Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello, long time lurker, but felt compelled to join after the new Ryzen CPUs were just released.

My desktop seems to run almost everything I throw at it with other emulators, but I am yet to use Dolphin for any serious gaming on it.

I just really want to format my desktop to get rid of all game related stuff and have it devoted to be my work machine, and have a nice little laptop for "play time", dedicated solely to running Steam, Epic and modern emulators. I have a very large library of Gamecube and Wii games I'd like to convert to ISO and play at a minimum of 1080P, but even higher if possible. I do realise that with some games this may be achievable and not with others. There is absolutely no room for a second desktop, otherwise it would have been cheap and easy to do.

What do y'all think of the (very) new Ryzen laptops?

Is there any benefit for Dolphin, getting the 8 core for example over the 6 core? Or is single core clock speed king?

I am interested in the new 4800HS in a small laptop called the Asus G14 or perhaps it's bigger brother the G15. I believe they also include freesync and are a reasonable price, unlike G-Sync laptops which are generally very expensive these days.

The thing is, it has only a 2060 "Max Q" graphics card, which I am presuming is between a 1660TI and regular 2060. So, does 8 cores at around 4ghz (what the tests are generally showing the G14 maintains all core boost at) and a 2060 MaxQ, sound enough to run Dolphin and a large selection of games at 1080P? Or do I need a more powerful graphics card, or cpu, or both?

The research I have done presents me with conflicting info, even at this forum, so I thought maybe a developer could kindly chime in and let me know their thoughts on the matter, or, anyone who is using around a 3.5 to 4ghz laptop CPU with at least 1660TI graphics. There'll be no 5GHZ boosts in this sort of setup, so if that's what's important, I'll probably have to look elsewhere into a more expensive 9980HK laptop. The 9980HK has great single core boost but there are only a couple laptop chassis that can deal with the piping hot thermals. However, there is a nice Clevo 17", model PB51RF-G, with 9980HK option and full fledged 2070 Graphics, as well as real Nvidia G-Sync, for a higher, but almost acceptable price, if that would be the way to go. I just liked the idea of something smaller and cooler running. And of course in the current slow work climate, monetary savings are always welcome.

On a final note, AMD are offering soon an integrated AMD CPU/5700M solution, and the 5700M is around a 2070 Max Q apparently. How are AMD drivers and Dolphin cooperating these days, or is Nvidia preferable?

Thanks so much for your attention!

For the most part it be fine as for the graphic, any modern gpu that reasonable(around a gtx 750 or faster) can usually run dolphin in 1080 and you should easy do 4k with dolphin with though cards. On the cpu side there no belief for the most part to get a 6 core over a 8 core since dolphin doesn't use much cores but a 8 core might have higher peak clock speed that could have benefits. For the most part it should be fine outside of like the 1% of game that really need the most possible performence. I have a ryzen 7 3700x in my desktop and it great for most games even star wars rogue squadron 2 for the most part. I don't have any recent experience with amd\ati driver and dolphin but I never had any issue with them with my ati mobility 5650 either.

(04-06-2020, 10:53 AM)themaster123 Wrote: [ -> ]For the most part it be fine as for the graphic, any modern gpu that reasonable(around a gtx 750 or faster) can usually run dolphin in 1080 and you should easy do 4k with dolphin with though cards. On the cpu side there no belief for the most part to get a 6 core over a 8 core since dolphin doesn't use much cores but a 8 core might have higher peak clock speed that could have benefits. For the most part it should be fine outside of like the 1% of game that really need the most possible performence. I have a ryzen 7 3700x in my desktop and it great for most games even star wars rogue squadron 2 for the most part. I don't have any recent experience with amd\ati driver and dolphin but I never had any issue with them with my ati mobility 5650 either.

Thank you for the reply. I have just been reading the guide on how to rip my gamecube discs, thankfully I still have my lovely original Wii console but I have absolutely no idea how to homebrew it. This is going to take a lot of investigation on my part. I have 101 Gamecube games and 114 Wii titles, and I am VERY excited to be able to play them in HD. I didn't even know Dolphin existed till a few months back  .
Being in New Zealand they are all Pal games, but many of the games support Pal 60 so there is no difference really anyway. Oh I have so many questions to ask, like will Dolphin load Pal games or do I need to rip my gamecube bios, and so on, but I will do research on all these things before asking any more!

