Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi everyone, I've been experiencing some emulation problems on Dolphin running inside a virtual machine. I've tried the latest build (Dolphin 5.0-9213) and some older ones going back to 5892. The games were definitely working on my previous builds (and similar versions) so it must be something to do with my PC or OS.

The specs of my PC is definitely capable, it's not a performance problem:
- Intel i7 7700K
- GTX 1080, PCI passthrough
- 16GB RAM, allocated 8GB to VM
- Intel SSD dedicated for Win10 qcow image

The jist of it is that when I launch a game, it's stuck on a black screen:


But, some games work fine:


When it doesn't work, it gets stuck as I try to close it and have to force stop it.

Here are some different things I've tried:
- Dual Core on/off
- Changing CPU emulation engine
- Changing graphics backend
- Changing shader compilation
- Skip EFB Access from CPU on/off

Suffice to say, nothing's worked.

When I launch a game that's not working on Dolphin 5.0-6539, I get this warning:

Other games have some similar read errors, usually with addresses 0x00000000~0x00000008.

I've also tested GC games, and all of them are working fine.

Anyone have any ideas on what this might be caused by, or knows the log files I should look for?

When it gets stuck on a black screen on boot, it means the dump got corrupted and you need to redump the game.

That said, why are you even using a virtual machine? Sure, your PC is beefy, but it´s not the most effective way to use your hardware...

If you only are having the problem with Japanese Wii games, the solution is most likely to set the Wii system language to Japanese.

(12-23-2018, 05:28 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: [ -> ]When it gets stuck on a black screen on boot, it means the dump got corrupted and you need to redump the game.

That said, why are you even using a virtual machine? Sure, your PC is beefy, but it´s not the most effective way to use your hardware...

I also do this. I don't like windows much but am not going to try to pretend that anybody is going to care about Linux anytime soon

Anyways the VM is not the cause of their problems

(12-23-2018, 05:28 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: [ -> ]When it gets stuck on a black screen on boot, it means the dump got corrupted and you need to redump the game.

That said, why are you even using a virtual machine? Sure, your PC is beefy, but it´s not the most effective way to use your hardware...

Right, I see. I'll give re-dumping a shot.
Also, I'm using a VM since my main (host) OS is Linux which suits my needs more, and I prefer not to get an entirely different computer or dual boot for playing games on Windows 10.

EDIT: Hmm... I just tested it on my host OS, and it launches without any problems:

But it's still the same problem on the guest OS.

(12-23-2018, 06:48 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]If you only are having the problem with Japanese Wii games, the solution is most likely to set the Wii system language to Japanese.

Unfortunately this is also happening with SMB2, US version :c

At this point it sounds like driver issues

(12-24-2018, 03:13 AM)Helios Wrote: [ -> ]At this point it sounds like driver issues

Could be, but I updated my Nvidia driver but it's still not launching.

Is there a way to get some log or crash dump of what's happening? I know basically nothing about how to use Dolphin's debugging UI, but it seems that it's going on an infinite loop:

The instruction at 0x801bac60 jumps to this weird region and blocks everything else it seems.

I understand your sentiment, but why run Dolphin in a VM when there is a perfectly native Linux version of Dolphin available? If you want to have the latest version you can easily build it yourself.


edit: ah... you already did then just out of interest: why are you running Dolphin in a VM?

Because with a few exceptions, tossing the guest GPU back to the host is a pain.