Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

After months of testing, reporting, and enjoying Gamecube Netplay in Dolphin,the first major leap in netplay usability is here. Courtesy of countless hours of dedication toward making the emulator more accurate by the Dolphin Staff, the stringent requirements for accurate netplay have been greatly lowered. While we mainly focus on Melee; this setup can be adapted to work with almost any GameCube game.

• NEW - HLE Audio now works for netplay, Thanks Delroth
• NEW - Netplay Stability under the right settings should finally be 100%
• Low Latency Pad Buffer system for the best online lockstep experience
• 4 players can play with any amount on any computer!
• Spectators can watch without impacting netplay latency!
• Can disable memory cards in netplay for easy standardization of memory cards!
  

• No known issues at the moment.
  

• Anything modern will work fine. A 8xxx nVidia or newer will run higher resolutions fine. On the AMD side, I'd recommend at least a 4xxx Radeon, but as low as 2xxx are supported.
• Dolphin Requires 2GB of ram
• For your connection, don't use Dialup or Sattelite, period. Otherwise, just be prepared for latency to go up the higher your ping goes. If you have dialup or sattelite, you won't have a good experience.

This is pretty much whatever you want it to be. If you're playing local multiplayer, use pads 2 - 4 to setup your friends. For netplay, by default it takes the first pad from every player; so even if you're the third person connecting to a netplay, you don't have to setup a third pad or anything like that!

100% Melee Memcard for playing in the Melee Group: http://www.mediafire.com/?l50qa965xi6suuq

Do note, because the group now uses official builds, you may need to synchronize memory cards when playing with different players. Keeping a zipped copy of the memory card and then re-extracting it every time you play a new person is the easiest way until an option not to save to memory card is added to master. On other games that don't have as many unlockables, it may be easier to just not use a memory card, in that case, you can set it to no memory card.

One of the neat things about Dolphin is how it handles latency. It can be confusing at first, but, when setting the pad buffer, you're not setting
how many frames of lag. Assuming your max speed is 60 fps, the host can then turn down pad buffer until the game starts slowing down. The best time to do this is during the character select, since you're less likely to get slowdown from your computer. Most of the time I find pad-buffer ends up between 5 - 15 for 2 players.

Sometimes, the two players who are playing each other will want to record a video, or maybe stream their match, but their computers aren't fast enough. Sometimes, you might also want to bring in a local player who lives at your house or nearby enough to come on your computer. The host's netplay menu is the key to making this work.



Notice how each player has a |X - - -|, with X being a number. That's their controller port. Now this is kind of confusing, so try to bare with me. In Options/Gamecube Pad Settings, that's where you set your controller. Notice how each of those numbers is in the first slot? That means netplay is taking the controller setting that you setup in Pad1.


(Note that this is my button configuration; your controller will likely have different results)

Now, let's just say my brother wants to play. What I can do is set up his controller on pad2 in that menu, then, when I setup netplay, I can set my pad2 to another controller. Let's pretend everyone already connected, and I want to add another player on my computer. Host can do this for any of the connected players, but for ease of explanation, I'm going to do it on my own computer. So, I highlight me, let's say I'm player[0].

]

Then, I hit configure pads, and then click on Pad 2, because that's where he set up his controller. I put him to netplay pad 4, since I already have 3 players.


(Sorry it got cutoff; using printscreen and paint so I don't spend an eternity)

Then, when I hit okay, I have |1 4 - -| now. That means Pad1 is port1, and Pad2 is port4, my brother is now the 4th player in our game.
]

Okay, now, let's go back a bit. Setting a spectator as host is easy. You pick the person you want as a spectator (Let's just say player3,) highlight them, and then set them to no pads.



Now spectators won't affect your latency, and can record the video. If their computer slows down, crashes, desyncs, or anything else, you can continue playing just fine. A neat way to record matches without seeing internet stutters is to pause the spectator's dolphin right before a round starts, and let the other players get ahead. That way, if the internet temporarily freezes, their computers have slowdown that the recording computer doesn't, or any other temporary problems; it won't show up in the recording.

