Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

My Wii has finally gone the way of the dodo, or at least, the disc drive has.

So, I'm looking at building an HTPC for Netflix, Youtube, DVD watching, but primarily for playing Wii games with Dolphin.

I was wondering, because I know nothing about Dolphin, other than you can use it to play Wii games in HD, if what I'm planning on getting would be powerful enough to play all my games in HD?

Here's what I'm planning on:

CPU: i3-2120 2C/4T 3.3 GHz
Mobo: MSI H61M-P31/W8 Micro ATX LGA1155
RAM: Kingston 8GB DDR3-1600
HDD: WD Caviar Blue 1TB
GPU: EVGA GTX 750 Ti

And that's all the meaningful specs.

So, could I do it fairly easily? I'm not looking for top of the line performance, all I want is to play MP 1&2&3, Skyward Sword, and SSBB in HD without terribad frame rates (don't worry, I did buy the games, no pirating here lol).

Could I drop down to 4GB to save some money? Like I said, this won't be used for much else besides Netflix and the interbutts.

Consider upgrading the cpu to an i3 4130 with a H81M motherboard. You could drop the RAM to 4GB if you wish. From my experience, dolphin worked wonders for me with 4GB of RAM. The GPU is fine, you can keep that.

That CPU is a Sandy Bridge, get a Haswell as they are faster with Dolphin. Preferably an i3 4130 as TheLastCat suggested...

Alright, thanks for the suggestions. Is there anything else I should know? How much disk space does Dolphin take up? I was thinking about dropping the HDD and using an external 250GB I have to store games, and getting a cheap 64GB SSD so it boots faster. I'll be using Windows 8.1.

In the worst case, Dolphin would take around 650 MB of disk space, excluding the disk space that Texture Dumps, Audio/Video dumps, and Saved States may take, if you plan using them. Using an SSD will help your OS booting faster. In fact, as long as you have enough space to store your ISO dumps, you shouldn't worry with the disk space Dolphin takes...

electroball09 Wrote:My Wii has finally gone the way of the dodo, or at least, the disc drive has.

You know the disc drive is a discreet unit and you can buy one and swap it out, right? Well, admittedly it's not easy, but I did it.

Jhonn Wrote:excluding the disk space that Texture Dumps, Audio/Video dumps, and Saved States may take,

Don't forget screenshots. They add up FAST.

(03-01-2014, 09:10 AM)MaJoR Wrote: [ -> ]

electroball09 Wrote:My Wii has finally gone the way of the dodo, or at least, the disc drive has.

You know the disc drive is a discreet unit and you can buy one and swap it out, right? Well, admittedly it's not easy, but I did it.

I did that D: It worked for about two weeks, and then I started getting the same errors as with the old disc drive.

FYI, if you want to play the Metroid Prime games at full speed, you'd want to bump that CPU straight up to an overclocked i5-4670K. Those games are notoriously hard to run at full speed, and even with the overclocked 4670K, disc reads cause speed dips all over the place since Dolphin doesn't do those asynchronously.

And MP3 is still buggy as hell. Borderline unplayable imo. MP1 and 2 will be fine with an i3 4130 though.

electroball09 Wrote:I was thinking about dropping the HDD and using an external 250GB I have to store games, and getting a cheap 64GB SSD so it boots faster.

I would definitely recommend doing this if you have the money for it. My HTPC boots to desktop in 5 seconds flat with an SSD boot drive. And 2.5 of those seconds is just waiting at the POST screen for a keypress to enter the UEFI setup. So the actual booting procedure only takes about 2 seconds.