Dolphin - Emulating Wii and Gamecube Games

Damn just found out about Dolphin, sadly I only have a 2.4 quad core from like 2 or 3 years ago, so guess I gotta update my computer to get full enjoyment out of it. HD wii games shall wait I guess :(
 
Well my PC can't handle the LLE. Virtually unplayable slowdown and freezing. I suppose maybe I could try overclocking the CPU, but I doubt I'll be able to push it far enough to pull it off, and it's probably not worth the effort just to get rid of some occasional audio crackling.

Anyway, changed setting to Gvaz's recommended settings, and performance seems just as good as before (constant 98-100% speed) with even a bit of visual improvement. Very nice.

IzSDk.jpg



Audio problems are starting to occur with a bit more frequency now, which is obnoxious. Strangely it's mainly only garbling BGM at this point, and it tends to only happen after a song has been playing for a while. At least it's easily fixed in the field by just changing the time of day.
 
Yeah I still get minor issues but it's completely playable.

Sometimes when the game starts doing some particle effects or it's weird poorman's version of Depth of Field (blame the wii for that, it looks ugly on high resolutions) the game slows down to the high 10s in cutscenes but that's ignorable.
 
TheExodu5 said:
It's not based on a thing. It's just a rough approximations. 3.2GHz on its own doesn't mean a thing...a 3.2GHz Sandy Bridge is a hell of a lot faster than a 3.2GHz AMD CPU.

*looks at 3.4 AMD Phenom II x4*

Aw man. Looks like I'll have to switch to Intel after all. And a new motherboard to go with it. A chance to tinker is always welcome at any rate.
 
TheExodu5 said:
It's not based on a thing. It's just a rough approximations. 3.2GHz on its own doesn't mean a thing...a 3.2GHz Sandy Bridge is a hell of a lot faster than a 3.2GHz AMD CPU. On top of that, the speed required really depends on the game, and the hacks applied.

In my experience, a 3.0GHz Core 2 or AMD is not quite enough for most games. The Sandy Bridge CPUs are the only ones I would recommend for Dolphin at the moment. You won't really have trouble running any game with a heavily overclocked 2500K...at least I haven't run into any issues, yet.

hmm. i'm working on OCing my i5-760 to about 3.6ghz, hopefully. how would this rate for doplhin use? between an AMD and sandy bridge, then?
ive had no troubles with the stuff ive thrown at PCSX2 (except maybe Global Defense Force) at stock 2.8, just wondering about what to expect - say, using Xenoblade as one barometer.

also: what's LLE?
 
Anyone using an XBOX360 controller to play this? How do you have it configured button-wise?

Also, are there any bluetooth adapters that don't require that BlueSoleil application?
 
Big Papa Husker said:
Anyone using an XBOX360 controller to play this? How do you have it configured button-wise?

Also, are there any bluetooth adapters that don't require that BlueSoleil application?
I'm using the Xbox 360 controller. Works great. I mapped everything basically 1:1 position-wise with the Classic Controller Pro. The only thing is that the A/B and X/Y buttons are reversed between the two controllers (i.e. "a" on the CCP is where the "B" button is on the 360 controller, and vice versa).
 
What's a good game to use as benchmark for your setup right now? I mean what's a good game to measure the average strain Wii emulation puts on your system? If there is such a thing as an average I guess.

I tried ripping/playing Mario Galaxy and F-Zero GX around christmas 2010 and was met with some crushing framerates and audio issues, enough to turn me off the idea alltogether. There's been a load of revisions and new configs since then though and I'd love to try something that gives me an idea of whether it's worth fiddling with settings and whatnot on my machine.

I guess specifically I'm asking about games that aren't total performance hogs and at the same time don't necessarily speed along on any old hardware.
 
Sorta an off-topic question but somewhat related to graphics

My graphics card is a gtx570 and I have a choice of AA mode of 32x CSQQ or 16Qx CSQQ

Which is better, for image quality and processing power usage?
 
Durante said:
People with HLE audio problems in Xenoblade, are you using the patched Dolphin version? (from here)

The only other reason for the HLE audio problems is a slow CPU which causes low FPS in-game which triggers the audio problems.
 
Eiji said:
The only other reason for the HLE audio problems is a slow CPU which causes low FPS in-game which triggers the audio problems.
Actually, with unpatched Dolphin, the major problem is that the effect of very small slowdowns accumulates, leading to completely broken audio after a while even with generally good performance. The patch fixes that.
 
