Dolphin emulator can now boot every single official Gamecube game

The Wii/Gamecube Dolphin emulator has been in operation for well over a decade, having went open source in 2008. Since then, its community has helped improve scores of games’ compatibility and performance to varying degrees, and has more recently allowed for vast speed improvements via DirectX 12 support—albeit in beta form.

For many years, the Dolphin emulator has been able to boot the vast majority of Gamecube games in its official library, however a number of technical obstacles have prevented Star Wars: The Clone Wars from completing the collection. As detailed via a comprehensive blog post, as well as the following video, JMC47 explains this is no longer the case and that the collection is now complete.

In essence, a “gargantuan” code rewrite was required to make Star Wars: The Clone Wars compatible with the emulator. “With this rewrite, Dolphin has taken another big leap in accuracy under the hood,” explains JMC47. “While most users shouldn't see a difference, a few random crashes here and there should be sorted out. It's bittersweet in a way, while it is a momentous occasion to get the last Gamecube game booting, it also denotes that there aren't many huge mysteries remaining.

“While some games still crash, and there are a lot of issues to still tackle, there are no completely broken games that make zero sense remaining. Dolphin's MMU emulation should be able to handle any retail game at this point.”

It’s worth noting that Nintendo has nothing to do with the Dolphin emulator, and that it’s a completely unofficial project. Here’s Wes on the legal side of the matter:

“If you don’t closely follow the emulation scene, you may wonder why Nintendo hasn’t shut down the Dolphin project. The code of the emulator itself is completely legal. It’s written by programmers like Fiora, and none of that code belongs to Nintendo.

“For its most accurate audio emulation, Dolphin does require a DSP (digital signal processor) dumped from a Wii; downloading that is illegal, but dumping it from your own modded Wii is perfectly legal. Ripping your own Wii/GameCube discs is legal, but downloading them is definitely not. That's piracy. Don't do it.”

Thanks, Eurogamer