Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Maybe running dolphin games off of the disc can be good?

(12-31-2014, 10:40 AM)Yoyoman Wrote: [ -> ]Maybe running dolphin games off of the disc can be good?

What disc are you talking about?

(12-31-2014, 10:40 AM)Yoyoman Wrote: [ -> ]Maybe running dolphin games off of the disc can be good?

Dolphin already does that but it only works with backups (eg. you burned the ISO in a regular DVD). Booting games directly from their retail discs isn't possible and probably can't be implemented...

Maybe it can happen in the future of Dolphin?

Maybe, but that's just as much a "maybe" as any of the other ideas proposed here. For PS1 and PS2 emulation, this is easy enough because the game's are written to discs your PC can easily read. GC and Wii discs are not-so-standard optical media that only a few consumer drives can read with firmware hacks.

I still think booting retail games directly from disc is not possible, I mean, since RawDump/FriiDump, we can count with our hands the number of drives that allowed dumping GC/Wii games, most of them aren't even sold anymore and dumping in these drives were slow, very slow, probably not suitable for playing in Dolphin if someone even add support for it...

Well, there really should be no technical reason why Dolphin (or any emulator) couldn't theoretically boot it. You could just have FriiDump put the entire disc image in RAM. To do that, however, would basically involve running through the entire dumping process, at which point you'd be better off just dumping the disc as a file on an HDD or something (I mean, eventually you're going to free up that RAM too...) It would be very slow; you wouldn't be able to put a disc in and just go right away. Possible? Yes. Dumb by design? Also yes.

Doesn't it take hours? lol

Dumping GC discs takes about 90 minutes with FriiDump, since they're only 1.4GB. Dumping Wii discs takes more like 5 hours, since they're at least 4.7GB for single-layer discs. RawDump is a bit faster, but AFAIK it doesn't work with dual-layer discs, while FriiDump supposedly does. (I don't have any to test with.)

I'd be curious to see documentation on what exactly Nintendo did to make the discs so difficult to read, assuming any such documentation exists. Even the Dreamcast's obscure GD-ROMs can be ripped without needing special drives, although you need a trap disc to fake the TOC, AFAIK.