Durante said:
Actually, with unpatched Dolphin, the major problem is that the effect of very small slowdowns accumulates, leading to completely broken audio after a while even with generally good performance. The patch fixes that.

How do you patch it? Where is it?
 
I'm still using 7719m and it works fine. The audio thing doesn't happen as often as it did when I patched the 30 FPS fix too.
Looks like this:
sx4p01-991u1r.png
 
Magnus said:
Noob question:

So, I have Wind Waker running acceptably well (remarkable actually). Widescreen hack isn't working the way it should be, but I'm working on it.

It seems almost all of the configuration options have been shuffled around and moved/renamed in the latest iterations of Dolphin, though. For a moron like me, it's difficult to find all the settings mentioned in the Wind Waker config guide in the OP. I imagine if I did set those all up right, the game would be as smokin' as it is in the OP's photos.
the dolphin wiki has a good set of settings for wind waker if you're wondering how the settings should be in latest svns. Also for some settings add the game folder to dolphins gamefolder list to access some properties, tweaks and cheats. The biggest problem I've encountered so far is the garbled heat effect in Dragon Roost Island.


And damn those xenoblade screens look hot. No xenoblade in my local store;no xblade for me for a while :(
 
So my new laptop has an Intel i5 2540M which is very good from what I've read, though it has an Intel HD3000 graphics card. No chance?
 
Ydahs said:
So my new laptop has an Intel i5 2540M which is very good from what I've read, though it has an Intel HD3000 graphics card. No chance?

You will at least need a decent dedicated GPU yes.
 
Ydahs said:
So my new laptop has an Intel i5 2540M which is very good from what I've read, though it has an Intel HD3000 graphics card. No chance?

I have an i5 2520M and the same graphics cards and the answer is no chance in hell, that GPU cannot play even normal 360 ports.

Best you can play on it is Xbox/ PS2 ports like Splinter Cell 1, Painkiller, F.E.A.R. basically 5-10 year old PC games :|

(N64 and 3DS emus run perfect, though)
 
StoppedInTracks said:
I have an i5 2520M and the same graphics cards and the answer is no chance in hell, that GPU cannot play even normal 360 ports.

Best you can play on it is Xbox/ PS2 ports like Splinter Cell 1, Painkiller, F.E.A.R. basically 5-10 year old PC games :|

(N64 and 3DS emus run perfect, though)
Heh, expected as much. Looks like I'll just to wait until I upgrade my PC (though that should run some Dolphin games as it is).
 
Ydahs said:
So my new laptop has an Intel i5 2540M which is very good from what I've read, though it has an Intel HD3000 graphics card. No chance?
By any chance is this a Macbook Pro? Cuz I have the exact same setup on my Mac
 
Ydahs said:
Nope, a Lenovo L520. Have you managed to get Dolphin up and running on your Pro?
Haven't tried it, but I can pretty much gurantee it's not gonna look too good... I can barely run Portal 2 with max settings without the fan going off like crazy
 
MetatronM said:
I'm using the Xbox 360 controller. Works great. I mapped everything basically 1:1 position-wise with the Classic Controller Pro. The only thing is that the A/B and X/Y buttons are reversed between the two controllers (i.e. "a" on the CCP is where the "B" button is on the 360 controller, and vice versa).


I`m probably just stupid and missing a setting, but what do you select to in-able the controller? When I go under the settings I map out the buttons, it recognizes all the button presses but when I launch the game it will only recognize keyboard/mouse commands.
I have controller/game-pad selected from the drop drop down menu.
 
captmorgan said:
I`m probably just stupid and missing a setting, but what do you select to in-able the controller? When I go under the settings I map out the buttons, it recognizes all the button presses but when I launch the game it will only recognize keyboard/mouse commands.
I have controller/game-pad selected from the drop drop down menu.
Did you make sure to set the Wii-remote attachment to Classic Pro and made sure all the mappings are correct?
 
So dug up 2 older GC games. Rogue Leader and Skies of Arcadia. Former works fullspeed, but the death star was missing and screen kinda jumped. Latter needed LLE for good audio, but got it working full speed with occasional hiccups.
 
Ydahs said:
Heh, expected as much. Looks like I'll just to wait until I upgrade my PC (though that should run some Dolphin games as it is).

Worst thing is the CPU is super fast, the RAM is super fast but they paired it with such a shit intel GPU. Why not go for some Radeon?

