Dolphin 5.0 released

[LucidMew]

Can't find a topic on this, but this is a bit late.

Dolphin Emulator got updated to 5.0 on June 24th, with a bunch of fancy new stuff that not only makes games easier to run, but more accurate as well. A DX12 backend was implemented back in february (forum thread created in march)

 and since then lots of stuff made it to the release, three years in the making.

 

Straight from the horse's mouth: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2016/06/24/dolphin-50-release/ and the youtube release trailer 

 

A couple of highlights and pretty pictures:

Quote

Integer math is now correctly implemented

Spoiler

Various floating point rounding errors would cause tons of issues in games.

 

Those are gone now thanks to using integer math!

 

 

 

 

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zFreeze is emulated and not just a dumb hack! (More details https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2015/02/01/dolphin-progress-report-january-2015/#40-5279-add-zfreeze-emulation-to-hardware-backends-by-neobrain-phire-and-nanobyte011 )

 

Spoiler

Flickering and ordering issues dominated zFreeze titles in Dolphin 4.0.

 

Dolphin 5.0 has no such issues remaining, with complete zFreeze support.

 

 

 

Quote

Revamped Netplay (I'm just going to copy/paste this, because I can't be arsed to rewrite all of it)

Spoiler

 

Thanks to an active netplay community, we try our best to keep things up to date and working. Back in Dolphin 4.0, netplay was quite a thing to setup. Users would have to port-forward, sync all settings manually, and even if they did all that, there would be no warning if they did desync. Thanks to a very active community at smashladder for assisting in high volume testing, we've managed to pack in a ton of new features for netplay in Dolphin 5.0!

• Dualcore Netplay: A new form of Dualcore called "fake-completion" was added. While it has lower compatability than single-core on netplay, it brings most of the speed of dualcore mode in a deterministic way.
• Blank NAND Netplay: Without Wiimotes and saves on Wii netplay, it's left as a mostly useless feature. By disabling the NAND, users can at least use Wii Netplay with Wii games when they don't need to save or use Wiimotes. Enterprising users onsmashladder have taken to playing Project M competitively on netplay, simply because it's lower latency than Nintendo WFC!
• STUN Server: We realized that many users couldn't forward ports in order to play netplay, so, we now have an alternative. Dolphin's STUN server allows many users who either lack the ability to configure their router or the knowledge to forward ports to still host and play netplay sessions! While gaining 100% compatibility across all routers and networks is impossible, this should still work with most setups.
• Settings Sync: Dolphin now syncs many settings that could commonly cause desyncs if they were different. They are only set during the netplay session, and will not permanently change any settings beyond that.
• Desync Detection: If something is wrong and you do manage to desync, Netplay will now warn you that it has detected a possible desync. If users are using cheat-codes or any kind of modification to the game, this could be set off erroneously. But in most situations, the desync checker will detect if you've desynced before you even notice! This usually will show up very early on if something is setup wrong.

 

 

 

 

Other stuff:

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System Requirements to run Dolphin 5.0 can be found here but here's a quick rundown of what changed:

• 64-bit CPUs and Operating Systems are required.
• Windows XP is no longer supported. Windows Vista is no longer officially supported.
• Direct3D10/OpenGL3 Required. This means AMD Radeon 4xxx, NVIDIA GeForce 8xxx, or Intel HD 2xxx minimum! Anything older than that will most likely not work or will have significant glitches.

Dolphin on Android is not getting a release build. This does not mean it's falling behind or anything. We just did not feel like Dolphin on Android has reached any milestone with these changes. We'd rather it have its own special time in the sun when it comes, instead of tagging it onto what has been an already concerted effort on the desktop release.

 

 

Dolphin now has an optional statistics reporting tool that you can opt into that can help the developers figure out bugs. (more info https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2016/06/19/optional-usage-statistics-reporting/ )

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In Dolphin 5.0, the stat collecting will be barely more than an infrastructure. Dolphin 5.0 will only collect basic information:

• OS and relevant system hardware
• Dolphin version
• Dolphin settings
• What games are being run via the GameIDs
• Information collected is encrypted during transit

 

 

==========

 

Honestly, I'm really impressed with the Dolphin team, they continue to be gold standard in not only Emulation, but OSS as well. Now if they can continue the greatness to [insert literally any other half working emulation project here], then that would be damn great.

 

However, I am saddened that there is no official benchmark built into the Emulator. There is no button that says "Click here to test your CPU's performance for Dolphin Emulation", and instead you have to rely on the special build to do that. There doesn't even seem to be plans to put that in there, going off of the last two sections in the release page

 

Go ahead and download it https://dolphin-emu.org/download/

[Megazero]

I think the last time I ever use Dolphin was to try playing Megaman Battle Network Transmission on Gamecube, and it run so bad I kinda gave up on it all together. I wonder how is it now

[SageOfSpice]

Wow, this looks cool. I didn't even know this was a thing.

[Castdeath97]

I thought this was the mobile browser....I'm dumb.

[Trixanity]

8 minutes ago, Castdeath97 said:

I thought this was the mobile browser....I'm dumb.

Easy mistake. Common name.

[Master Disaster]

Just an FYI, it's been available in pre release state for over 7 months now, it was still labelled as v4.0 but it was V5.0.

 

Personally I've been using it for a whole and it's almost perfect, almost. They still haven't fixed invisible coins in NSMBW on Nvidia GPUs, they claim they can't fix it yet Exaap (the guy making CEMU) fixed the exacts are issue in NSMBWU within a few weeks? Still an almighty emulator though, just remember you'll need a Wiimote to use it properly. 

