Tag-Archiv: netplay

Dolphin Progress Report: November and December 2021, January 2022

This year, we've hit an important milestone that's been in the works for nearly a decade. In late 2012, Sonicadvance1 began work on Dolphin's ARM JIT. Back then, there weren't any devices that had even a sliver of hope of running Dolphin close to full speed, but that wasn't really the goal. All he wanted to do was see if it could be done; it sounded like a fun, challenging project. However, as time passed the idea turned into more than just a passing curiosity. Users were more than happy to donate to cover the hardware cost of staying on the bleeding edge of a rapidly evolving ecosystem, allowing ARM development to flourish. By 2015, Sonicadvance1 astounded developers and the community alike with footage of Mario Kart: Double Dash!!'s time trial mode running close to full speed.

We've come a long way.

On that note, we're happy to announce that Dolphin's AArch64 JIT has finally reached feature parity with Dolphin's x86-64 JIT. This means that every PowerPC instruction that the x86-64 JIT supports along with every major JIT feature are now supported in the AArch64 JIT! And this is a great time for ARM in general, with each generation of processor pushing the boundaries and companies like Apple adopting the architecture for larger and higher power devices like their M1 Mac line. For those on mobile phones and tablets, Adreno powered devices provide decent enough graphics drivers to get a reasonable experience at this point. And with a critical bottleneck getting fixed just days ago, performance on Adreno GPUs has skyrocketed. You won't have to scroll far for that news, we promise.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg; we've had three months worth of changes pile up and some other important infrastructure news. We've improved the user experience on macOS significantly and restored support for older devices. In fact, enough has happened that we'll be detailing the status of Dolphin's macOS support near the end of the report.

And... we haven't even talked about any emulation fixes yet. The past three months have had tons of changes that would have normally been the highlight of a Progress Report. The three month gap between reports was not because of a lack of changes. Want to take Riivolution games on netplay? You can. Hate the EA VP6 bugs? Make them a thing of the past with a new option. Wish your favorite LogicOp game worked on GLES or MoltenVK? Odds are, it does now! The list goes on, but outlining everything would take way too long, so let's just dive in. Please enjoy the November, December, and January Progress Report!

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mGBA Integration: Introducing the Integrated GBA

Your eyes are not deceiving you. As of 5.0-14690, Dolphin now has mGBA directly built into it as a new way to handle Game Boy Advance connectivity with GameCube titles. For those who don't know, mGBA is the most renowned and accurate GBA emulator of this era and has been rapidly improving since its inception. Recently, we wrote about mGBA adding support for our TCP GBA protocol, but this is something completely new. With integration and synchronization work done by bonta, connecting your favorite GameCube titles with a Game Boy Advance for multiplayer and other bonus features is now greatly simplified. Dubbed the Integrated GBA, a stripped-down version of mGBA will boot up alongside Dolphin when set to one or more controller ports. These mGBA instances are clock-synced to GameCube emulation for impeccable connection stability. By bringing these two emulators together in one package, GBA connectivity features now work with popular features like savestates, input recordings, and netplay! All of this comes with the added bonus of improved performance and compatibility. If you don't believe us, check it out yourself!

Introducing the Integrated GBA!

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