With that said, in my quest to get the most accurate, console-like experience out of the emulator and the monitor I came across an issue that probably doesn't bother a lot of people, but I felt it was worth mentioning anyhow.
First, a real console simply doesn't output perfect pixel like you are expecting from dolphin. In-fact dolphin outputs significantly "cleaner" pixels, as it skips several steps of blur. The clean image quality you are striving for simply never existed. By default, games always do both vertical and horizontal bluring, and most games do horizontal scaling. All PAL games apply a vertical scaling.
Second, The video used by the GameCube and Wii (REC.601) has non-square pixels. 0.91:1 in NTSC and 1.09:1 in PAL. It's simply impossible to accurately portray this on a video mode with 1:1 square pixels, like 640x480 @ 60HZ VGA. Either you need to do some form of scaling (like dolphin currently does) or you end up with an incorrect aspect ratio.
However, I admit the experience could be better for this kind of usecase. At the very least, it should be easy to configure dolphin to a mode that actually showed the correct number of vertical lines with overscan/padding. Such a video mode would still need scaling along the horizontal for the majority of games, but at least you would only have scaling along one axis, and it happens to same axis that composite video really struggles with (and that a real console always has some amount of forced blur).
The reason I'm saying this is that CRT displays could do without any form of horizontal scaling, since they can adjust the image after it has been sent to the screen, due to them not having a fixed pixel structure. So the correct aspect ratio could be achieved without the emulator doing any scaling (when set in 1:1 PAR). To my knowledge, LG OLEDs also have this "resizing" feature, and while they do have a fixed pixel structure, the pixel density is so high that you wouldn't notice any scaling.
But as far as I'm aware, there has never been a sane OS API that actually lets you output non-square pixels over VGA, or even composite. If there was (and if the install-base of CRT monitors was a bit higher) then it would be interesting for dolphin to support.
You could probably hack it together with custom screen modes and manually telling dolphin what the current pixel aspect ratio is, but then you run into problems that different games use different pixel aspect ratios, and some games will probably switch on the fly. It really needs to be dolphin directly controlling the display mode to make any sense.
IMO, it's simply not worth investing any development, code-complexity and support effort in this direction.
In the future, dolphin will support high-quality custom upscaling/downscaling algorithms as post-processing shaders. You could choose between a high quality bicubic (or AMD's FSR) for smooth resampling that looks a lot better than bilinear's blurry mess. Or choose an upsampling algorithm that tries to preserve the a more pixelated feel without resorting to full nearest neighbour.
Here I used the emulator's options and set the aspect ratio to "corrected", and it's a big mess, with some pixels being square and others being rectangular, and in motion it's even worse because they switch sizes basically every frame, creating shimmering. But the aspect ratio is actually correct.
I used a program called Sizer and dolphin set to Stretch to set the window to the correct size, but the window border was included in the size, so I used an xfb image to help resize the window manually. I was then able to take a dolphin-screenshot and it came out to the correct 640,448 dimensions. The sizer size was 642,480. It sounds close to 640,480 but it is counting the bulky top of the rendering window.
This matches the look on my 29" CRT with the PS2, and it has no shimmering. I didn't use any shaders, only the scaling options of the emulator, with 5x horizontal, and 1x vertical, along with a custom 1280x240 monitor resolution:
I'm sure the Game Cube and Wii also have a whole set of weird resolutions, so an option to view what those are would be nice. PCSX2 already shows it in the tittle window, and many PSX emulators also have options for viewing IRs.
Woo thanks for being so thorough! I'm glad the old one turns out to be just fine, because I was having trouble with the updated one. I did add a manual integer width slider though: -emu/dolphin/pull/10722/files you can just copy it into a glsl file.
This past October, Dolphin turned 20 years old since its initial release to the public as an experimental GameCube emulator. It's been a long ride, with twists and turns. I don't know if anyone back in 2003 expected Dolphin not only to still be under active development 20 years later, but to also support the GameCube's successor in the Wii.
Dolphin is an emulator for two recent Nintendo video game consoles: the GameCube and the Wii. It allows PC gamers to enjoy games for these two consoles in full HD (1080p) with several enhancements: compatibility with all PC controllers, turbo speed, networked multiplayer, and even more!
This code will work on all the programs I have tried. But it does not work for some emulators. Is there something I am doing wrong or can this library just not interact with the dolphin emulator. If this library does not work could someone tell me a library or way to make python code simulate a keyboard press for the dolphin emulator
I like to report this issue: In Dolphin emulator when I try to use Vulkan as backend the emulator just close without any error message even in log file. I thinked that the problem was the emulator, but is not the case aparently because, in Android Studio, when I try to launch my AVD devices pop up an error:
ProblemasAndroidStudio2539726 24.2 KB
An important consideration when using Dolphin or any other emulator is that you must ensure you own a legal copy of the games or content you host, share, or link to using Hostinger VPS. For more details, you can refer to our Terms of Service.
Dolphin is a Gamecube and Wii emulator. Most games run perfectly or with minor bugs. Games are playable at HD quality, with 1080p and more. This is a remarkable feature the actual Gamecube and Wii consoles are not capable of. As an open source project everyone can commit improvements. The code is hosted on code.google.com. Dolphin is actively developed and almost every day new features are added and bugs fixed as well. Dolphin is a multiplatform project and many operating systems are supported. Dolphin runs on Windows 7 (x86 and x64), Mac OSX and Linux.
Development versions are released every time a developer makes a change to Dolphin, several times every day! Using development versions enables you to use the latest and greatest improvements to the project. They are however less tested than beta versions of the emulator.
Modern smartphones provide a powerful platform for running retro games. There are a slew of emulators for Android, but Dolphin is one of the best emulators around for Nintendo fans. Installing Dolphin Emulator on your phone is exceptionally easy.
Much like the PC version, we recommend you create a folder on your phone to stash your ROMs. It makes it easier for the emulator to find new games, and it also makes it vastly easier to back up if you ever need to switch your phone. For this tutorial, we use Solid Explorer (Google Play), but you can use any good file browser app.
Dolphin Emulator is a powerful Nintendo Wii and GameCube emulator, completely free and open source, which allows you to enjoy almost the entire catalog for these two consoles, with many improvements. Among them, the most notable is undoubtedly the possibility of enjoying all games in high definition, with resolutions ranging from 1080p to 8K, although the latter resolution is only suitable for the best graphics cards and the best screens, of course.
Configuring the graphics of Dolphin Emulator is a simple process, but it can be quite time consuming if you want to get the most out of your computer. The good thing? The emulator is so scalable and well optimized that, regardless of the PC you have, you will most likely be able to play almost any GameCube or Wii game. With a good graphics card and a good processor you can get a higher resolution and better performance, but even mid-range computers will be able to run games at some of the more modest resolutions.
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