Question: Why does it run so slow? I can run "insert First Person Shooter here" just fine!
Answer: An emulator has to translate Gamecube code/graphics into something your PC can read. This makes simple tasks immeasurably more expensive. That means, even though your computer is more powerful than a Gamecube, it may not be able to emulate it full speed.

Q: Why am I having desyncs?
A: While the emulator seems to be perfectly deterministic with a very particular group of settings, there are still multiple things that can go wrong. Your memory cards can be desynced, someone can have too many controllers set when someone else has less, etc.

Q: Why am I getting a blackscreen at startup with no sound or anything?
A: One of the players has the wrong number of pads and the other emulators are waiting for input before starting. Double Check Options/Configuration/GC

Q: Why can't Dolphin use more of my cores?
A: It can, but because of the way computers work, it makes it unreliable for netplay. Even then, because of the way the Gamecube and Dolphin are designed, there's only so many cores it can use before the returns are negligible.

Q: Do other games work?
A: Yes. Most Gamecube games work (except Mario Kart Double Dash, The Zelda Games, Pikmin) with HLE audio enabled. All Gamecube games work with LLE and No Audio Output. Wii games, Super Smash Bros Brawl and Mario Kart Wii can also be used on netplay. Brawl in particular is nice, because can be less texing to emulate than Melee and it gets around how gimped Wifi is.

Q: How do I tell what version of Melee I have?
A: Well, honestly? There wasn't a good reason for a long time. Luckily, nmn is cooking up a way to quickly identify which version you have with a program. You should see this crossed out shortly.

Q: Why don't you give us performance settings?
A: Because the goal is to make the emulator not desync ever. Just because you can play a round of Melee without desyncing in dualcore doesn't mean it's a good thing. Plus many characters and features can't even be used with this setup! It gets worse with more players as well, making it less likely to last a whole round. The best thing to do for performance is use the 30 or 45 FPS codes provides by InternetExplorer. They can be found on the Smashboards forums.

Q: How do I find matches with people?
A: Well that's somewhat difficult right now. If you post or message your skype name to me, I can add you to the skype group, where a lot of experienced and helpful players hang out. And there is also a steam group at: http://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791433773565

Q: Can my 32bit computer play a 64bit computer?
A: Yes, but you both have to use the x86 (32bit) build of Dolphin.

Q: What about testing now, are you done?
A: Of course not, but, we're not actively looking for people just to test. At this time, we should be looking for features we wanted added to Dolphin's main branch, what other games work, and perhaps even find bugs that lead to desyncs through experimentation. At this point, it's gone beyond a simple proof of concept; Gamecube Online play has arrived, and there's no better game to showcase that than Melee.

Q: For Melee, does 1.0, 1.01, SDRemix/Hacks work?
A: Yes, but most players already have 1.02, and it is the tournament standard.

If you want great online matches featured in the thread, I can help with recording (as a spectator, even) and upload them to the Melee Netplay channel and post them here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQPeqLW5VPE

These are some old videos, but we could post matches, tournaments, streams and more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IYdAMYffdc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chWcqfPiUoU

I'm also contemplating having a player database if there's interest. we could list, either usernames, skype names, emails, some kind of identification to make finding matches easier. If there are any questions, comments, complaints or anything else, please let me know in your replies.

This thread, and group, is originally from Smashboards and we have been doing this October. Because the emulator was generally difficult to use, we were using hacked builds, and netplay wasn't perfect on any settings, we didn't branch out right away. I'll be working on writing up a more generalized, in-depth analysis on how to make netplay work on the Wiki for general purposes, rather than being based on Melee. For what it's worth, these settings are known to work with Soul Calibur Series and the Mario Party Series. Mario Party is great on netplay, and has moderate requirements.