Dolphin Emulator 4.0, the newest major release of the most compatible & performant GameCube and Wii Emulator comes with about 2500 changes.
New Features in Dolphin 4.0:
- Beta support for the Wii official online multiplayer.
This is a feature that has been coming for a long time. More than two years ago, Matthew Parlane and Shawn Hoffman started working on emulating the Wii Wi-Fi networking API in order to run Wii online multiplayer games inside Dolphin. While it was not an easy change in itself, it also required a lot of modifications to core components of the emulator to be implemented properly (for example asynchronous IPC HLE) and a lot of debugging. It is now working well enough that we are releasing it to the public as a beta: don’t expect everything to work, but popular games like Mario Kart Wii or Super Smash Bros Brawl can be played online right now.
- Alpha support for ARM/Android
About two years ago, Ryan Houdek began the implementation of an ARM port of Dolphin, designed to run on powerful mobile phones and other ARM devices in the future. After a long time spent making Dolphin work well on both ARM and x86, Dolphin can now emulate GameCube and Wii games on recent Android phones. This support is still in early alpha stages: crashes happen, it’s slow on Qualcomm hardware because of graphics drivers issues, and it is still missing a ton of features. Nowadays, Dolphin on Android is a two man project: Mathew Maidment is helping Ryan with the UI and making the Android version actually usable.
- Global User directory on Windows
This is not exactly a major feature, but it is a big change in how Dolphin works on Windows, and requires user interaction to move from the old configuration system to the new one. Before 4.0, Dolphin configuration was stored next to Dolphin.exe, often causing issues when upgrading to a new version of Dolphin. New versions of Dolphin use a centralized location to store the configuration for all builds, usually My Documents\Dolphin Emulator. The documentation article linked above explains the details of this move, as well as what you need to do to migrate your old configuration to the new system (if you were using Dolphin before).
- New AX DSP HLE emulation code
DSP HLE is the main audio emulation technique used in Dolphin. Before 4.0, it was extremely inaccurate and full of bugs, mostly due to how it was implemented. Dolphin 4.0 introduces a full rewrite of the audio emulation used in 99% of games, fixing hundreds of audio related bugs in Dolphin. On the flip side, it is now required to run a game at full speed to get full speed audio out of it, which is a direct consequence of fixing these bugs.
- A new look has been designed by MaJoR for Dolphin (new icon, new icon theme)
- Wii Balance Board and GC Steering Wheel support
- Wii Remote support improvements
- Fastmem is an optimization for Dolphin’s CPU emulation, which was previously only implemented on Windows. Now it supports for Linux and OS X
- New OpenAL audio backend
- The Dolphin OpenGL video backend was rewritten by Markus Wick in order to use newer features of OpenGL and be GLES3 compatible. As a result, the OpenGL backend is now the fastest Dolphin video backend on NVIDIA cards.
- NetPlay stability and usability improvements
- Mac OS X support enhancements
- In addition to shipping with a new default icon theme, Dolphin now allows you to make your own themes and share them with other people.
- official release note
Download & Install Dolphin Emulator:
The official website provides 64-bit deb only for Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail. The PPA contains 32-bit version. Due to the dependency problem, this version won’t work on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise.
Download: Dolphin Emulator 64-bit Deb
For 32-bit, run below commands one by one in terminal (Ctrl+ALt+T) to install it from PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:glennric/dolphin-emu sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install dolphin-emu dolphin-emu-master
If you’re on Ubuntu 13.10 & Ubuntu 12.10, try the DEB from launchpad.net
Handy info, thanks!
The official Dolphin website is: https://dolphin-emu.org/
I have tried to install dolphin for 32 bit as a crazy but i don’t get it. Also tried what you wrote by terminal and it doesn’t work neither. Anything else to get it?
So which Ubuntu edition?
The most recent build for Ubuntu 14.04 seems broken in the PPA. There’s now a new PPA contains both stable and lastest development release of Dolphin Emu for Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04, and Ubuntu 12.04. You can do below steps to get it:
1. If you’ve added the PPA in this tutorial, remove it first via Software & Updates utility, or by running below command in terminal:
2. Then add the new PPA:
3. As the PPA description says, if you want the stable version, just run:
If you want to the latest development release, Ubuntu 14.04 and 12.04 users have to add another PPA for libstdc++6 (>=4.9):
After that, run below commands instead to install the master packages:
I installed dolphin-emu from ppa:dolphin-emu/ppa. Loading Metroid Prime, it stars good, although with some slow. When the game effectively starts dolphin-em crashs with message.
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Failed to compile pixel shader!
This usually happens when trying to use Dolphin with an outdated GPU or integrated GPU like the Intel GMA series.
If you’re sure this is Dolphin’s error anyway, post the contents of /home/caco/.dolphin-emu/Dump/bad_ps_0000.txt along with this error message at the forums.
Debug info (Intel Open Source Technology Center, Mesa DRI Intel(R) G41 x86/MMX/SSE2, 2.1 Mesa 10.1.3):
0:0(0): error: `gl_FragColor’ redeclared
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Is it possible to bypass that?
Well, I have disabled Panic Handler in Config. The message is gone but the game get very slow. I think my CPU and GPU (It must be integrated) does not support dolphin. Shade.