Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

So, currently Dolphin supports emulation for Gamecube and Wii. Based on some of what I've been reading about the breakthroughs in Wii-U Emulation, it sounds like that may be coming sometime this year.

I'd like to see if there's been enough interest to eventually incorporate NES, SNES and N64 emulation into Dolphin to build out a unified emulation platform.

This question / sentiment seems to have been met with hostility in the past on this forum, so I want to take a few moments to build out a good case for why this is a good feature to add overtime:

#1.) First and foremost Dolphin is the most current emulator and truthfully the only one really under continued development today with perhaps CEMU being another emerging one down the road. Many of the old emulators are great but not perfect and active community and active dev work is required to get things completely right down the road.

#2.) Convenience: simply put, its more convenient to have all the emulation in one place.

#3.) Uniform Library Management: While there still remain a few oddities of differences between how you can update / modify GC vs Wii vs Wiiware titles, Dolphin offers a unified feel for all the various titles. This is something I'd like to have access to for my full library and not just the most current emulatable systems.

#4.) Uniform controls: Being able to use a uniform control across all platforms makes the general experience a lot better. Not needing to fiddle with getting all the various emulators to figure out my control schemes helps overall engagement.

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Those are some of the main points why I'd love to see Dolphin eventually add more backwards support.

That being said, the source codes are generally all available for the major emulators currently out:

NES:
http://nestopia.sourceforge.net/

SNES:
https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x

N64:
https://code.google.com/p/mupen64plus/

While Nestopia is easily dated (and I know others are out there), SNES and N64 are pretty Windows 64bit friendly and would probably port nicely into Dolph (with some and love).

This is really unlikely and will probably never happen because there's really no point. I'd say the only likely possibility of something like this would be if someone decided to port Dolphin's core into BizHawk.

I made some specific points on the value of it.

Care to comment directly on those?

If you want a multi system emulator use Retroarch. Dolphin won't ever emulate more systems than it currently does.

Working on wii emulation is a big enough challenge in itself. Trying to support three more consoles especially when all of them have vastly different hardware would make the code bloated and unmanageable, thus putting excessive strain on the developers.

No, no it wouldn't.

Dolphin already has modules setup.

Assuming the Dolphin Team simply transplants the code (which, I'm unsure what kind of legal issues might be in this territory; but everything I linked is open source) it's more of a matter of doing the leg work to create and add modules in to run these utilizing the main Dolphin Screen as the base interface for all systems.

As far as SoniceAdvance's comments go, I'm a bit concerned about that considering we're riding the cusp of Wii-U emulation reality.

I see past emulation is an excellent way to keep the Dolphin community engaged, but the future --- is --- well -- the future.

Dolphin also won't be doing Wii U emulation.
Also we aren't modular, the differences between the Gamecube Wii and Triforce are minimal and mostly involve mapping the addiitonal memory ranges that the Wii offers.
Retroarch is modular in that each of its cores are loaded as a dynamic library.

Not that you would want retroarch in Dolphin anyways.

How would retroarch configure a wiimote, nunchuk, or (insert attachment here)

I already am not a huge fan of the conglomerate emulators anyway. Retroarch does what it does well, but, I like having single, highly configurable emulators.

Retroarch is difficult to configure. It has a non-native interface incompatible with standard keyboard-mouse navigation and OS conventions. It used to be ugly. Bizhawk is more in the right direction.

Just for fun, I redownloaded Retroarch on Windows. First impressions: home/end/pageupdown broken. None of the menu items do ANYTHING when pressing Enter. Dead-end software package.

Also Dolphin's UI backend is not the best-designed (even if the front-end looks good), and not designed for multiple systems.