Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Nah, more like I never owned RS II or III. But I'm a serious fan of the Mario Tennis and Golf games

One thing I'm curious about that the article didn't really go in-depth in is how exactly did the working zfreeze emulation happen? I remember earlier that phire commented that he didn't think zfreeze emulation was possible on PC GPUs without hacks and as far as I know neobrain's original zfreeze branch only worked with the software renderer. Now all of a sudden very soon after there is a working zfreeze implementation that can use the hardware backends too. Is my understanding incorrect or was there some kind of breakthrough here that I missed?

Epic, this is Dolphin, this is absolutely EPIC ! I can only say thanks.

Ok just made a quick account here to say thank you and give you a big hug.
So 7 weeks ago I finished Metroid Prime 1 on Dolphin and went on to Metroid Prime 2. Knowing about the raindrop slowdowns from MP1 I was really NOT looking forward going to Torvus Bog in MP2, and yeah it was like the Matrix in there. So I said to myself "Well, to get through here I'll have to wait until that water slowdown is fixed... that may take years but oh well..."

Now, not even 2 months later, and I read "that refraction effects in games like Metroid Prime would bring OpenGL to its knees" and "The Metroid Prime series will see great improvements on a lot of their special effects." and wow, it works perfectly now. I was willing to wait at least 3 years for a fix for that but now I can already continue.    

@MaJoR: Forgive me if this has been answered already but is there a place that lists which games you guys use for the Progress Report banners? That would be interesting to see IMO.

The only list is in my head. Why don't you try guessing them? I'm curious how many you can recognize!

(02-02-2015, 08:56 AM)Pringo Wrote: [ -> ]One thing I'm curious about that the article didn't really go in-depth in is how exactly did the working zfreeze emulation happen? I remember earlier that phire commented that he didn't think zfreeze emulation was possible on PC GPUs without hacks and as far as I know neobrain's original zfreeze branch only worked with the software renderer. Now all of a sudden very soon after there is a working zfreeze implementation that can use the hardware backends too. Is my understanding incorrect or was there some kind of breakthrough here that I missed?

Technically it's not possible to fully emulate zfreeze, there will always be edge cases.

But after checking how all the games used zfreeze, it was discovered that none of them used a visible reference plane, which eliminated most of the hard cases.

neobrain's original attempt at zfreeze in the hardware renderers was actually approach we ended up using, but it had several massive bugs, it was a complete fluke that it rendered the correct thing in rs2. One we fixed those bugs (it was like an 18 hour debugging session, on top of many months of research) it just worked.

So as long as nobody finds any game which abuses any of the weirder aspects of zfreeze, this will work.

(02-02-2015, 07:23 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]Nah, more like I never owned RS II or III. But I'm a serious fan of the Mario Tennis and Golf games

Lol fair enough gotta love Mario tennis. I wonder if I can find a copy of it for a good price now actually.

Wanted to say a quick "thank you" for putting out these progress reports.  As someone who has followed Dolphin since early 3.0, its amazing to see how much progress Dolphin is making on a month-to-month basis right now.  Thanks to you for creating the report, and thanks to the devs for all their hard work to make them so impressive!

Ahaha I loved the screenshot of the Shulk portraits in the Jan 2015 progress report regarding custom texture handling, that gave me a good laugh! Nothing could have more accurately represented the issues we faced, and how wonderful it is to not have to have those 98k textures anymore. Love Dolphin and its team, loved the blog entry. Great read as always, keep em coming!