Oh I know, it costs $20 more. But what's $20 next to $800 cost of laptop? Well if you sell 2M of them you have $40M more in the bank :(
 
is there a quick save option? xenoblade seems to crash pretty often (all 30-45min)

edit: found it, now i use xpadder to make the "click" from the xbox pad into the quicksave command so i can quicksave easily without using a keyboard. and the other click to load the savegame :)
 
Diprosalic said:
is there a quick save option? xenoblade seems to crash pretty often (all 30-45min)

edit: found it, now i use xpadder to make the "click" from the xbox pad into the quicksave command so i can quicksave easily without using a keyboard. and the other click to load the savegame :)

What sound mode are you using?

Edit:

From what i've been reading, HLE patched has no sound issues, but crashes.
LLE has sound issues if you don't have very high end processor, but does not crash.
 
Suikoguy said:
What sound mode are you using?

Edit:

From what i've been reading, HLE patched has no sound issues, but crashes.
LLE has sound issues if you don't have very high end processor, but does not crash.

Yep. LLE requires a lot of CPU power. On the Bionis Leg, my 4.6GHz 2500K skipps ever 4-5 seconds, which means it's just barely too slow to keep up.
 
Lol wow. I was going to upgrade to that processor and speed later on, but to know it still isn't enough for Xenoblade is fucking crazy.
 
Gvaz said:
Lol wow. I was going to upgrade to that processor and speed later on, but to know it still isn't enough for Xenoblade is fucking crazy.

It's 99% enough. This is the only time I've had regular skipping, and it's still like only 1 dropped audio frame every 5 seconds.

I could push past 4.6GHz as well...I'm just not super comfortable with the voltage it would take at the moment.

Trying HLE for now...no issues as of yet, surprisingly. Not using the patched Dolphin, as it was crashing with HLE.
 
So instead of buying another desktop Mac I think I'm going to build a gaming PC to go with an Apple laptop. I'm excited to finally try Dolphin out in a few months.
 
so i finally got around to trying Xenoblade out on Dolphin ...works amazingly well so far.

i'm only @ the very first town you come across so i haven't played much of it.

anyway, i'm running it @ my monitor's 1920x1080 with 2x internal resolution, 4x anti aliasing, 16x anisotropic filtering. per pixel lighting and force texture filtering are both enabled. using DX11.

game seems to be running full speed 30fps ...i applied that patch to the iso.

using HLE for sound and that seems to work good. sound stuttered a couple times but its few and far between, so its not much of a bother.

setup:

i5 760 @ 3.8ghz
soundblaster x-fi xtreme sound card
2 highly clocked GTX460 1gig cards. SLI disabled at the moment.
8gig 1600mhz ram

i have an xbox 360 pad, but didn't try to set it up for this. currently using the mouse/keyboard and that seems to work pretty well for now.


anyway, my main question is ...is it worth trying to play through this game via the Dolphin emulator, or should i just stick to using my Wii?

i'd hate like hell to drop some serious time into the game and end up not being able to complete the game, or something, because of some fuck up with the emulator.
 
People have completed it on the emulator so I'm going to say no. Did you try my settings I posted earlier? you should be able to play at a higher resolution than that I think.
 
Gvaz said:
People have completed it on the emulator so I'm going to say no. Did you try my settings I posted earlier? you should be able to play at a higher resolution than that I think.


didn't try those settings. i just went with something fairly modest to start with in order to test its performance.

i'll give your information a look over.
 
Gvaz said:
People have completed it on the emulator so I'm going to say no. Did you try my settings I posted earlier? you should be able to play at a higher resolution than that I think.


I used your settings and it's running great, thanks :)... but i'm having random freezes with the game :(
 
tiku said:
I used your settings and it's running great, thanks :)... but i'm having random freezes with the game :(

I think it's some sort of bug with the sound emulation, most likely it will be sorted out soon.
 
What version of Dolphin does Xenoblade work best on? I tried it with Dolphin 3.0, and I got the same frame/audio stuttering that people mentioned.
 
tried it out with 4x internal resolution and 4x anti aliasing (quality level 16 - whatever that means), 16x AF. still works great. i thought it might slow down at that setting, but its been really good so far. impressed.
 
I use 7719 and it works fine for me. 3.0 is about 5~ fps slower. I hear 7714 is good but I haven't tried it yet.

I get better performance by putting AA and AF to 0 or 1 inside Dolphin, and force it in my control panel instead for my graphics card. But ymmv
 
Zimbardo said:
i'd hate like hell to drop some serious time into the game and end up not being able to complete the game, or something, because of some fuck up with the emulator.

i'm pretty sure that you can just copy your save to the wii assuming your wii is modded (it has to be where else did you get the game from?) and play it there if suddenly something will stop working on dolphin. [citation needed]
 
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