Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I'm not sure if this is expected behavior or not, but I find is somewhat interesting and I'm not sure why Dolphin 5.0 (stable release) does this.  I installed Dolphin 5.0 and made it portable by creating the "portable.txt" file in the same directory as the Dolphin.exe file.  As I understood it, this was all I needed to do in order to make Dolphin completely portable.  When I started up Dolphin, it created the "User" directory in the same directory as the Dolphin.exe file (as expected) and it can run games and do everything normally.  However, to my surprise, I noticed that this portable version of Dolphin still creates the "Dolphin Emulator" directory in the "Documents" folder under "C:\Users\[Username]\Documents".  Since Dolphin was supposed to be portable, this bamboozled me.  I deleted the directory and started up Dolphin again, and the directory was created once again, and this problem persists every single time I open up Dolphin.  When checking what's in the directory, I find this:

"C:\Users\[Username]\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Wii\shared2\sys"

In this directory is a single, extensionless file titled "SYSCONF."  I have no idea what it does, but if it's important I'm somewhat concerned that it isn't being placed in the "User" directory like the rest of the files.  This is a portable version of Dolphin, after all, and I don't know why Dolphin is still placing stuff in the Documents folder.

Is this a bug?  Is this expected behavior?  Is that particular file important if I want to keep all of my game saves / Dolphin settings / Wii Menu settings / etc. if I end up moving the portable Dolphin Emulator folder to another computer (and therefore losing whatever Dolphin puts in the documents folder)?  What should I do?

The SYSCONF file essentially contains the settings that exist on a real Wii, such as the Wii Remote speaker volume and the configured video mode (576i/480i/480p). You won't really lose out on much by deleting that file, as all of the settings that are stored in there are quick to set up again, and often not relevant anyway. However, the reason that Dolphin is creating that file in Documents is probably because your NAND path is set to the Wii folder in Documents. You'll need to change that if you want your Wii save data to be portable.

(05-31-2017, 05:53 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]The SYSCONF file essentially contains the settings that exist on a real Wii, such as the Wii Remote speaker volume and the configured video mode (576i/480i/480p). You won't really lose out on much by deleting that file, as all of the settings that are stored in there are quick to set up again, and often not relevant anyway. However, the reason that Dolphin is creating that file in Documents is probably because your NAND path is set to the Wii folder in Documents. You'll need to change that if you want your Wii save data to be portable.

Okay, I figured it out.  Apparently under "GameCube" you have to change "SlotA" to "GCI Folder" in order for the portable version of Dolphin to use the memory card in the "User" directory instead of creating one in Documents.

However, for the Wii NAND root, I have to manually specify a directory for this.  So if I keep Dolphin in the same place, that's not really too much of a problem.  However, if I ever move Dolphin to another folder, then I'll have to go and change the Wii NAND root directory again.  Is there any way that I can enter a "local" directory, relative to the dolphin.exe file (or something like that), instead of an absolute directory?  It's not very portable if you manually have to specify absolute directories for this.

This is what I'm talking about:

http://prntscr.com/fdz4sh

I'd prefer to specify local/relative directories there instead of absolute ones, if possible.

Just change it directly in the config (User/Config/Dolphin.ini). It seems it is under [General] as NANDRootPath. (And if you want a completely portable Dolphin, also change WiiSDCardPath and in [Core] DVDRoot, MemcardAPath and MemcardBPath)