[ThreePinkApples]

2 hours ago, Megazero said:

I think the last time I ever use Dolphin was to try playing Megaman Battle Network Transmission on Gamecube, and it run so bad I kinda gave up on it all together. I wonder how is it now

I don't know about that particular game, I've just tried a few Wii games, but they've run near perfectly, and that was over a year ago using a dev build (they have several dev builds each day available for download since they build on each commit to the code). 5.0 is really solid in many ways.

Looking in the wiki it looks like the game you mentioned should run fine now
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Mega_Man_Network_Transmission

[M4st4M1nd]

Would have made more sense if they used Vulkan instead of Direct X12.

[Trixanity]

6 minutes ago, M4st4M1nd said:

Would have made more sense if they used Vulkan instead of Direct X12.

It was most likely made before Vulkan was available. Vulkan is less than 5 months old. DX12 is a year old at least (I'm not exactly sure when it was released to developers).

[ManIkWeet]

6 minutes ago, M4st4M1nd said:

Would have made more sense if they used Vulkan instead of Direct X12.

Not really because Vulkan hasn't been publicly available for that long.

 

Vulkan has been released on February 16, 2016 while DirectX12 has been released July 29, 2015.

[patrickjp93]

3 hours ago, Megazero said:

I think the last time I ever use Dolphin was to try playing Megaman Battle Network Transmission on Gamecube, and it run so bad I kinda gave up on it all together. I wonder how is it now

Extremely good. Once the SSE and AVX extensions were implemented, it started scaling like crazy. There's a big performance difference clock for clock between Sandy Bridge and Haswell, for instance.

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, M4st4M1nd said:

Would have made more sense if they used Vulkan instead of Direct X12.

Im sure Vulkan support will come in time, that's the beauty of open source. Anyone can commit code to the project and once it's deemed stable enough the devs will integrate it into the main build and release it. I'd be very surprised if, at least the groundwork to Vulkan wasn't already on the projects git tracker right now tbh. 

[Master Disaster]

Fun fact: the current DX12 backend was almost entirely coded by a newcomer to Dolphin, the dolphin team helped with code optimisation to meet current code standards but all the main work was done by a single user. Needless to say he's now an official Dolphin programmer. 

[AlTech]

5 hours ago, LucidMew said:

Can't find a topic on this, but this is a bit late.

Dolphin Emulator got updated to 5.0 on June 24th, with a bunch of fancy new stuff that not only makes games easier to run, but more accurate as well. A DX12 backend was implemented back in february (forum thread created in march)

 and since then lots of stuff made it to the release, three years in the making.

 

Straight from the horse's mouth: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2016/06/24/dolphin-50-release/ and the youtube release trailer 

 

A couple of highlights and pretty pictures:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other stuff:

 

Dolphin now has an optional statistics reporting tool that you can opt into that can help the developers figure out bugs. (more info https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2016/06/19/optional-usage-statistics-reporting/ )

 

==========

 

Honestly, I'm really impressed with the Dolphin team, they continue to be gold standard in not only Emulation, but OSS as well. Now if they can continue the greatness to [insert literally any other half working emulation project here], then that would be damn great.

 

However, I am saddened that there is no official benchmark built into the Emulator. There is no button that says "Click here to test your CPU's performance for Dolphin Emulation", and instead you have to rely on the special build to do that. There doesn't even seem to be plans to put that in there, going off of the last two sections in the release page

 

Go ahead and download it https://dolphin-emu.org/download/

Sorry but I still don't understand what this is.

[Bouzoo]

11 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Sorry but I still don't understand what this is.

Instead of explaining, read this. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(emulator)

http://www.dolphin-emulator.com

[Master Disaster]

2 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Sorry but I still don't understand what this is.

It's very likely the most accurate emulator ever created. It plays Gamecube & Wii/Vwii games. 

[AlTech]

21 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

It's very likely the most accurate emulator ever created. It plays Gamecube & Wii/Vwii games. 

K. But I don't understand how this is news?

Does anybody care about this at all?

[BuckGup]

Do I need to own the games to play them or just find the ROM?

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, SamStrecker said:

Do I need to own the games to play them or just find the ROM?

It plays roms perfectly. You can use the entire ISO, convert it to WBFS format or even extract the raw data and run the executable directly. 

[BuckGup]

17 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

It plays roms perfectly. You can use the entire ISO, convert it to WBFS format or even extract the raw data and run the executable directly. 

Wow. That is some solid work. How do these guys make money?

[Trixanity]

3 minutes ago, SamStrecker said:

Wow. That is some solid work. How do these guys make money?

Donations most likely. That's how FOSS developers make money (if they do make money).

[LAwLz]

25 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Does anybody care about this at all?

If you ask me, it is way more newsworthy than how some random app is now available on Windows Phone, and apparently that's newsworthy enough to warrant like 20 separate threads.

 

*shots fired*

 

 

5 hours ago, patrickjp93 said:

Extremely good. Once the SSE and AVX extensions were implemented, it started scaling like crazy. There's a big performance difference clock for clock between Sandy Bridge and Haswell, for instance.

Did you ever find any evidence for that? Remember that time you said AVX would double performance in Dolphin, and your only evidence was some fork someone made that had it, but when you read the thread it turned out there was only like a 2% performance difference? Fun times.

[nosirrah123]

This comes just in time for my new system build, which I was planning to emulate wii games on. I can't wait to get Fragile Dreams looking like the mastapiece it should've been.

[EscalatorBoy]

The advancements in Dolphin in the past couple years have been astounding. Being able to play Melee netplay in widescreen with an HD texture pack with less input lag than console+CRT always seemed like a pipe dream, but now it's a reality. Loving it.

[AlexGoesHigh]

3 hours ago, SamStrecker said:

Do I need to own the games to play them or just find the ROM?

legal: buy the game and find a game to dump the iso outside of it, then use dolphin to play the iso

 

and its pretty self expliratory the non legal way which i won't explain since its agaisn't the forum rules