PlayStation 3 is and will be steadily at a loss.Ninth generation consoles: the x86 clones war.A Dreamcast emulator on the PSP? Just a style exercise….Three monthly highlights from the emulation world.Dolphin emulates New Super Mario Bros.
Of course, the emulator compatibility is still pretty low both with GameCube and Wii games, and in cases like this the essential condition to get satisfying results is to have a “ninja” system with a multi-core CPU, a last-generation GPU and everything – provided the emulator work.Īll things considered, anyway, and even granting that the scarce details revealed by Nintendo on its newer architecture – practically a substantial and retrocompatible upgrade to GameCube’s PowerPC architecture – will continue to give a lot of trouble to reverse engineering efforts on the hardware features, defining Dolphin R3661 as one of the most significant emulation results of 2009 should be a fairly safe bet. If reaching a working PS2 emulator took several years and the marketing of enormously superior PC architectures for specifications and performances, the wonderful work made by the Dolphin coders demonstrates that replicating the Nintendo Wii won’t take that much.
But the last Dolphin versions, and particularly release R3661 at the beginning of July considerably improved support for Nintendo’s “new-gen” console up to the point to properly run Super Mario Galaxy with full graphics, sound and (as it seems) working Wiimote as showed by the following YouTube video clip. Then it was an extremely embryonic emulation lacking stability, sound, proper graphics and Wiimote support. The release of Dolphin’s source code during the past year coincided with the introduction of Wii emulation, or emulation of the console Nintendo exploited to take revenge on Sony radically changing the entire gaming market. Initially released in 2003, abandoned in 2004, resumed in 2005 and finally landed to open source in 2008 on the Google Code platform, Dolphin was the first emulator capable of running commercial games for GameCube, the unlucky Nintendo sixth generation machine which sold just 22 million units during its market lifespan compared to the 140 million consoles of the competing PlayStation 2. For this reason the results recently achieved by GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin are exceptional to say the least and let foresee a bright future for the Nintendo machines emulation “scene”.
This post is part of the series High-end emulationĪs the yet partial success obtained by PCSX2 with PlayStation 2 emulation demonstrates, adequately recreating the last generations videogaming machines on a PC screen – it doesn’t matter how much powerful and advanced equipped CPUs and GPUs are – isn’t an easy task.