Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello everyone.

First of all, I am new to this forum and haven't been active in any forum for quite some years, so forgive me if this thread is out of place or any other thing, and second, while I can write and understand English quite well I think, it is not my mother language, so again, forgive me for any errors in my writting.

I downloaded an tried Dolphin for the first time some months ago (Windows 5.0 x64 version), with the only purpose of playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on my laptop, but I never thought too much about updating it nor registering to the forums and engaging with other Dolphin users. That was until today, after much thought I decided to finally get deeper into the Dolphin emulator and join its community due to my growing curiosity and will to help in any way I can.

So I am greatly grateful to all people who have contributed to this incredible emulator, wich has allowed me to relive my young memories of playing TLOZ: TP back in the 2006 Christmas holidays on my NGC.

To be honest, I have a lot of questions about the emulator itself and its community, but I do not know if they have already been answered in some way on other threads and I do not want to bother people here with noob and silly questions, but I guess I have to start at some point, so I will say some of them:

1: How does the developers work on this, are there donations or anything like that currently?
2: Why do people work on this? I mean, just to contribute and improve it for everyone?
3: How can someone contribute to the emulator or become a dev?

Thanks again to all people who take the time to read me, and specially to the devs who have made this possible.

(01-09-2023, 01:18 AM)EduAlama97 Wrote: [ -> ]1: How does the developers work on this, are there donations or anything like that currently?

There are no donations.  It is entirely voluntary.

(01-09-2023, 01:18 AM)EduAlama97 Wrote: [ -> ]2: Why do people work on this? I mean, just to contribute and improve it for everyone?

I work on it because:

* I like the challenge
* I want to bring happiness and smiles to the people that experience the things I implement
* I want to see improvements that I can use for my own enjoyment

(01-09-2023, 01:18 AM)EduAlama97 Wrote: [ -> ]3: How can someone contribute to the emulator or become a dev?

Becoming a dev is as simple as finding something to do and implementing the code for it, then making a pull request on github.  We have an issue tracker that can be checked or if there's something you are interested in specifically, you can look at the existing code to see how to improve it.  Once the code has been submitted, the core developers will review the code and give feedback.  After all the feedback has been incorporated, the code change will be merged.  For bigger changes, it can be useful to reach out to the core devs and ask if it's something that is desired or would be accepted.  You can do this by going onto IRC or to our (recently) official Discord.

Thank you for your explanation, it helped a lot!

I have a doubt about the issue tracker, I thought it was used to report bugs/issues, not to fix them and wait for approval of the code. Is it for both of them?

Also, I am curious about how many branches the emulator has. I saw on Github only the master branch is active now, am I correct?

PD: Is there an option to edit posts? I can't find it if there is one.

(01-11-2023, 04:37 AM)EduAlama97 Wrote: [ -> ]I have a doubt about the issue tracker, I thought it was used to report bugs/issues, not to fix them and wait for approval of the code. Is it for both of them?

The issue tracker is only used for reporting bugs/issues/feature-requests but you can look at if you need inspiration on finding something to work on.

(01-11-2023, 04:37 AM)EduAlama97 Wrote: [ -> ]Also, I am curious about how many branches the emulator has. I saw on Github only the master branch is active now, am I correct?

Yes, master branch is the only branch. Typical workflow is to fork the repo and branch off your repo's master to a branch where you will make your change. Then you submit that branch for review as a pull request.