Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi all, first time here. Nice to meet you.

I'm a veteran gamer but pretty new to the emulator scene so i have a few questions if you don't mind.

1. I trust you can see my spec below. I have only one game and one game only in mind - Xenoblade Chronicles. Can you tell me how well it will run on my pc?

2. Irregardless of my spec, how well optimised is the game on Dolphin? what are some of the common problems?

3. A technical question.... why do emulated games have such steep requirement (i gather as much by reading through this board) when the current gen (and especially Wii) is practically a few notches below even the low-end rigs?

Thank you for your time.

My spec:
CPU: C2D E7200 2.53Ghz
GPU: Nvidia 560Ti Twin Frozr 1G
Memory: 4G

1. Xenoblade will be playable, but not @ fullspeed. It's a pretty demanding game, so i suggest you to overclock your CPU if you want more FPS
2. The game is not optimized, but you can optimize Dolphin with the right settings -> http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/showthread.php?tid=23618
3. Because it's emulation

1.Now well unless you overclock your cpu to atleast 3.0-3.2 ghz , 3.5 if you are lucky.
2.It used to freeze randomly,I dont know if this is fixed.
3. Because they are not meant to play on pc hardware,nor in microsoft windows

Quote:2.It used to freeze randomly,I dont know if this is fixed.

I've never had that problem with it.

1. Same as above two responses.
2. Our developers don't optimize a game they optimize dolphin. Optimizing a game is nearly impossible without the source code. The game is a separate piece of software running through dolphin.
3. Because hardware behavior needs to be replaced by software behavior, which is a lot slower.

1- It is a very demanding game. To get full-speed you'll need at least 4.0GHz.
2- The main issue in this game is sound.
3- PC gaming can't obviously be compared to emulation

Ok, thanks for the answers folks, and especially naturalviolence for question 3. I guess I should play games where they belong have fun~