Archives For November 30, 1999

Dolphin Emulator icon

Dolphin, an open source GameCube and Wii emulator, has reached the 5.0 stable release. Now it requires Direct3D 10 / OpenGL 3 and 64-bit CPUs.

After two and a half years of development, Dolphin 5.0, the biggest stable release finally is available with compatibility, crash fixes, and new features.

  • Texture EnVironment Fixes
  • zFreeze support
  • better and faster CPU emulation
  • 3D Stereoscopic output
  • Full ES_Launch support
  • Revamped Netplay
  • Audio rewrites and advancements
  • ability to override emulated CPU clock
  • Expanded Native Controller support
  • Video Output Emulation
  • Improved Audio and Video Dumping
  • Line-Width and Point-Size Fixes
  • Exclusive Fullscreen support
  • Memory card folder support
  • For more details, see the release note.

How to install Dolphin Emulator 5.0 in Ubuntu:

There’s no official Linux binaries available. A third-party PPA contains 64-bit packages for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 16.04, and derivatives.

1. Add PPA.

Open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T), paste the command below and hit run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dolphin-emu/ppa

Enter your password when it asks and there’s no visual feedback while typing for security reason.

2. If you have a previous release installed, launch Software Updater and run Partial Upgrade after checking for updates:

Or run the commands below one by one in terminal to update and install the game emulator:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install dolphin-emu

For those who don’t want to add PPA, grab the .deb package from HERE.

3. (Optional) For any reason you want to revert to the stock version of Dolphin in your official Ubuntu repository, purge the PPA via ppa-purge:

sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:dolphin-emu/ppa

Quick tutorial shows how to install the stable or latest dev version of Dolphin, a GameCube / Wii / Triforce emulator, in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 via PPA

Dolphin is an open-source Nintendo GameCube, Wii, and Triforce emulator for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It is the first emulator to successfully run commercial GameCube and Wii games. It is still the only emulator capable of running commercial Wii games. Its name gives reference to the Nintendo Dolphin, which was the codename for the GameCube. Dolphin is a community driven project with developers from all over the world who work together to bring you this high-quality software with remarkable features.

Dolphin Emulator’s wiki page refers to an unofficial PPA repository that contains both the stable and latest development version of this software packages, which so far supports Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 and their derivatives.

1. To add the PPA, open terminal from the Dash, Launcher, or via Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut keys. When it opens, run command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dolphin-emu/ppa

2. After added the PPA, you can either run below commands one by one:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install dolphin-emu

or use Synaptic Package Manager to install the stable version:

3.(Optional) For the latest development version, replace the package name dolphin-emu with dolphin-emu-master in previous command or Synaptic Package Manager.

As the PPA description said, Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 12.04 users need to add below PPA first before installing the development version for an updated libstdc++6 (>=4.9):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dolphin-emu/gcc-for-dolphin

That’s it. Enjoy!

Dolphin is an open-source Gamecube, Wii and Triforce emulator for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It was the first emulator to successfully run commercial Nintendo GameCube and Wii games, and is the only emulator capable of running commercial Wii games.

Features:

  • Real Wii Remote support over bluetooth (a real MotionPlus can be used for games that require it)
  • Wii Remote expansions support (MotionPlus adapter, Nunchuk, Classic controller, Guitar, Drums, Turntable)
  • Support for multiple controllers with DirectInput or XInput support for emulated GameCube controllers and Wii Remotes with or without expansions (unofficial builds are available that emulate MotionPlus for games that require it)
  • Jailbroken iOS devices can be used as emulated Wii Remotes through iController
  • NetPlay for online gameplay for online unsupported games only with other Dolphin users
  • Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection for online gameplay for WFC supported Wii games with other Dolphin users as well as real Wii users
  • Anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering
  • Hi-Res Texture Support, Texture Dumper, Free Look
  • Post-processing pixel shaders
  • OpenCL hardware accelerated texture processing
  • Widescreen hack for forcing widescreen output on some games that don’t have widescreen. This hack may cause some graphic glitches, notably seen on Super Mario Sunshine
  • Nvidia 3D Vision for 3D gameplay
  • Ability to skip Wii Menu or GameCube BIOS when starting a game
  • Ability to start a region-locked game from any region
  • NAND emulation
  • WAD (downloadable games) support (mostly used for WiiWare, Virtual Console, etc.)
  • Support for Homebrew and XFB emulation
  • And more.
  • Minimum System Requirements:

  • SSE2 support
  • 2GB RAM
  • GPU with Pixel Shader 3.0 or greater. Some integrated graphics chips work but it depends on the model (and only with DirectX 9).
  • Install Dolphin Emulator:

    The Emulator and its dependencies are available in launchpad PPA for Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 12.04 and their derivatives.

    To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run below commands one by one:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:glennric/dolphin-emu
    
    sudo apt-get update
    
    sudo apt-get install dolphin-emu-master

    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