Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi there,

this is my first post and I want to give a quick shout out to the developpers at dolphin's heart, it's awesome and I can only admire work like that. I also admire Nintendo of course. They make gaming so much fun! But before I digress, I have some issues. Unfortunately.

I have been playing around with Dolphin's settings and have also been reading a lot of stuff over the past month, but I think at that point my problems might be too specific for further consulting the search option.

I think I have a fairly decent PC setup so I have come to believe that the only source for bad game experience could stem from my misconfiguration the emulator.

I'd like to ask a rather general question and hope that someone has an answer.

I started playing my Mario Galaxy on Dolphin because it just looks so amazing in HD.
At first I didn't tweak hardly anything. I discovered the wiki and adjusted Dolphin accordingly. The game run extremely smoothly, 60fps, 1080p... all was well. But then I started a second game. Smash Bros Brawl. It too ran perfectly, the odd crackle in sound but that's on the console as well.
I then started Mario Galaxy again and it didn't run smoothly anymore. Same with Brawl. I then put all my other games in the directory, the same pattern holds up to this very moment of my writing.
The first start of a game is smooth, near perfect. The second time, third time.... x. time I CANNOT PLAY WITHOUT TWEAKING FOR ~10 MIN.
Sometimes a game just 'doesn't want to'. I experience the worst audio crackling, the framerate drops arbitrarily below 40, in Mario Party it speeds up above 100, same in Zelda SS. If I limit fps it is too slow, sometimes, not all the time. I restart my computer, everything works smoothly. Or not...

The point is, I cannot control it. I even took screenshots of all the settings after a game has ran perfectly, but even if I replicate them the next time, it isn't the same.

I put a hotkey for EFB-Copy. Sometimes, I press it a couple of times ingame when fps drop, it seems to recover, sometimes not.

After 2 weeks of playing the OpenGL backend didn't function at all anymore, I get a black screen with glowing lines all over display. In Mario Kart Wii I see polygons without texture.

The EFB-Copy to RAM does not work at all. Not in a single game do I get framerates above 40 with EFB to RAM. At the beginning it worked.

I hope that wasn't too much.

A little info about my setup:
I use the dolphin bar and original Wiimotes with MP inside and RT at the end. Got them working.

Additional Info About Dolphinish
Operating System: Windows 7
Processor/CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1275 V2 @3.5GH
Video Card/GPU: Nvidia GTX 770
Memory/RAM: 4 x 8GB SDRAM DDR3 PC3_12800 @800MHZ 1.5V
Dolphin Revision Currently Using: 4.0-2241


Thank you so much!!

You probably have enabled wireframe in advance graphic settings to have only lines appear on screen.

No, I don't have wireframe enabled. I now enabled it, then started Mario Galaxy. I then disabled it again and now I only get a black screen with no sound and no lines altogether... just black screen.

Switch over to D3D, cause this sounds kinda similar to https://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/is...el%20crash

Also, update to the most recent version of Dolphin.

(11-04-2014, 12:27 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]Switch over to D3D, cause this sounds kinda similar to https://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/is...el%20crash

Also, update to the most recent version of Dolphin.

I already switched over to D3D, but like I said, it seems like I cannot play any WII Game without that aweful crackling in audio. I can't get rid of it. And with it come the framedrops.

I just don't understand, I was playing so well with the exact same setup as of today, but the past two days, I couldn't get a single one game to run smoothly.

How is that even possible? Is there a way to "reset" dolphin without deleting saved games and Miis ?

I have meanwhile set up my whole system. Started from scratch so to say.

Playing Mario Galaxy is really becoming no fun at all because of that crackling. It doesn't matter what I change, it's stable at 60fps for a couple of seconds, then it crackles again. It varies from stage to stage and even within courses. Even if I set internal resolution to 1x, I don't get constant 60fps ANYMORE. Like I said, the first time I played there were no such problems, so I must believe there is some setting I messed up and cannot seem to find again, because it worked. It was the exact same rom too.

Is there any specific information I could provide you guys with that would help zeroing in on the issue? I would appreciate it so much!

FYI, SMG is one of the most demanding games playable in Dolphin. Have tried with HLE, just in case?

(11-04-2014, 06:00 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: [ -> ]FYI, SMG is one of the most demanding games playable in Dolphin. Have tried with HLE, just in case?

yes, as a matter of fact i have to use HLE (you do mean sound, right?) in all games. The volume shift is, for my personal taste anyway, not that big of a problem. but still, what has changed? btw i did up- and downgrade to a lot of different versions. the pattern of the problems i encountered were the same everytime. crackling audio and drops in fps.

completely uninstall then reinstall your sound and graphics drivers try using the dolphin build i am using + revert your settings default make sure your graphics are set to high performance.

(11-04-2014, 06:46 PM)natnint4000 Wrote: [ -> ]completely uninstall then reinstall your sound and graphics drivers try using the dolphin build i am using + revert your settings default make sure your graphics are set to high performance.

Ok, so I did that, I followed all the specific advices from the forums and now as far as I can tell everything is running smoothly, even the beginning of Mario Galaxy that was always the most choppy scene.

thanks