Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

My specs are:
3gb ram
AMD Athlon 64 x2 5600+
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
Windows Vista

I recently began using Dolphin and it has been running well. I've tried playing many games such as Twilight Princess, Super Mario Galaxy, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl and I've gotten pretty good fps with all of them, at least good enough that it's playable. At first it ran fine without any crashes, I played Twilight Princess for well over 2 hours without any problems. However, suddenly it began crashing after 15 - 30 minutes no matter what game I played. Whenever it crashes it isn't just the program that closes, but my entire computer will randomly shut off while playing.

Does anyone know what is causing this and if there is anything I can do to fix it? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Also, I'm planning on upgrading to Windows 7 sometime soon, will that improve my fps?

well, im not an expert but this is rare cases maybe :

1. u just modified your dolphin
2. dolphin is corrupted
3. your game is corrupt
4. your pc has problem

try delete dolphin folder and complete remove from your pc (from registry or whatever) and reinstalled it

Windows 7 x64 is the most stable for dolphin,need atleast 4G Ram but 2G Ram should be fine if you don't use any antivirus or running another program at the same time."Crashing" abit sometime when I play too long(3 hours~) but wait 10~30 sec, it back to normal

that reminds me...check your ram usage when playing dolphin, maybe u got this error

Could your PC be overheating? It might be the days your PC was crashing, the weather was a bit warmer than usual causing your PC to overheat, I wouldn't doubt this considering how resource intensive an emulator such as Dolphin is.

Have you played any of the newer PC games recently? If so have they caused any crashes?

I tried removing dolphin and installing it again but it didn't fix it. I'm not sure if my computer is overheating, but it could be, what can I do to prevent it from overheating? No other games have caused my computer to crash, I played fallout 3 and oblivion recently with max settings along with many other games without any problems.

I just installed windows 7 64 bit and am going to try playing a few games and see if it's still crashing.

A black screen?

What do you mean? Whenever it crashes my computer turns off so the screen does go black. I just tried super smash bros melee and it crashed after around 30 minutes so it is still happening.

Well, this is totally a shot in the dark, but if you ask me, Dolphin is putting so much strain on your PC that it is causing your PC to crash because your power supply is dieing and is about to fail. Either that, or something you've overclocked is causing the crashes.