Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hey guys, please don't flame me as I have searched as best I can, I promise...

I've followed emulation since the early days of MAME and also got massively into it when UltraHLE allowed me to complete Zelda OOT on my old Voodoo2 PC quicker than my mate did on his actual N64... and one thing I've been wondering about Dolphin is this:
Just how complete is it?

This isn't a complaint, I'm merely curious.
It was a recent FIFO commit that got me thinking this as the first reply was "congrats for working where no one wants to".

Following the regular revisions (which having worked with Devs for years are frighteningly fast-paced and feature-rich), it seems loads is happening around making the emulator more advanced than the original hardware, but for example SNES9x would say "98% implementation of xyz co-proc, with the following instructions outstanding..."
So I just wanted to know if there were any major things that hadn't been implemented, and similarly minor things too.

I'm intrigued as to what the devs thoughts are, or anyone else that can look at the code and "see blonde, brunette, redhead..."

Cheers

Quote:So I just wanted to know if there were any major things that hadn't been implemented, and similarly minor things too.

What do you mean by that?

As for "how complete" the emulator is. That's impossible to figure out for obvious reasons. It can't be measured mathematically. And since emulator development is a constant learning process their are all kinds of things missing that we don't know about yet. For example we wouldn't know that MMU emulation was missing if we didn't know that the GC/Wii uses an MMU, thus it never would have been implemented.

Like a specific hardware or software feature, a part of the DSP cpu, a particular element of the GPU, anything that the Wii has - or is capable of - that Dolphin is not.

I'm really not criticising here - your response seems to suggest you think I am - all I'm wondering is if there's a breakdown of apples for apples between the emulated hardware and real hardware. I wouldn't expect a mathematical calculation, just an idea as to what is yet, or left to be implemented, feature/hardware/software or otherwise (eg. Wiimote speaker)

That's a hard question to answer. I like to think of emulator completeness in terms of compatibility - out of all of the games that you own, how many work?

Most things have been mostly implemented for most games to work...

Notable exceptions are:

* PowerPC's data cache
* Video hardware timing
* Wiimote speaker
* Wii wifi hardware
* Wii USB hardware
* Wii's ARM CPU (starlet)
* Wii ES_LAUNCH (multiboot Wii games)
* Wii settings screen in the System Menu

how complete is the emulator?

nearly everything is implemented in some way...
the next steps are
to improve the functionallity of every plugin (and if its compatibilty in cost of speed)

OK so it's pretty complete in that case and yes most of my games do work, albeit with texture issues that I put down to an ageing MacBook Pro.

The two that intrigue me the most are the starlet ARM CPU and Wii Settings. The former I've googled and can't really dig up much, though it would seem considering compatibility that it's low on the priority list? And the Wii Settings I guess would be useful for things like Audio output?

As for PPC data cache - whilst I'm in IT, it's not that area - but I'll go google and see what I can find.

The only other thing I was wondering about is Audio emulation, as getting BGM music to work seems to be quite arduous - though I'll save that for another thread.

Cheers

Quote:The only other thing I was wondering about is Audio emulation, as getting BGM music to work seems to be quite arduous - though I'll save that for another thread.

Just use lle.

Quote:The two that intrigue me the most are the starlet ARM CPU

Read the third paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_%...cs_chip%29

That's basically everything you need to know about it.

RULE 27. It needs more Desu. No exceptions.