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Dolphin is an emulator for running GameCube and Wii games on Windows, Linux, macOS, and recent Android devices. It's licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPLv2+).
Please read the FAQ before using Dolphin.
- OS
- Windows (7 SP1 or higher is officially supported, but Vista SP2 might also work).
- Linux.
- macOS (10.13 High Sierra or higher).
- Unix-like systems other than Linux are not officially supported but might work.
- Processor
- A CPU with SSE2 support.
- A modern CPU (3 GHz and Dual Core, not older than 2008) is highly recommended.
- Graphics
- A reasonably modern graphics card (Direct3D 10.0 / OpenGL 3.0).
- A graphics card that supports Direct3D 11 / OpenGL 4.4 is recommended.
This fork includes a Rust submodule that needs to be built and linked to the final executable. First, pull in the submodule by running
git submodule update --init --recursive
then install the Rust compiler for your current system; to do this, simply visit rustup.rs. Once installed, both CMake and Visual Studio should be able to automatically handle the rest for you.
Open the solution file Source/Dolphin.sln
to build Dolphin on Windows using Visual Studio 2019.
Other compilers might be
able to build Dolphin on Windows but have not been tested and are not
recommended to be used. Git and Windows 10 SDK 10.0.17763.0 must be installed. You can download it here. Once the solution is loaded, change the Configuration to Release x64
, this can be done changed in the top toolbar.
You also need the June 2010 DirectX SDK, you can download it here. You will most likely have issues installing this, look at this comment for how to fix it. Not sure everything in it is a hard requirement.
If you have trouble with some .lib
files missing, right click the Externals directory and click rebuild.
An installer can be created by using the Installer.nsi
script in the
Installer directory. This will require the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
(NSIS) to be installed. Creating an installer is not necessary to run Dolphin
since the Binary directory contains a working Dolphin distribution.
Dolphin requires CMake for systems other than Windows. Many libraries are bundled with Dolphin and used if they're not installed on your system. CMake will inform you if a bundled library is used or if you need to install any missing packages yourself.
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
An application bundle will be created in ./Binaries
.
If you are building on Mojave, you will need to install the 10.11 and 10.14 SDKs to build because Quicktime has been removed in the latest SDKs. Find the sdk version here https://github.com/phracker/MacOSX-SDKs and copy it to
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs
. You should not need to modify the plist file as the project readme seems to indicate.
If you are building on Catalina, you only need to install the 10.14 SDK.
There are two builds of Slippi Dolphin, the netplay and playback build. To build each you can use the given build scripts or read them to understand how to do your own.
./build-linux.sh [playback]
will generate a dolphin binary. The binary will be written to ./build/Binaries/
.
./build-appimage.sh [playback]
will generate an AppImage with the binary you generated by running build-linux.sh.
Usage: Dolphin [-h] [-d] [-l] [-e <str>] [-b] [-V <str>] [-A <str>]
- -h, --help Show this help message
- -d, --debugger Opens the debugger
- -l, --logger Opens the logger
- -e, --exec= Loads the specified file (DOL,ELF,WAD,GCM,ISO)
- -b, --batch Exit Dolphin with emulator
- -V, --video_backend= Specify a video backend
- -A, --audio_emulation= Low level (LLE) or high level (HLE) audio
Available DSP emulation engines are HLE (High Level Emulation) and LLE (Low Level Emulation). HLE is fast but often less accurate while LLE is slow but close to perfect. Note that LLE has two submodes (Interpreter and Recompiler), which cannot be selected from the command line.
Available video backends are "D3D" (only available on Windows) and "OGL". There's also "Software Renderer", which uses the CPU for rendering and is intended for debugging purposes only.
totaldb.dsy
: Database of symbols (for devs only)GC/font_ansi.bin
: font dumpsGC/font_sjis.bin
: font dumpsGC/dsp_coef.bin
: DSP dumpsGC/dsp_rom.bin
: DSP dumpsWii/clientca.pem
: Wii network certificateWii/clientcacakey.pem
: Wii network certificateWii/rootca.pem
: Wii network certificate
The DSP dumps included with Dolphin have been written from scratch and do not contain any copyrighted material. They should work for most purposes, however some games implement copy protection by checksumming the dumps. You will need to dump the DSP files from a console and replace the default dumps if you want to fix those issues.
Wii network certificates must be extracted from a Wii IOS. A guide for that can be found here.
These folders are installed read-only and should not be changed:
GameSettings
: per-game default settings databaseGC
: DSP and font dumpsMaps
: symbol tables (dev only)Shaders
: post-processing shadersThemes
: icon themes for GUIResources
: icons that are theme-agnosticWii
: default Wii NAND contents
The Data folder contains a udev rule file for the official GameCube controller adapter and the Mayflash DolphinBar. Package maintainers can use that file in their packages for Dolphin. Users compiling Dolphin on Linux can also just copy the file to their udev rules folder.
A number of user writeable directories are created for caching purposes or for
allowing the user to edit their contents. On macOS and Linux these folders are
stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Dolphin/
and ~/.dolphin-emu
respectively. On Windows the user directory is stored in the My Documents
folder by default, but there are various way to override this behavior:
- Creating a file called
portable.txt
next to the Dolphin executable will store the user directory in a local directory called "User" next to the Dolphin executable. - If the registry string value
LocalUserConfig
exists inHKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Dolphin Emulator
and has the value 1, Dolphin will always start in portable mode. - If the registry string value
UserConfigPath
exists inHKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Dolphin Emulator
, the user folders will be stored in the directory given by that string. The other two methods will be prioritized over this setting.
List of user folders:
Cache
: used to cache the ISO listConfig
: configuration filesDump
: anything dumped from DolphinGameConfig
: additional settings to be applied per-gameGC
: memory cards and system BIOSLoad
: custom texturesLogs
: logs, if enabledScreenShots
: screenshots taken via DolphinStateSaves
: save statesWii
: Wii NAND contents
Custom textures have to be placed in the user directory under
Load/Textures/[GameID]/
. You can find the Game ID by right-clicking a game
in the ISO list and selecting "ISO Properties".