Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi there!

I just tried Dolphin for the first time. I grabbed revision 4771 (x64) and New Super Mario Bross Wii. I now have multiple questions:

1. What is the difference between Dolphin.exe and DolphinIL.exe? Why no readme.txt explaining them?
2. I have a wireless xbox360 controller for windows, which works great in multiple games. In Dolphin, I can't get any button to register. I tried with both "Dolphin KB/X360pad" and nJoy plugins with the "enable pad" checkbox enabled, but nothing.
3. My keyboard controls are working, but keys are not mapped the way they are in the "pad configuration" menu. The up key actually go left, and down go right. The rest don't seems to have much more sense.
4. I have about "VPS 55/60 (91%)" which seems pretty good, but the thing is barely responsive and have a moon-like slow-motion feeling which is not good at all to play Mario. I tried with some frameskip, feels even worse. Anything I can do?
5. I had a few graphical glitch (vertex coming from origin up to Mario's hand, invisible coins, etc). I though from your compatibility list that it was green, which meant with no graphical glitches? No big deal, but just a remark.

post your computer specs and screen shots of the settings your using.

1. Because that's somewhere in the forum FAQs, which you OF COURSE already read, right?
3. Nope, they're right I guess, but they are refering to an upright Wiimote, i.e. since you hold the Wiimote sideways in NSMBW everything's rotated by 90°
4. Set Framelimit from "auto" to 60 manually, auto framelimit was broken for me and making the game run only half speed (ideally the game should be displayed to run at 200% ... then it runs at normal speed )
5. I think that one is already known, thanks anyway; I also think the editors are separating "perfect" and "playable" now, i.e. the latter one would be more appropriate here.

CPU: E6600@2.4ghz
Memory 2 Gigs DDR2-800Mhz
GPU: NVidia GeForce 9800GTX 512
OS: Windows 7 64bit

1. I saw the official FAQ on Dolphin website, with only three unrelated question. After searching a bit, I saw the "hidden" faq you are talking about. Still not really answer the question. It's faster to re-compile? We don't build it, we execute it?! Anyway you probably know more what you are doing than me and I'll just forget about it

2. No idea why the xbox pad don't work? Could it have something to do with your latest version trying to get multiple wiimote working? Maybe I should try a prior version. I took a screenshot, but it's kinda the default settings :

And yes, my gamepad actually still work in every other games.

3. Yeah, that make sense, but will be hard to configure the xbox gamepad to do the same .

4. I set every graphic to minimum, 640x480, linear filtering, and framelimit to 60. Menus are fast, but in-game go at around 43/60 (73%). It still run a bit slower than normal. One can play, it's nice to see it working, but it's not really a viable option to actually complete the whole game and have fun doing it.

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Ok,.. I just answered some of my question by myself. First, I wasn't checking the correct configuration plugin, it's not gamepad I should use but wiimote emulation. My gamepad was not detected, but I fixed it by disabling Kaspersky Antivirus who was detecting Dolphin as a "PDM.Invader behavior", which is of course a fake alert, Kaspersky is good with that. Too bad that I have to use the keys, and can't seem to be able to map the analog stick to the direction keys. Sideways checkbox works great.

I then tried the DirectX9 plugin instead, I manage to have about 51/60 (87%) in-game, but it still feel like it's running at half the speed and not really pleasant to control.

1. Okay, as far as I understood, DolphinIL (IL = intermediate languages) recompiles into an IL which gets recompiled into native machine code then, whereas Dolphin directly recompiles into machine code. The advantage of the IL thing is that better optimizations can be made, so there's a chance the game will run a tad faster with that one. It's been more unstable as well, but I don't notice any stability issues in the last few hundred revisions...

(sorry, no idea about 2)

4. Not sure whether you can play this game at 100% with your computer, but make sure you have Dual Core and Idle skipping enabled. Set Frameskipping to 1 (that might make the game slightly choppy but might give you a 5-10 FPS speed increase) and try both the OpenGL as well as the D3D plugin (OGL runs faster for me). And maybe try an older Dolphin build (about r4642), some people reported speed decrease in newer revisions.

Ok, I tried Dolphin and DolphinIL, no difference on framerate.
With OpenGL I get around 12fps (real fps), while in DirectX9 I get around 35-40. With frameskipping to 1 it's actually getting somewhere.

Some new problems: with OpenGL, fullscreen mode works great. With DirectX9, it don't. I press the button, or alt+enter, and it just do nothing. Also, the load emulation state option don't seems to work. I load the game, I hear the music of where I was when I saved, but the display stop refreshing.

Also, I managed to get the coins to render the first time I tried DirectX9, but now I try to get the settings back the way I had them and they stay invisible.

Hm... Make also sure you enabled EFB copy to texture (hack) instead of to RAM. (retry both plugins if that wasn't the case before)
And... while we're at it, you are using the DSP HLE plugin and not the LLE one, right?

Switching between fullscreen and windowed mode is broken afaik, try forcing it in the gfx plugin settings.

Not sure about the load state thing, that might still be broken as well under Dual Core mode. (working fine for me though)

Wow! Thanks!

I first realized that changing dx settings in-game don't refresh, you need to close and restart the game. I don't know how, but my coins suddenly re-appeared.

I just tried the EFB copy to texture instead of ram, and my speed tripled! I now run maxed out at 60fps with no lag at all, just like on a real Wii. I even set it to 1280*1024 with 2x MSAA, no frameskipping and it just works perfect! Why is this efb copy not the default settings?

I noticed that when I close the game (either press the X window button or the stop button), Dolphin often crash. I don't know if it's related, but here's the exceptioninfo.txt :

Unhandled Exception
Code: 0xC0000005
Call stack info:
0x0795D3A0 : ?
USER32!0x76F4C3C1 : GetSystemMetrics

I have to say that I use an English Windows7, but with Canadian french metrics.

Nice to see I could help you, not sure why that setting isn't default though... You can see little glitches in NSBMW (coins aren't rotating) with it, in other games it might turn out to be even worse. Maybe the idea behind setting "to RAM" as default was to prefer stability over performance.

Not sure about the crash, but might be worth a bug report, see http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/list.

Ok, final reply for now. Everything work nearly to perfection, I'm surprised! The only problem are the coins. While they do now appear, they are not correct. Some coins (dynamic ones rolling on the floor) are perfect, but the static ones floating in the air just stay at the first frame, they don't rotate. This is no big deal, but when you get somewhere with a magic P which is supposed to spawn the blue coins for a certain period of time, they don't render at all and are invisible (I guess they stayed at frame 0 too, which is invisible). Red coins and big coins render fine.