region NTSC GameCube with matching controller and GBA Player, the official GameCube modem, a 251-block memory card and a component cable - all boxed, and in mint condition. I was happy with that...

... and for a further £300, I picked-up a job-lot of 38 NTSC GameCube games, all of which are boxed, and all but a couple of which are in mint condition. So, I did okay, I reckon.


Sincerely, though, if the day comes when Dolphin emulates the GameCube perfectly, it will not be a sad one for me - it will be a magnificent one.

[Xtreme2damax]

You can read the various blog articles to find out what has improved. Fixes range from improvements to gpu, fifo emulation and cpu, jit optimizations and numerous graphical issues fixed. Fixes to audio emulation and currently in progress rewrite of the Zelda ucode. Games that utilize AX ucode's have near perfect if not perfect audio output. No more bgm stopping in several games including Zelda Ucode games like Super Mario Galaxy 1/2, Zelda Twilight Princess, Mario Kart Double Dash etc.. several games run flawlessly and more games are compatible. The JIT optimizations courtesy of Fiora and others, buffer storage (for Nvidia gpu's), improvements to both the DX/OGL backends have really boosted performance. For example I can achieve between 100fps to 200fps in Super Mario Galaxy 1/2 on my old i7 950 @ 4GHz.

I think on newer cpu's the requirements to overclock to achieve good performance are past. Meaning you can stick with safer stock clocks and reach full speed in most games.

[dh2005]

(04-14-2015, 10:54 PM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: You can read the various blog articles to find out what has improved.  Fixes range from improvements to gpu, fifo emulation and cpu, jit optimizations and numerous graphical issues fixed. Fixes to audio emulation and currently in progress rewrite of the Zelda ucode. Games that utilize AX ucode's have near perfect if not perfect audio output. No more bgm stopping in several games including Zelda Ucode games like Super Mario Galaxy 1/2, Zelda Twilight Princess, Mario Kart Double Dash etc.. several games run flawlessly and more games are compatible. The JIT optimizations courtesy of Fiora and others, buffer storage (for Nvidia gpu's), improvements to both the DX/OGL backends have really boosted performance. For example I can achieve between 100fps to 200fps in Super Mario Galaxy 1/2 on my old i7 950 @ 4GHz.

I think on newer cpu's the requirements to overclock to achieve good performance are past. Meaning you can stick with safer stock clocks and reach full speed in most games.

So, by standing still my PC has become significantly better at running Dolphin? Happy days...!!!

I must admit, I have long been staggered by what a solid job Dolphin has done of emulating pretty sophisticated hardware. I mean, the N64 is almost 20 years old and I feel like nobody's ever really got on top of it... though I suppose the hardware patents will be expiring soon, so we might start to see some competent aftermarket consoles coming out in the next year or two.