I haven't tested this extensively on real hardware, but I do know that bad things happen if the address isn't properly aligned, and libogc says it should be 32-byte aligned.
A user shouldn't be able to disable "skip ipl" when they don't have a bios file. This finds the ipl file and tells the setting when toggling is allowed. Additionally, if the user previously disabled the option and then deletes their ipl file, they will be allowed to enable it but toggling will be disabled afterwards.
Turns out all OSD messages, every single one, are written to the titlebar. We've just never seen them because the FPS is in the title bar and it replaces it in a fraction of a second. This was only visible when saving savestates because it halts emulation for a moment while writing.
This is dumb, let's not do that anymore.
A few weeks ago, a vtuber tweeted that they had to remove a vod of their stream because Dolphin Emulator showed some personal information during the steam, and left a warning to everyone else that Dolphin shows the account name of the computer. And yea, we do, we show the full directory of the memory card every time a memory card is written, and due to mandatory Microsoft account nonsense, that is very likely to contain someone’s real name.
Fortunately this is very easy for us to solve. This change simply removes the filename from wrote memory card contents string. That’s it. All functionality of the wrote memory card OSD message remains the same, it just doesn’t say where the memory card is anymore.
There are lots of other potential solutions to this but after talking on IRC it seems the simplest one is the best.
Skylander code tidy ups
Convert c array to std::array and fix comments
Formatting fixes/review changes
Variable comment
Migrate portal to System Impl and code tidy ups
Use struct
Restore review changes
Minor fix to schedule transfer method
Change descriptors to hex and fix comments
Ported the code from RPCS3, with improvements made to the handling of control messages and audio transfers, Co-Authored with @mandar1jn
Missing new line chars
Co-Authored-By: mandar1jn <49076509+mandar1jn@users.noreply.github.com>
We've decided this track will never be used in the future. Releases will
continue using the "beta" branch internally, though we'll have the
user-visible strings use a different name instead.
(Note: Dolphin provided builds have always defaulted to 'beta' as the
auto-update track, so anyone who set 'stable' did so manually.)
This should be a fairly easy merge, assuming I didn’t mess anything up. TL:DR no one uses it and it’s not great.
Boot from DVD Backup is an ancient feature with origins in the Megacommit. Back then, GameCube and Wii games were quite large relative to drives of the time. For example, in 2008, the most common hard drive sizes were 320GB and 512GB. On the 320GB drive I personally had at the time, as little as 42 Wii ISOs could have filled it entirely! And that’s ignoring any other files one might want to put onto a drive. Backup DVDs allowed users to burn relatively cheap DVD media and store their GameCube and Wii dumps in a Dolphin accessible way that didn’t eat into their precious HDD space. It had compromises, even then, but in 2008… I mean honestly users probably wouldn’t even notice those compromises with how Dolphin barely even worked at all back then.
Obviously, today the storage space concerns are not as big of an issue. According to seagate the average hard drive it sells today is 8TB. For typical laptops purchased now, the -minimum- selection for storage is usually 1TB. You can even buy a name brand 4TB external hard drive for $100. GC and Wii ISOs are not as big as they once were, relatively anyway. Plus flash drives and SD cards are super cheap and way faster than disc drives ever were. For anyone that has limited drive space, removable flash media can fulfill this offloading role far better than backup DVD media ever could.
Also no one has DVD drives anymore. That’s kind of an important detail.
But to see if Booting from DVD Backup even still worked, I decided to give it a try. I have an ASUS BW-16D1HT, a badass Bluray XL reading and burning drive, connected to my Windows 11 Threadripper 5975WX machine. A super fast drive on a super fast machine is as good as it possibly can get for this feature. So I bought a spindle of DVD-Rs, burned a couple of discs and gave it a try. Surprisingly, it does still work. However, as expected, it introduces a lot of stuttering. Testing Prime 1 and Prime 3, in both games stuttering was introduced whenever the DVD Drive had to suddenly seek. Spikes of 50ms occurred constantly, but I observed 150ms and even over 1000ms stutters! The worst was a three second stutter, when loading Elysia in Prime 3. I could even hear the stutters - any time the drive suddenly made a harsh seeking noise, the game would have a hard stutter. It worked but, it has some serious compromises.
Boot from DVD Backup isn’t great, using removable flash media or external hard drives is a FAR better option for anyone with limited storage space today, and no one can even use this feature anymore because their computers don’t even have disc drives. It’s time for Boot from DVD Backup to go!
So I did my best on the cleanup but I’m bound to have left some bits. Especially in translation - I didn’t get any warnings or anything there that could help point me to where to clean that up. Please review!
Admiral H. Curtiss