I grew up with the GameCube and spent many hours gaming on it but as the original hardware ages it's increasingly becoming more and more expensive to source (it's not unaffordable but you're paying for old stuff that's, unfortunately, likely to break soon-ish). Without projects like Dolphin it would become a very expensive hobby, somewhere in the next 5-10y.
I know that there's "official" solutions but the quality of the emulators that Nintendo produces unfortunately, tends to be subpar.
Dolphin is becoming so good that it's usually my goto benchmark for budget hardware (SBCs, lately the N100s, etc). Really cool to see that the team keeps pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
I don't quite get, with 100,000+ video games to play across so many different platforms, why people choose to play specific ones in niche ways.
Often times the controller disconnecting for a moment isn't able to re-connect in the previous slot. I guess my 8bitodo controllers are on their last legs. Anywho whenever this happens (every night at least once) we spend time trying to re-order the controllers (digitally and with the usb hub) but ultimately generally need to abandon our monkey ball or ribbit king session (which is tragic iykyk).
I now have a really thorough note about how to configure all of the controllers and what ports things need to be in so that savestates work on the steamdeck controller. They don't work on the 8bitdo controllers. Two years ago was maybe able to get savestates on the 8bitdo controllers but I think an update regressed that functionality? Never been able to get it working again. So steamdeck needs to be port 4 for savestates so that no one needs to use the deck as a controller (which is plugged in to ubs hub and HDMI). That means I need to go into desktop mode and fiddle with settings if I want to use dolphin in single player on the deck (and back again to reset before friends come over).
I imagine this is all because dolphin has a more sophisticated interface when it comes to controllers? It would be nice if there was a toggle that hides all of that functionality such that controllers work out of the box ala most other emulators. No idea the feasibility of that however. Or maybe it's an emudeck issue.
For anyone curious, the cross-platform IPC library they’re considering is ZeroMQ. Draft pull request here: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/14046
> This project has largely been superceded by the nng project. Users are encouraged to use nng if they are able. The nng project is wire compatible with this library, and supports a significant superset of capabilities.
Honestly, they are the North Star of transparent development.
I wish even a 10th of the effort that went into these was put into corporate software release notes.
(original title: "Dolphin Progress Report: Release 2512")