To your reply.. In a laptop, it is actually easier to maintain higher clock speeds in the 6 core as the 8 cores produce more heat under load, so if Dolphin is not using 8 cores then I don't see the need. I might get the Ryzen 6 core laptop then, and save even more money.  The 4600H sounds good. A base clock of 3.0GHZ and boost of 4.0ghz, the same boost as the 8 core. And I feel it will maintain it easier as it *should* produce a lower thermal output under load (i mean it just makes sense with regards to physics).
Laptop chassis are limited, so I will closely watch reviews and buy one that has a very high thermal rating without any thermal throttling.

The 8 core laptop, the 4800H I spoke about, has been tested and is close to a desktop 3700x in performance, which is quite incredible in such a small form factor.

What graphics card does your desktop have friend? You didn't say. I hope you don't mind me asking.

Anyway, it seems I will be ok with a 4ghz, 6 or 8 core CPU and a decent GFX card. So that's good to know!

However, you mentioned rogue squadron 2? Is it particularly difficult to emulate or something? The only one I have is Rogue Squadron 3 and it's a bit scratched but works ok, and I hope I can rip it successfully. It does play from start to finish in my Wii though, so I presume it will be OK to rip in the Wii.
I really enjoy rogue squadron 3 and was thinking about buying rogue squadron 2 as I found a used, average condition (bit scratched) but complete copy for $10 NZD, and I have never played it. Which one is harder to emulate, 2 or 3, do you know? Maybe I'll see how I go with 3, and if my system can cope with it, I'll buy 2 as it's always easy to find for cheap at ebay or a retro game store.

So in a nutshell, if I can emulate Rogue squadron 2 on the ryzen laptop, i can emulate anything? Is this the punchline of what you are saying? Thanks again! Maybe I will just go ahead and buy rogue squadron 2 for $10 just to have it to fine tune the emulation performance as best I can.

Now I have many days of ripping ahead.. I don't even know where to begin, I am so incredibly confused by it all. 

My best friend has a homebrew Wii for 2 years now but someone else installed for HIM, he is also clueless like me. If I go to his house cause it is already set up, and take my own gamecube discs and rip on his wii so I don't have to modify my WII at all, then save the ripped ISO files onto SD card, I presume this is legal and within Dolphin regulations and forum restrictions? As long as I am ripping my very own games, it doesn't matter if I do it on a friend's hardware console? Is this OK? I read the rules here many times already and I am sure this is OK but just want to be 100% sure from a developer or moderator. 

PS I hope I can ask even though it's off topic to my own original question.. How long does it take to rip each 1.2GB gamecube and a full dvd size wii game? I am using worst case scenario here, if the disc is completely full.
If I set aside one week, is that long enough to rip 215 games? Or am I dreaming? I am thinking in my mind to do 40 or 50 a day if possible. Maybe I am dreaming. Even 20 a day if possible as I am barely working now with the world problems (no clients), so I have a lot of time to kill. I just want to have them all safely as digital files so I know my games are preserved forever, even if the disc stops working some day (believe me it happened to me before on PS2 and Xbox OG, and I am fairly careful with my games). Sadly, most of my gamecube games are second hand, as I only collected for it once I got the Wii in 2008, never before. All my Wii games were bought brand new or mint condition second hand.

(Now i can't contain excitement when thinking about it, to play no more heroes in HD, mad world, and Geist, Eternal Darkness and more.. Months inside due to the silly virus means LOTS of dolphin game playing ahead!)

When I meant about 8 vs 6 core is for the same amount of cores use it would be similar heat output for the same clock speed and since higher core cpu generally have better cooler it could allow for higher boost. dolphin doesn't use more then 2 maybe 3 cores and the other core could be put to sleep to save power full example. Oblivious under full load 8 core will run hotter then 6 cores given same processor series. rogue squadron 2 is a demanding game but there are games that likely will be worst then it. I hear super mario galaxy is hard to emulated also. There an area were my r7 3700 get major problem issue in star war clone wars for gamecube and it run much slower then most games for example of a worst case(small area but worth noting). The wiki are also a good guide on if a game will work and any setting that it might need that probably are change in the game ini. I use the super smash brother exploit to install homebrew as that works on you can also use an external storage drive in though ripping program also. As for ripping them I think it okay if you using someone else system as long it your game you ripping but a mod will have to post an answer to be sure. I have a gtx 970 it does 4k async ubershader fine without issues it in my profile. I have an older laptop with a gtx 1070 and i7 7700hq(only a quad core) and it run dolphin fine also to give you idea how most game probably will play. also rogue squadron 3 I hear is even harder to emulate then 2 is though I have yet to rip my game to try it.
In short though most game should work fine but I don't know what the most demanding game to emulate is off hand. Also i leave some link to game that have exploits you could use to install the homebrew channel. https://sites.google.com/site/completesg/exploits . you run and exploit with the homebrew channel on the sd card and you should be able to install the homebrew app and thus the use the ripping program. Also this page has homebrew that allow you to get the gamecube memory card save off so you could use them with dolphin https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-ge...s-to-my-pc .

