Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I'm rather new to Dolphin. My issue is that the lighting doesn't seem to be working. Characters in Smash Bros Melee look flat and without depth, and the entire world in Pikmin is completely dark and flat, making the game very difficult to play.

I'm running OS X 10.8 on a Retina Macbook Pro with a 2.6 GHz Ivy Bridge i7, 16 GB of RAM, on Dolphin 3.0-751. The GPU is a GeForce GT 650M with 1024 MB.

Here's an imgur album of the problem and my settings: http://imgur.com/a/EUfyj

An unrelated issue is that when I try to run Dolphin 3.0 (instead of 3.0-751), my Bluetooth PS3 controller no longer works in games even though it is recognized under GCPad settings.

Thanks very much for the support!

Haha, I own a Macbook Pro Retina too

Well, the settings are okay. Did you try to set EFB Copies to RAM?

Does your Mac work perfectly? What gives?! I just tried that and it didn't seem to do anything. Is there anything I have to press to apply settings?

Yep, I can confirm your problem. I guess, it's a problem of the OpenGL graphics backend. Install Win 7 through Bootcamp and choose the Direct3D9 backend.

Ah, bummer. I was hoping to avoid the expensive purchase of a copy of Windows.

So do all Mac versions of Dolphin exhibit the same problem?

Yep, it's probably a problem with the OpenGL graphics backend. And Macs with OS X can only use this backend.

It's an issue with Mac drivers AFAICT. Other games are impacted by an issue like that, but only on OS X.

Indeed, it's just another case of the OS X OpenGL drivers being problematic. Melee is unaffected for me with OpenGL (Linux distros can only use this as their backend, just like Macs). Haven't played Pikmin yet, but I'm fairly sure it won't exhibit any glitches either. So, if you don't want to drop the cash on Windows, Ubuntu makes for a nice alternative

Tbh, it's not necessarily an unfixable problem - it's likely that there exists a very simple fix for the OS X lighting issue. It's just that no dev who is familiar enough with the gfx core has access to any apple hardware.

Well, it definitely isn't an issue with the older MacBook Pros (mine is from early 2011). Mac OS X Mountain Lion works fine for me here. Probably drivers like delroth said.