Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I'm a glitch hunter of the 3D Zelda Speedrun Community and recently we managed to get our hands on the Chinese NVIDIA Shield and Twilight Princess on it. This was made possible by a generous member of my TP community who took the risk of importing a Shield from China for $250 with 0 guarantees it would actually be possible to make it work. Buying the game from the Chinese store proved to be difficult, but a member from this very community here at resetera went ahead and used her wechat account to buy the game for us.

2 days ago Pheenoh, the person who imported the shield, did a full playthrough and glitch testing on this version. You can find the VOD here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/223286572

The most remarkable things about this version is how well it performs. It doesn't crash, it has no graphical issues, the framerate is locked at 30 fps pretty much throughout the entire game and the loading times are on par with the Dolphin Emulator with fast load times enabled, so pretty much instant.

There was one thing that hit our attention however. 2 notorious consistent game crashes on the original GC did not crash the game on the Shield. Interestingly enough the same 2 glitches that also didn't crash Dolphin until very recently where an option of proper Memory Management emulation became available.

With the hints mounting up, yesterday we went ahead and dumped the APK from the shield. After extracting it I immediately found the native executable that should be the game executable if this was a true port of the game. But taking a look at it it didn't match its GC counterpart whatsoever - especially crucial game asset strings that are required to run the game are missing.

What I did find however were the following strings:

[IMG]

Note: OSPanic is a GC function called by the game when it encounters a critical error

[IMG]

[IMG]

[IMG]

This leaves pretty much no doubt that the executable I'm looking at is in fact a GC emulator. A GC emulator that runs one of the most demanding games on the Cube very smoothly on the same hardware as the Switch. Something tells me this emulator wasn't created to just emulate 2 Nintendo games on a niche console in China

EDIT:

Title is maybe a bit misleading. Wouldnt mind if a mod changes it to: "Nintendo has theoretical access to a highly capable GC/Wii emulator for the Tegra X1"

https://www.resetera.com/threads/nintendo-and-nvidia-have-a-working-gc-wii-emulator-for-tegra-x1.19839/

In the original thread on the other forum, someone mentioned nVidia hiring a Dolphin developer to work on this. Is there any truth to that?

You also probably should put everything in your post in a quote tag so it's obvious that you're quoting from the linked thread.

Well, that's basically a confirmation that Nintendo Switch Virtual Console will have GC and Wii games then?

I'm not a developer, but from what I could understand it means that the Chinese shield has an emulator created just for tegra x1? Then it would be possible to extract only the emulator to use with other games? And if it's an apk, could it be used on any Android, making the necessary modifications?
Opening many doors to development on android

It's unlikely it'd work on other devices. Nvidia will have made no effort to work around the huge numbers of driver bugs on other Android devices and that's basically the main part of getting things like this and Dolphin ported to Android.

It would be fantastic if knowledge from that could make Dolphin run several times faster specifically on Android with ways to optimize the emulation unique to Android itself.
If not exclusive boosts for Nvidia hardware,it could also make much weaker Android devices run Dolphin quite a bit faster if performance issues are not caused from bad gpu driver bugs.

Interesting. I don't think the APK would run on other devices since Tehran games can't even run on SD 835's.

(02-04-2018, 11:58 PM)Whatnoww Wrote: [ -> ]Interesting. I don't think the APK would run on other devices since Tehran games can't even run on SD 835's.

Well that’s also down to Tegra exclusive games tending to use the desktop openGL extensions offered by nvidia, which is why the nexus 9 and Pixel C cannot run a large number of Tegra exclusive games. Ultimately I think this emulator is tuned specifically for the Tegra X1, likely to a level we’ve not seen before. The performance of this specific emulator seems to be well above dolphin running on the same hardware.

(01-31-2018, 04:40 AM)mbc07 Wrote: [ -> ]Well, that's basically a confirmation that Nintendo Switch Virtual Console will have GC and Wii games then?

I'm not sure whether this is a sarcastic question or not. On the chance it's serious, i'll answer it.

It's unlikely the Switch will get GC and Wii emulation. While it shares the same Tegra X1 chip as the Shield TV, the Switch's CPU clock speed is reportedly half that of the Shield TV. 1ghz for Switch  vs 2ghz for Shield TV. The GPU is also a lower clock speed, 768mhz docked and 307mhz in portable mode compared to Shield TV's 1ghz. At least these are the rates i've read online, which I believe have not been disputed following the Switch hacks and homebrew (so I assume they are accurate).

I'm going to go out on a limb to say that based on this, GC/Wii emulation on the Switch probably isn't happening. Nintendo may have accomplished it on the Shield TV, whether via game-specific hacks and optimizations or just due to their own emulator being better than Dolphin. But I don't  see it being possible on a 1ghz Cortex A57 CPU.

Better hope that they extract that official emulator created by NVIDIA and NINTENDO which clearly shows to the incapable that ANDROID has enough power (TEGRA X1) to move consoles as poor as GCN and Wii, these people of DOLPHIN have been too many years with constant updates (10 daily) damaging the poor emulator that they have not been able to successfully complete in more than 5 years.

Thanks to God they stopped taking useless updates for Android that did nothing but break the little that in years achieved, and lately they did not serve many games that 2 years ago if as Super Mario Sunshine between 20 more