WOW thank you for your amazing help! I don't know what to say! Legend!

(04-06-2020, 02:06 PM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]Oh I have so many questions to ask, like will Dolphin load Pal games or do I need to rip my gamecube bios, and so on, but I will do research on all these things before asking any more!

Dolphin runs PAL games just fine. The GameCube BIOS is optional – the most major problem caused by not having it is that fonts look a little off in some GameCube games because Dolphin has to use a free replacement font instead of the real BIOS font.

(04-06-2020, 02:06 PM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]However, you mentioned rogue squadron 2? Is it particularly difficult to emulate or something? The only one I have is Rogue Squadron 3 and it's a bit scratched but works ok, and I hope I can rip it successfully. It does play from start to finish in my Wii though, so I presume it will be OK to rip in the Wii.
I really enjoy rogue squadron 3 and was thinking about buying rogue squadron 2 as I found a used, average condition (bit scratched) but complete copy for $10 NZD, and I have never played it. Which one is harder to emulate, 2 or 3, do you know? Maybe I'll see how I go with 3, and if my system can cope with it, I'll buy 2 as it's always easy to find for cheap at ebay or a retro game store.

Rogue Squadron 2 and 3 are very hard to emulate, with Rogue Squadron 3 being the slightly harder one. In fact, it's so hard that it doesn't even run at all in current development versions of Dolphin...

(04-06-2020, 02:06 PM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]My best friend has a homebrew Wii for 2 years now but someone else installed for HIM, he is also clueless like me. If I go to his house cause it is already set up, and take my own gamecube discs and rip on his wii so I don't have to modify my WII at all, then save the ripped ISO files onto SD card, I presume this is legal and within Dolphin regulations and forum restrictions? As long as I am ripping my very own games, it doesn't matter if I do it on a friend's hardware console? Is this OK? I read the rules here many times already and I am sure this is OK but just want to be 100% sure from a developer or moderator.

Yes, that's fine. Who owns the console doesn't matter at all.

(04-06-2020, 02:06 PM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]PS I hope I can ask even though it's off topic to my own original question.. How long does it take to rip each 1.2GB gamecube and a full dvd size wii game? I am using worst case scenario here, if the disc is completely full.

A GameCube game takes about 10 minutes, and a single-layer Wii game takes about 30 minutes (at least for me – it might be slightly faster for you depending on what storage device you're ripping the games to). A dual-layer Wii game might take 50 minutes, but only 15 games out of the entire Wii library are dual-layer (and some of those are not even dual-layer in all regions), so they're a minority of your collection.

Hi Jos Juice.. thanks for such a detailed reply. So you are the actual developer of Dolphin? I am flattered to get a reply from you, thank you!

I am not sure how to do this multi quote thing (yet) so I'll answer in logical order.

1) great re Pal games and no need for bios! PHEW cause that would have been beyond me ROFL.
2)Hmmm, this is very interesting indeed.. I wanted to test my system out with a demanding game but it won't even run LOL!
Why I say it's interesting is because if I go to youtube.com and put in the search "dolphin rogue squadron 3", it does actually bring me results with fully playable Rogue 3 working in Dolphin, but those videos are not "new" so to speak. It looks fine enough to me.
So the question then is.. Does it make sense to use what you guys call the stable release from 3 years ago, or the "every two days" , I presume beta(?) release?
What about if I was to keep a small USB flash drive with a dolphin install on it and just a couple roms that work in older dolphin that do not work in current dolphin, and have the main dolphin installed on my computer itself. Does this cause conflicts and is there anything I need to know about to use 2 different versions of dolphin? Also, if it's not too much trouble, I see I can go back many versions, which versions would you recommend for those harder to emulate games, but when dolphin was as you say, not as accurate? 

3)Great to hear. I spoke to him after I posted prior and he is happy to swap consoles for a week or two.

4) The timing on the Wii games is huge. WOW. Thanks for telling me but I am afraid now for the WII side it will be more a SLOW labour of love and preservation rather than urgency to play. Part of me is already thinking to buy a WII U, which supposedly can play all wii games in normal HD. I'll look into it, and just use Dolphin for Gamecube.
So I think the key for me is, to concentrate and rip my entire gamecube library whilst in possession of the modded WII, and then in the future, bit by bit, as I have time, I will slowly learn to homebrew my own Wii and rip a Wii game disc here or there, when I have a half hour to spare. I guess it could take me easily to the end of the year to get all my games ripped where WII is concerned.

