Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello there! I am new to using dolphin, and even to gaming in general. As such, I am not very familiar with the various processors and graphics engines on the market. I initially tried to download Dolphin on my old Chromebook, and was successfully able to install it using Linux. However... I only got about 13-17 FPS... so obviously not feasible there. All that to say, I am in the market for a new laptop, something cheap as I am by no means an enthusiast or professional gamer (>$300). Are there any Windows laptops currently on the market that would be feasible to run Dolphin, primarily MKW (With mods such as CTGTP and/or Retro Rewind installed), or am I just out of luck? I read this article, but admittedly most of the technical terms went over my head, and I just want a decent, low-budget laptop that will reliably run Dolphin for my little brother.

I don't even know if this post is allowed (The rules were a bit fuzzy, mostly referencing people who already have a computer), but if not I suppose it will not make it out of moderation anyways.
If it is accepted, then thanks in advance for any help y'all!

Before going farther, there's a few things to consider:

1. if a used Wii or Wii U console is an applicable option or not

2. if an entry-priced Steam Deck is an applicable option or not


Otherwise, in terms of specifically laptops, it'd be great if you could first answer:

A. if you're specifically looking for new, or if refurbished or new is fine

B. if it needs to be already completely assembled or if some do-it-yourself assembly is an option

C. what country and/or region you'd need to be purchasing from (certain hardware isn't always available worldwide)

Sorry for the late reply, life's been crazy.


No, a Wii or Steam deck is not really the route I want to go.
I'd prefer new, but I know my budget is pretty limited so I could go with refurbished.
Completely pre-assembled would be great, as I stated I'm not super familiar with computer hardware.
I'm in the US.

Thanks for your time and your help!

By the way, you put >$300 as your budget which means greater than $300—did you by chance actually mean <$300 as in less than $300?


Do you have any storage preferences in terms of capacity, or even large-capacity mechanical hard drive (HDD) vs a smaller-capacity solid state drive (SSD)?

Presumably you want to use the laptop for things other than Dolphin? That'd certainly be a good reason for why a more dedicated gaming device isn't really a valid option for your supposed use-case.

Lastly, have you ever replaced or upgraded RAM?

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So I must admit, I'm not super-up on specific laptop models as, ever since the Framework laptop came out, it's sort of been a case of "all other laptops are dead to me", but they're definitely still too expensive for that budget despite the initial revision (Intel 11th gen) beginning to enter upper-budget range on the used market.

Honestly for the price you're looking at, it might just be best to try to find an older Thinkpad, or finding someone confirming if an exact model of laptop has good Linux compatibility (I found a reddit post for example regarding a specific Dell model).


The main issue is that, unless you can somehow find something with discrete graphics, you'll need to almost certainly rely on integrated graphics. AMD integrated graphics will be best, but AMD processors would be a poor choice for Dolphin unless it's Ryzen (or Zen-based Ahtlon CPUs), except those have the issue of not only being newer but also being sub-par choices regarding CPU performance relative to Intel until you get to like 4th or 5th gen Ryzen which would be even harder to get within your budget.

Therefore, in order to get good CPU performance for Dolphin without being stuck with newer, more expensive stuff, that can force you to go Intel anyway. And when it comes to Intel integrated graphics, especially of the older-ish variety, that can also force you to go with Linux which itself means a laptop that has good Linux compatibility—a Thinkpad being one of the go-to examples of such without going for more specialty brands like Framework or System76.

That being said, you'll probably be limited to just 1x internal resolution for older Intel graphics (or maybe 2x internal resolution), and presumably not with even hybrid ubershaders or the like but you're welcome to experiment (if you're playing online, you may need to use the "skip drawing" option for shader compilation, ideally with "compile shaders before starting" also enabled).


One place you're welcome to get started on browsing if you care is Back Market (though you said you're not particularly savvy regarding hardware, so perhaps don't actually buy anything without asking first ) which I recently used for purchasing a refurbished phone and I've not really had any problems; your mention of a Chromebook makes me wonder if you're a student—they have $20 off any item if you're a student:

• https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/student-discount

Also you can take a look at their item "condition" categories of Fair, Good, and Excellent—click the "Learn More" located to the far right of the "Condition" heading on this random much-too-expensive overkill laptop (because I couldn't directly link to the item condition definitions):

• https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/acer-...0cbe0002dc

Yeah that was supposed to be <$300, total brain fart on my end lol. Also, thanks for the suggestions!

Alright, because there's an excellent condition 13-inch P-series (rather than U-series) Intel 12th gen laptop that somehow is only $310 and at least on Ubuntu "just works", but it only has 8GB of RAM and the RAM is non-upgradable but it's at least dual-channel (maybe the 8GB of RAM is why it's so cheap? Or maybe its lack of ports, like only a single type-A USB, no SD slot, and no ethernet):

• https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/lenov...c719c55962

EDIT: Or rather, there was such a laptop available; I'm guessing they only had one in stock? If I find any other models that I think are good options, I might send them to you via email instead in case other people are "sniping" our forum posts and then, once you've actually made a purchase, I'll go back and edit in links for future referencing.

(Of course, if you can actually claim that $20 off student discount, then it would in fact end up under $300)

...though technically, because it's a CPU with not just 4 performance cores but also 8 efficiency cores, at least on the Linux side of things, one could "cheat" and use those efficiency cores to just run zram and compress the contents of your RAM in real-time (at least on Ubuntu and its derivatives like Linux Mint, this requires doing nothing more than just installing the "zram-config" package from the package manager; then afterwards you can check if it's working via the cat /proc/swaps command in the terminal).

But even then, Dolphin on Linux is perfectly fine with 8GB of shared RAM without zram—the issue is really modern versions of Windows (Windows 7 for example was also perfectly fine with 8GB).


Two reviews I sourced some of my info from:

• https://youtube.com/watch?v=dj7QCk6_SKU
  
• https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/...n-4-review