Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Note: This is a repost from a recent thread that was buried and never was solved.

I'm sure a lot of other people are having this issue but no matter what I do I can't seem to get netplay to work properly at even a semi-playable state. What I mean by that is it works... but is not even a tolerable speed. Once I click "start game" The windows come up for us, but the emulator speed drops to 10-30%. I've already went through a majority of solutions on the forums, and nothing has worked towards fixing the speed. Even while using all the settings that Dolphin says all emulators should be using for netplay. We've also tried other settings but none worked. Our ping to each other is 15 so I wouldn't think internet could be an issue. So I guess, is my computer even capable of hosting gamecube games online? Also the person I've been testing netplay with has a fairly similar pc to mine, only with minor differences. Keep in mind we don't desync, our performance is just horribly low.

My specs:
Operating System: Windows 7 64-Bit
Processor/CPU: AMD FX™-8350 Eight-Core Processor 4.01GHz
Video Card/GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7800
Memory/RAM: 8GB DDR3
Dolphin Revision Currently Using: 3.5-2171



We've already tried changing the pad buffer higher, sadly when we've tried it, there isn't even a notable difference when changing the pad. Performance would increase (at the very most) only by 1-2%. It didn't make much of a difference. The emulator performs fine running on a single thread when not using netplay, but is it too intensive for my CPU to handle with netplay? I wouldn't think that would be the case cause even when my friends have tested themselves (One uses an Intel Core i7-4770K @ 3.50GHz and the other uses Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz ) Not even they could get it to work at moderate speed.



My friends and I have been testing netplay with multiple games to see if we can manage to get any working at a playable speed. But the main games we've been testing were "Super Smash Bros: Melee, Mario Party 5, Super Mario Strikers, and Worms 3D" (I think Worms may be a problem anyway since you have to share one controller). We've been using these games as tests for netplay just cause we figure they might easier to run than for example an open-world games like Kirby's Air Ride or Starfox: Assault. But anyway, our settings for all Dolphin emulators have consisted of Duel-Core being off, Audio Throttle off, all Backend set to Direct3D9 (depricated), DSP-HLE with No Audio Output, Frame Limit Set to either No Limit or Auto (we've been going back and forth on this setting), No Memory Card, and controllers set from 2-3 (dependent how any people were present during our cracks at netplay), as well as all users using Dolphin 3.5-2171. And I think it goes without saying that my port for the Dolphin Emu has been forwarded.

Considering your specifications, there's obviously something odd going on in your case. I just have a few things to note real quick before getting into the meat of things, as honestly they won't affect your problem.

1: Mario Party 5 is kinda hard to run because the INI defaults EFB2Ram on.
2: Kirby Air Ride works in Dualcore, I haven't been able to desync. It's literally the second easiest game to run on netplay behind Mario Party 4; which also works on Dualcore.

With that out of the way, have you tried older builds? Netplay has gotten wrecked by half finished features and such as of recent. I'd heavily recommend trying something like 3.5-1789.

Are other people using your internet? The fact it's a constant lag can mean bandwidth just isn't high enough. Netplay only adds about 20 - 25% more strain to a CPU than playing alone, so this is not normal behavior. Try finding other people to play with, playing with only two players instead of three; it's very possible someone's internet is just messing up and causing problems.

Super Smash Bros. Melee, Kirby Air Ride and Mario Party 5 have all been tested and verified to work no problem, so, I'm going to guess the problem is on one of the ISP's that you're playing with. If you need more help or it doesn't work out, keep me updated and I'll work with you more closely.

(09-01-2013, 07:13 AM)JMC47 Wrote: [ -> ]Considering your specifications, there's obviously something odd going on in your case. I just have a few things to note real quick before getting into the meat of things, as honestly they won't affect your problem.

1: Mario Party 5 is kinda hard to run because the INI defaults EFB2Ram on.
2: Kirby Air Ride works in Dualcore, I haven't been able to desync. It's literally the second easiest game to run on netplay behind Mario Party 4; which also works on Dualcore.

With that out of the way, have you tried older builds? Netplay has gotten wrecked by half finished features and such as of recent. I'd heavily recommend trying something like 3.5-1789.

Are other people using your internet? The fact it's a constant lag can mean bandwidth just isn't high enough. Netplay only adds about 20 - 25% more strain to a CPU than playing alone, so this is not normal behavior. Try finding other people to play with, playing with only two players instead of three; it's very possible someone's internet is just messing up and causing problems.

Super Smash Bros. Melee, Kirby Air Ride and Mario Party 5 have all been tested and verified to work no problem, so, I'm going to guess the problem is on one of the ISP's that you're playing with. If you need more help or it doesn't work out, keep me updated and I'll work with you more closely.