But to at least get started with playing, I'll start doing my gamecube ones ASAP and try get them all done in a week. They are the ones I feel that have no real way to play them in HD other than Dolphin, well at least from what google searching tells me. There are many I never finished, like Spartan total warrior and so on, which I'd love to play fully. Also Pacman world rally, RE4 and many others.

I had a lot of issues with PS3 ripping, where ALL my "emulation" experience lies thus far. The desktop has the needed components but I only ever managed to properly rip 2 games of my entire PS3 library, and have no clue how to get the bought ones from the PSN store that are provided as downloads. They are all on the PS3 hard drive but I am once again clueless. For example Afterburner climax is discontinued, yet I bought it on time and have never deleted it. I was desperately trying to find out how to preserve this to play in PS3.

The reason i went OT is to try explain how dumb I am with the emulation scene and ripping, and just how inexperienced I am.
Furthermore, I also wanted to suggest, that the two games that I DO have running on PS3 emu, seem to benefit massively from more cores, as if the more the better without a limit.
I therefore hope one day, Dolphin may be optimised to use 8 cores for example and get a big performance boost? I know nothing of coding nor whether this is possible, but thought I'd at least suggest it.

As far as storage I am ripping to, I will use whatever you tell me is faster.
I have spare here, a 1 terabyte USB 3.0 lacie 7200RPM orange HDD, I also have a sandisk extreme 128GB SD card and a corsair USB 3 64GB flash drive.
Whatever you think is the best to rip my gamecube games (and in future wii, too), I'll use. They are all empty and free at present.
A million thanks again.

(04-07-2020, 03:29 AM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]Hi Jos Juice.. thanks for such a detailed reply. So you are the actual developer of Dolphin? I am flattered to get a reply from you, thank you!

A developer of Dolphin, not the

(04-07-2020, 03:29 AM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]Why I say it's interesting is because if I go to youtube.com and put in the search "dolphin rogue squadron 3", it does actually bring me results with fully playable Rogue 3 working in Dolphin, but those videos are not "new" so to speak. It looks fine enough to me.
So the question then is.. Does it make sense to use what you guys call the stable release from 3 years ago, or the "every two days" , I presume beta(?) release?

I would recommend the development builds in most cases, and the stable build only for special things that the development builds can't handle, such as Rogue Squadron 3. (RS3 did work in the latest stable build, and that version or some version from around that time is probably what you see in those YouTube videos.)

(04-07-2020, 03:29 AM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]What about if I was to keep a small USB flash drive with a dolphin install on it and just a couple roms that work in older dolphin that do not work in current dolphin, and have the main dolphin installed on my computer itself. Does this cause conflicts and is there anything I need to know about to use 2 different versions of dolphin?

By default, all versions of Dolphin will share the same folder for settings, save data and so on. This normally doesn't lead to any problems, but in case you want Dolphin to not do that, you can create a file named portable.txt in the same folder as Dolphin.exe.

(04-07-2020, 03:29 AM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]Also, if it's not too much trouble, I see I can go back many versions, which versions would you recommend for those harder to emulate games, but when dolphin was as you say, not as accurate?

5.0 stable is generally the only version I would recommend if you want to do something that doesn't work in the latest versions. But if what you mean by "harder to emulate" is "runs slowly", then 5.0 isn't really going to be any better than the latest versions.

(04-07-2020, 03:29 AM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]Part of me is already thinking to buy a WII U, which supposedly can play all wii games in normal HD.

That isn't true. The Wii U plays Wii games in the exact same resolution as a normal Wii. It does however provide HDMI output, which will be a large quality boost if you are used to playing with composite cables (but less so if you're used to component cables or Dolphin).

(04-07-2020, 03:29 AM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]Furthermore, I also wanted to suggest, that the two games that I DO have running on PS3 emu, seem to benefit massively from more cores, as if the more the better without a limit.
I therefore hope one day, Dolphin may be optimised to use 8 cores for example and get a big performance boost? I know nothing of coding nor whether this is possible, but thought I'd at least suggest it.

This isn't really possible for Dolphin. The reason why a PS3 emulator can use so many CPU cores is because the PS3 has many CPU cores, but the GameCube and Wii only have one CPU core (not counting the Starlet, which can be HLE'd very quickly anyway).

(04-07-2020, 03:29 AM)pazzap Wrote: [ -> ]As far as storage I am ripping to, I will use whatever you tell me is faster.
I have spare here, a 1 terabyte USB 3.0 lacie 7200RPM orange HDD, I also have a sandisk extreme 128GB SD card and a corsair USB 3 64GB flash drive.
Whatever you think is the best to rip my gamecube games (and in future wii, too), I'll use. They are all empty and free at present.

