April 8, 2009by Chris

It is a rare thing indeed when a current-generation machine can be emulated. There is no chance at emulating the PS3 or the 360 right now but the Wii is another story. The Nintendo Wii emulation scene is strong and active at this very moment.

Meet Dolphin: an open source emulator originally by F|RES & ector available for Windows, Linux, and OS X. Dolphin code is found at code.google.com and the Dolphin Webpage is found at http://www.dolphin-emu.com. Dolphin is written in Cplusplus (sry my parser eats plus signs at the moment) and can be compiled in Visual Studio 2008 and GCC under Linux and OS X. The project is open to contribution, to find out more, visit code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu

Currently, the project is going through much refinement with bi-weekly builds which is discussed in this thread at the dolphin forum

Excerpt from the FAQ: Dolphin reads ISO or GMC files. You can dump your Wii games to your PC using instructions found with google.

So far, there are several Wii games that are playabl with varying degrees of functionality: Animal Crossing, Cocoto Kark, MarioKart, Wii Music, Wii Sports Pack, Wii Play Party Pack. Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros, and Metroid are also looking good. Dolphin has a much richer compatibility list for the Game Cube, naturally.

A decent system is required for this emulator - a fast CPU with SSE2, dual core or faster recommended, any modern GPU with pixel shader 2.0 compatibility, Windows XP, Linux, or OS X.

Regarding GameCube emulation, Dophin does a reasonable job - many games are supported and many don't work at all. Sadly, games such as Zelda, Mario Sunshine, and Pikmin do not have sound.

So this is a great day for Wii Emulation - the Dolphin Emulator is the future and with new builds coming out every week, it won't be decades before we can play Mario Galaxy on our PC.

MaxEm 9.4