Thank you for the version recommendation. Netplay runs a little bit better. But there still a problem of performance issues. We've netplayed with Melee and performance only reached a max of 60% with an average of about 50%. Desyncing was not an issue however. But to answer your question, no we are on different networks but we live relatively close with my friend having about 15 ping to my server. We've tried playing alone with Enable Duel-Core set to off and disabling Frame Limit to see if we can handle the game with a single core. In the menu I ran at about 450% and my friend at 420% and in-game I ran at 180% while my friend ran at 165%. But as you already know, those numbers don't seem to show when we netplay :c we we're still using the specified settings listed above.

Actually, this is sounding like a bandwidth issue; 1789 has half the inputs of newer builds meaning that your speed increase is likely from that. I'm thinking one of you are having bandwidth throttled something horrible.

Try playing with someone else, have your friend play with someone else. Single core should work for you; this is all on networking from what I've seen. Firewalls HAVE caused this in the past in some strange cases, may want to try disabling firewalls on all computers temporarily. Your computers are fast enough, but somewhere, the networking is derping, and I don't think it's dolphin's end.

(09-01-2013, 06:21 PM)JMC47 Wrote: [ -> ]Actually, this is sounding like a bandwidth issue; 1789 has half the inputs of newer builds meaning that your speed increase is likely from that. I'm thinking one of you are having bandwidth throttled something horrible.

Try playing with someone else, have your friend play with someone else. Single core should work for you; this is all on networking from what I've seen. Firewalls HAVE caused this in the past in some strange cases, may want to try disabling firewalls on all computers temporarily. Your computers are fast enough, but somewhere, the networking is derping, and I don't think it's dolphin's end.

Ok so the both of of tried netplaying with other people we both opened our networks to the port that Dolphin uses so our network doesn't block it. However, embarressing to say, performance was even more substantially lower. We were able to figure out though that it was them slowing the game down. Their cpu's weren't able to handle Dolphin by itself in Single Core mode (they could play fine in duel-core but we already know that causes desyncs). We don't know of many other people who have good enough pc's to be able to run Super Smash Bros Melee in Single core mode.

This may be an odd question but do you know of anyone who can test netplay with us for now so we can find out the problem?

You can find me and a lot of other melee players in our matchmaking room. Ping my name sometime and I'll help you out.

https://qchat.rizon.net/?channels=dolphin-ssbm&uio=Nz10cnVlJjk9MzU3fe

You can always connect via a normal IRC client too, but this link is just easier even if it kinda sucked sometimes.

(09-03-2013, 06:05 AM)JMC47 Wrote: [ -> ]You can find me and a lot of other melee players in our matchmaking room. Ping my name sometime and I'll help you out.

https://qchat.rizon.net/?channels=dolphin-ssbm&uio=Nz10cnVlJjk9MzU3fe

You can always connect via a normal IRC client too, but this link is just easier even if it kinda sucked sometimes.

Thanks so much for your help JMC47, thanks to you I can finally netplay at 100% I've only played Kirby's Air Ride and SSBM so far and they work great! Only thing I wanted to know is, some games have a LAN option in game ie Kirby's Air Ride and I was wondering if there's anyway we can make that work so we can use LAN for our own screens rather than sharing the screen in a split-screen netplay session. Also if I can message you at any times in case I need help with something? Other than thank you so much If I was wearing a hat right now, I'd take it off. thanks a lot ^-^

Don't bother with BBA; it's an absolute mess! Seriously, it needs to be completely redone if you want to use it effectively. If you're doing it on LAN, as in, people in the same house, there's a guide for that on the google code. Click the wiki tab and find the BBA guide. It won't go full speed though, even if you do that.

(09-07-2013, 06:54 PM)JMC47 Wrote: [ -> ]Don't bother with BBA; it's an absolute mess! Seriously, it needs to be completely redone if you want to use it effectively. If you're doing it on LAN, as in, people in the same house, there's a guide for that on the google code. Click the wiki tab and find the BBA guide. It won't go full speed though, even if you do that.

Well that's a let down but there's still netplay and most games share one big screen so not to bad. Is there anyway to netplay LOZ: Four Swords Adventure?

(09-07-2013, 06:54 PM)JMC47 Wrote: [ -> ]Don't bother with BBA; it's an absolute mess! Seriously, it needs to be completely redone if you want to use it effectively. If you're doing it on LAN, as in, people in the same house, there's a guide for that on the google code. Click the wiki tab and find the BBA guide. It won't go full speed though, even if you do that.

Stop the FUD. Because you don't understand how it works does not mean it's unusable or it needs to be completely redone. It means we need documentation.