dcc10cff11
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! |
||
---|---|---|
.tx | ||
CMake | ||
Data | ||
Externals | ||
Installer | ||
LICENSES | ||
Languages | ||
Source | ||
Tools | ||
docs | ||
.editorconfig | ||
.git-blame-ignore-revs | ||
.gitignore | ||
.gitmodules | ||
.mailmap | ||
AndroidSetup.md | ||
BuildMacOSUniversalBinary.py | ||
CMakeLists.txt | ||
CMakeSettings.json | ||
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md | ||
COPYING | ||
Contributing.md | ||
Readme.md |
Readme.md
Dolphin - A GameCube and Wii Emulator
Homepage | Project Site | Buildbot | Forums | Wiki | GitHub Wiki | Issue Tracker | Coding Style | Transifex Page
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.
System Requirements
Desktop
- OS
- Windows (10 or higher).
- Linux.
- macOS (10.15 Catalina 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 11.1 / OpenGL 3.3).
- A graphics card that supports Direct3D 11.1 / OpenGL 4.4 is recommended.
Android
- OS
- Android (5.0 Lollipop or higher).
- Processor
- A processor with support for 64-bit applications (either ARMv8 or x86-64).
- Graphics
- A graphics processor that supports OpenGL ES 3.0 or higher. Performance varies heavily with driver quality.
- A graphics processor that supports standard desktop OpenGL features is recommended for best performance.
Dolphin can only be installed on devices that satisfy the above requirements. Attempting to install on an unsupported device will fail and display an error message.
Building for Windows
Use the solution file Source/dolphin-emu.sln
to build Dolphin on Windows.
Visual Studio 2022 17.2.3 or later is a hard requirement. 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 11 SDK must be installed when building.
Make sure to pull submodules before building:
git submodule update --init
The "Release" solution configuration includes performance optimizations for the best user experience but complicates debugging Dolphin. The "Debug" solution configuration is significantly slower, more verbose and less permissive but makes debugging Dolphin easier.
Building for Linux and macOS
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. You may refer to the wiki for more information.
Make sure to pull submodules before building:
git submodule update --init
macOS Build Steps:
A binary supporting a single architecture can be built using the following steps:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j $(sysctl -n hw.logicalcpu)
An application bundle will be created in ./Binaries
.
A script is also provided to build universal binaries supporting both x64 and ARM in the same application bundle using the following steps:
mkdir build
cd build
python ../BuildMacOSUniversalBinary.py
- Universal binaries will be available in the
universal
folder
Doing this is more complex as it requires installation of library dependencies for both x64 and ARM (or universal library equivalents) and may require specifying additional arguments to point to relevant library locations. Execute BuildMacOSUniversalBinary.py --help for more details.
Linux Global Build Steps:
To install to your system.
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j $(nproc)
sudo make install
Linux Local Build Steps:
Useful for development as root access is not required.
mkdir Build
cd Build
cmake .. -DLINUX_LOCAL_DEV=true
make -j $(nproc)
ln -s ../../Data/Sys Binaries/
Linux Portable Build Steps:
Can be stored on external storage and used on different Linux systems. Or useful for having multiple distinct Dolphin setups for testing/development/TAS.
mkdir Build
cd Build
cmake .. -DLINUX_LOCAL_DEV=true
make -j $(nproc)
cp -r ../Data/Sys/ Binaries/
touch Binaries/portable.txt
Building for Android
These instructions assume familiarity with Android development. If you do not have an Android dev environment set up, see AndroidSetup.md.
Make sure to pull submodules before building:
git submodule update --init
If using Android Studio, import the Gradle project located in ./Source/Android
.
Android apps are compiled using a build system called Gradle. Dolphin's native component, however, is compiled using CMake. The Gradle script will attempt to run a CMake build automatically while building the Java code.
Uninstalling
On Windows, simply remove the extracted directory, unless it was installed with the NSIS installer, in which case you can uninstall Dolphin like any other Windows application.
Linux users can run cat install_manifest.txt | xargs -d '\n' rm
as root from the build directory
to uninstall Dolphin from their system.
macOS users can simply delete Dolphin.app to uninstall it.
Additionally, you'll want to remove the global user directory if you don't plan on reinstalling Dolphin.
Command Line Usage
Usage: Dolphin.exe [options]... [FILE]...
Options:
--version show program's version number and exit
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-u USER, --user=USER User folder path
-m MOVIE, --movie=MOVIE
Play a movie file
-e <file>, --exec=<file>
Load the specified file
-n <16-character ASCII title ID>, --nand_title=<16-character ASCII title ID>
Launch a NAND title
-C <System>.<Section>.<Key>=<Value>, --config=<System>.<Section>.<Key>=<Value>
Set a configuration option
-s <file>, --save_state=<file>
Load the initial save state
-d, --debugger Show the debugger pane and additional View menu options
-l, --logger Open the logger
-b, --batch Run Dolphin without the user interface (Requires
--exec or --nand-title)
-c, --confirm Set Confirm on Stop
-v VIDEO_BACKEND, --video_backend=VIDEO_BACKEND
Specify a video backend
-a AUDIO_EMULATION, --audio_emulation=AUDIO_EMULATION
Choose audio emulation from [HLE|LLE]
Available DSP emulation engines are HLE (High Level Emulation) and LLE (Low Level Emulation). HLE is faster but less accurate whereas LLE is slower but close to perfect. Note that LLE has two submodes (Interpreter and Recompiler) but they cannot be selected from the command line.
Available video backends are "D3D" and "D3D12" (they are only available on Windows), "OGL", and "Vulkan". There's also "Null", which will not render anything, and "Software Renderer", which uses the CPU for rendering and is intended for debugging purposes only.
DolphinTool Usage
usage: dolphin-tool COMMAND -h
commands supported: [convert, verify, header]
Usage: convert [options]... [FILE]...
Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-u USER, --user=USER User folder path, required for temporary processing
files.Will be automatically created if this option is
not set.
-i FILE, --input=FILE
Path to disc image FILE.
-o FILE, --output=FILE
Path to the destination FILE.
-f FORMAT, --format=FORMAT
Container format to use. Default is RVZ. [iso|gcz|wia|rvz]
-s, --scrub Scrub junk data as part of conversion.
-b BLOCK_SIZE, --block_size=BLOCK_SIZE
Block size for GCZ/WIA/RVZ formats, as an integer.
Suggested value for RVZ: 131072 (128 KiB)
-c COMPRESSION, --compression=COMPRESSION
Compression method to use when converting to WIA/RVZ.
Suggested value for RVZ: zstd [none|zstd|bzip|lzma|lzma2]
-l COMPRESSION_LEVEL, --compression_level=COMPRESSION_LEVEL
Level of compression for the selected method. Ignored
if 'none'. Suggested value for zstd: 5
Usage: verify [options]...
Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-u USER, --user=USER User folder path, required for temporary processing
files.Will be automatically created if this option is
not set.
-i FILE, --input=FILE
Path to disc image FILE.
-a ALGORITHM, --algorithm=ALGORITHM
Optional. Compute and print the digest using the
selected algorithm, then exit. [crc32|md5|sha1]
Usage: header [options]...
Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-i FILE, --input=FILE
Path to disc image FILE.
-b, --block_size Optional. Print the block size of GCZ/WIA/RVZ formats,
then exit.
-c, --compression Optional. Print the compression method of GCZ/WIA/RVZ
formats, then exit.
-l, --compression_level
Optional. Print the level of compression for WIA/RVZ
formats, then exit.