Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi there,
I just wanted to take a moment and say THANKS to everyone who has worked so hard to make Dolphin so amazing!

I have been a Wii and GameCube fan for years, and I love so many of the classic games on these consoles.

It took a lot of work, but I now have all my games running on a dedicated 3D Dolphin gaming system.  And it is AMAZING!  I never dreamed I'd be able to go back and play these games in high definition and 3D.

Perhaps it will inspire others if I post the details of my setup:

• 60 inch LG 3D television (using side-by-side 3D mode)
  
• Dell Inspiron 7000 gaming laptop with Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M
  
• Ishiiruka build of Dolphin (definitely improves performance and reduces lag)
  
• 2x native resolution (with V-sync on), side-by-side stereoscopic 3D mode
  
• Dolphin Bar for Wiimote connectivity (works great, I don't use this as my motion bar though, it is too jittery from long range)
  
• Nintendo official Wireless Ultra Sensor Bar (makes the motion pointer much more smooth and accurate from long range)
  
• Knock-off Wii remotes and nunchuks with built-in motion sensor plus (from eBay, these work great)
  
• Sony Dual-Shock official controllers (for GameCube games)
  
• Logitech wireless mouse (just for waking the PC out of sleep mode so I never need to open the laptop cover, also can be used to select game to play)
  

I use a custom front-end game launcher that I wrote.

Finding the proper depth and convergence settings for each game is difficult.  Dolphin doesn't really allow you to adjust the settings in-game and save them for next time.  And you can't use the keyboard shortcuts because it won't save your settings and I don't think there's any way to see the resulting values.  So my technique for finding the right 3D settings for each game was:
1. Play the game, and alt-tab over to the graphics settings.
2. Tweak the depth and convergence settings until they are dialed in
3. Exit Dolphin
4. Go find the resulting values in the dolphin config GFX.ini or gfx_dx11.ini
5. Save them in the game ini custom config file

At first I had the 3D maxxed out, but over time I realized that a bit more subtle effect is more comfortable for long playing sessions.  I try keep most of the 3D depth starting just in-front of the TV to about 5 feet behind the TV.

Also, some of my games have some textures that don't work well with 3D.  I used 3dmigoto to find and hide those textures.  I wrote a script to put the IDs of the textures to hide for each game into the d3dx.ini file before launching Dolphin.  Then the problematic textures aren't shown in the game.

Yes it took a lot of work, but it was fun and well worth it.  Now I have everything working smoothly like a console.  Thanks again to everyone who helped to make this possible!

Sincerely,
Morriz

I also love the 3D capability of Dolphin. I play on a 4K Sony TV. Some games are mind blowing in 3D. The Monkey Ball games immediately come to mind. Battalion Wars is also stunning. Some other games have some wonky effects, which usually can see ignored. Though sometimes the effect is too distracting, like in the water reflections in Waverace GC, which forces me to play in 2D. But overall, the 3D is very impressive.

I love 3D too. I play all polygonal PC and emulated games in 3D if it's possible.

My only problem with 3D (I use 3D Vision 2, by the way) in Dolphin is that some effects, like water in Zelda TP, are wrong. They can be fixed with 3Dmigoto, but not with Dolphin's 3D Vision mode, because depth and convergence values aren't passed to 3Dmigoto that way. However, those shaders can be just disabled without major issues, but that isn't the most correct thing to do.

I don't know how Dolphin's shader generator should detect shaders that need a correction. We probably need something to make individual fixes per game and store them in the Dolphin "Sys" folder. But what tool should be used to fix games? A custom 3Dmigoto branch specifically made for Dolphin? That would be out of my skill set (I'm just a shader fixer, and not one of the big masters at that). Or would some complex Gecko or Action Replay codes be able to do that?

At least 3D works, which is something that most emulators don't have, and I'm very thankful for that.