Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

This may be a dumb question, but what is idle skipping and when should it be enabled/disabled?

If I understand it correctly, Idle Skipping causes the emulator to stop attempting to hold itself at the processor speed of the Wii. In short, it will lock its CPU emulation at "as fast as possible" and the only thing throttling the emulator at that point is the audio plugin. With Idle Skipping *disabled*, the emulator attempts to run no faster than the actual clock speed of the Wii/GC (depending) and will try to maintain that.

I've heard that idle skipping generally causes more problems than it solves, but these reports vary and I can't get any solid answers on it. It shouldn't hurt to have it off, you won't really lose any speed that way, but you can gain considerable speed if you have Idle Skipping on and a null audio setting. This can be a great way to get past long intros
or cutscenes.

There's a (quite good, actually) chance that I'm completely wrong about the true function of Idle Skipping, so if I am someone please correct me, and I'll learn from the experience.

What I heard is that it ignores idle commands (Useless commands) the games gives. Why games would need these i don't quite know.