I'm not sure which one is the fastest. If you want to find out, I would suggest trying to rip one game to each device and seeing how long it takes.

pazzap Wrote:   As far as storage I am ripping to, I will use whatever you tell me is faster.
   I have spare here, a 1 terabyte USB 3.0 lacie 7200RPM orange HDD, I also have a sandisk extreme 128GB SD card and a corsair USB 3 64GB flash drive.
   Whatever you think is the best to rip my gamecube games (and in future wii, too), I'll use. They are all empty and free at present.

It likely wouldn't matter on which one as the cd read speed are likely slower then any of though drives write speed and likely be limited by the use 1\2 interface of the wii as it doesn't have usb 3. That said your probably better of using the hard drive if it work right as flash memory has a limited amount of writes this is especially true with flash drives and sd cards. Portable ssd wouldn't be idea ether but likely will be much more better since they usually have trim and better controller then flash drive and sd cards. Also the wii has a 2gb memory card limit(if I remember right) and you also need that to load the ripping program from the sd card. I for running dolphin on a flash drive I try that in the past any I experience stutter when the drive was read\write to. I was using a flash drive with large file speed of about 150 read and 30-40 write also. You might have better luck but I use a portable ssd and the portable.txt to move it from computer to computer so I can keep my save and setting similar.

Wow the response here is incredible. I am overwhelmed. And I just learned Dolphin is open source and has many developers?

Oh yeah, that completely makes sense.. there is no way the DVD drive read speed could match the write speed of even a USB2 drive really is there. So any will be fine.

I do have a tiny portable SSD, it's a sandisk in the shape of a flash drive but it's actually an SSD inside with 400mb/s read/300 write. It's very fast for being a tiny usb key and if I use it to create a second portable Dolphin 5.0 version, I don't think I'll be writing to it "all the time" so to speak, so it shouldn't be an issue. It would just permanently store a set of games that I feel I have better success with in version 5.0 rather than the daily development build, and V5.0 itself of course.

Is there a section here to talk about other emulators? Maybe someone would be able to help me work out how to extract my PSN store games that can no longer be bought (luckily you don't lose them for re download in your account though). Playing afterburner upscaled would be amazing, my favourite A/B game ever made (just an example, I have some incredible bought download titles in my PS3 library that are no longer available for sale sadly).
Anyway I'll check out all the sub-forums and see if there's anything suitable
Sorry again for the OT..

Finally, my bestie and I have some overlapping games. For example, he has a PAL Geist, I have a PAL Geist and so on.

He is also wanting to get into Dolphin after all this talk from myself, and has a very beefy machine (10 core skylake X overlocked to 5ghz all cores and intel speedstep disabled for maximum performance, as well as 2080TI and 64GB system ram). We both just had a chat and wanted to know.. In our case, to stay within legal guidelines as well as Dolphin developers' T&C, do we need to rip the game twice (i.e each doing our respective copies) even if we are in the same actual room when we rip the game title that we both own? Or is that a special case where a file on the ripped destination medium can be shared only between us if we both own the specific physical game? I won't even dare do this to save time if it is against "nintendo law" and of course against T&C of Dolphin itself, but that one seems to be something I simply can not find an answer to anywhere after an hour of googling. If it's legal, the time saving would be welcome for both of us, but I am just not sure.
I am an old(er) kodger but as said, really naive on this stuff.. My only 'real' emulation experience prior to this and the two PS3 games, is successfully ripping most of my PS1 library and playing in retroarch. I was able to set everything to maximum and it's been an amazing experience vs my PS1 console. That was quite a learning curve for me but once I knew how to do it, I managed to get most of them done. This was last year now though. I have never ripped a nintendo system game before so want to make sure that I am above board every step of the way with all involved, as well as what I discuss here.

This is just the beginning for me, eventually I would love to rip my saturn library, PS2 library, and then get into the world of my old cartridge games.. my mind shudders to even imagine me learning how to rip all my genesis and snes games LOL.. torture for another time! hehe. Oh, I have some classic master system credit cards as well like transbot and quartet.. I think I have years of this ahead of me as I am already panicking about ripping the gamecube games on an already modded WII! I have been an avid gamer since my teens on a commodore 64 (first gaming experience), and have amassed quite an incredible collection if I might say so myself. I couldn't believe what I found yesterday when doing a spring clean.. finally, my C64 cartridge of BEAMRIDER i thought lost, and my original C64 floppy disk of KARATEKA without a mark or dent on it! Exciting times ahead. Excuse my babbling but I am overwhelmed and like a 50yo school kid playing his first video game all over again!