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Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

dolphin-emu.org

21–30 of 69 posts

Re: Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

#21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Gamecube (and Wii) games are upscaled right up to 4K and they look great. Many games work in 16:9 widescreen also (Gamecube was originally 4:3). For many games there are even community high-def texture packs that you can add to make them look even better. [ Edit: Sorry, was talking about Dolphin here, not Wii U!]

[Edit: seems like you're talking about Dolphin. flatiron upthread mentioned a Wii U so that's what the question you replied to is about.] Wii U's max HDMI output is 1080p. Also I have not seen any information that it does upscaling at all, so if you have a source for that, I'd like to know it.

Yes, the GP misspoke. However, I'd expect any half-decent TV to have no trouble upscaling the Wii U's 1080p signal → 4K.

Re: Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

#22
post #10

I recently wanted to play the original Paper Mario, but sadly it's not available on Switch, only Wii U. So I decided to go the emulator route. Dolphin is so good that Paper Mario runs better as a Wii U Virtual Console ROM under Dolphin than it does as an N64 ROM under Project 64.

Dolphin isn't a Wii U emulator, are you confusing it with the Wii?

Re: Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually struggles to hit 30 FPS in most GC titles still. Accurate emulation between vastly different platform stacks generally does not care about the raw performance ratio rather how "lucky" some of the hardware functionality can be efficiently mapped.

Yes, in terms of Dolphin's performance today, I don't doubt it. There are probably many more optimisations that can be made: Dolphin's AArch64 JIT is still pretty incomplete and inefficient compared to the x86-64 JIT, for example. My point is in theory, given enough time and effort, the Pi 4 should have more than enough power to emulate a 20-year old device. I'd argue that it's certainly not "way way too weak" as the…

The RPi4 GPU is very weak for the tricks that Dolphin does. Good luck to get Ubershaders running on that for example.

The CPU isn't much of an issue.

Emulating a platform at such a low level in real-time is very heavy resource-wise, by design.

Re: Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

#24

>This was thankfully a lot less strict than on iOS devices, which strictly forbid mapping memory as executable whatsoever and made iOS untenable for us to officially support. Apple even provides documentation for helping developers port JITs to macOS on ARM. Skyler used a method described in the documentation that would change the mapped memory between Writeable when emitting code to Executable when executing code. S…

Where is that quote from? I'm not seeing it on the linked page.

Re: Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

#25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in terms of Dolphin's performance today, I don't doubt it. There are probably many more optimisations that can be made: Dolphin's AArch64 JIT is still pretty incomplete and inefficient compared to the x86-64 JIT, for example. My point is in theory, given enough time and effort, the Pi 4 should have more than enough power to emulate a 20-year old device. I'd argue that it's certainly not "way way too weak" as the…

The RPi4 GPU is very weak for the tricks that Dolphin does. Good luck to get Ubershaders running on that for example. The CPU isn't much of an issue. Emulating a platform at such a low level in real-time is very heavy resource-wise, by design.

To elaborate a bit more on the GPU peak FP32 perf:

> VideoCore VI @ 500MHz: 500 [MHz] x 2 [slice] x 4 [qpu/slice] x 4 [processor] x 2 [op/clock] = 32 Gflop/s

which is the RPi4 config.

compared to a Snapdragon 800: 147.9Gflops FP32, and that's still a very old part.

And about the Wii itself:

> With the Wii, Nintendo opted to go with an innovative control scheme, rather than to focus on processing power. It offered 12 gigaflops, which represents a 1.27x improvement over its GameCube predecessor

The margins are way too slim when counting emulation overhead.

Re: Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

#26
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look for a second hand Wii U. Plays GC wii and Wii U games with hdmi!

Does it upscale GameCube games? If not do the still look ok? Dreamcast VGA 480p still looks great.

Wii U keeps the original Wii/Gamecube GPU. It has another chip behind it that scales it to HDMI. This is also why Wii 240p doesn't work on the Wii U. Instead old VC games will be a slightly blurry 480p at best.

If you want the clearest 480p, the original Wii will do. With component cables and a compatible TV, it should be just as clear as DreamCast VGA.

Re: Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

#27
post #10

I recently wanted to play the original Paper Mario, but sadly it's not available on Switch, only Wii U. So I decided to go the emulator route. Dolphin is so good that Paper Mario runs better as a Wii U Virtual Console ROM under Dolphin than it does as an N64 ROM under Project 64.

Dolphin isn't a Wii U emulator, are you confusing it with the Wii?

Dolphin can't play Wii U games, but it can play games released on Wii U's Virtual Console platform, which is the case here

Re: Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

#28

>This was thankfully a lot less strict than on iOS devices, which strictly forbid mapping memory as executable whatsoever and made iOS untenable for us to officially support. Apple even provides documentation for helping developers port JITs to macOS on ARM. Skyler used a method described in the documentation that would change the mapped memory between Writeable when emitting code to Executable when executing code. S…

Where is that quote from? I'm not seeing it on the linked page.

It’s from this page (which was linked in the opening sentence of the April & May 2021 progress report):

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2021/05/24/temptation-of-the-ap...

Re: Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

#29
post #25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RPi4 GPU is very weak for the tricks that Dolphin does. Good luck to get Ubershaders running on that for example. The CPU isn't much of an issue. Emulating a platform at such a low level in real-time is very heavy resource-wise, by design.

To elaborate a bit more on the GPU peak FP32 perf: > VideoCore VI @ 500MHz: 500 [MHz] x 2 [slice] x 4 [qpu/slice] x 4 [processor] x 2 [op/clock] = 32 Gflop/s which is the RPi4 config. compared to a Snapdragon 800: 147.9Gflops FP32, and that's still a very old part. And about the Wii itself: > With the Wii, Nintendo opted to go with an innovative control scheme, rather than to focus on processing power. It offered 12…

Ok, sounds like the Pi’s VideoCore VI is a lot less performant than I thought. I’d imagined it’d be closer to other mobile GPUs.

Re: Dolphin Emulator - Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not well. If you don't have a PC you'd be better off running it on your phone with HDMI out to a monitor.

Is there a listing of which hardware can run games at full speed at native/upscaled resolution?

Not as such, but there are a lot of YouTube videos where people test a series of games on a particular phone. There are some general rules though. Snapdragon always outperforms other platforms of a particular generation due to driver issues. More popular games like Mario and Zelda will run better because they get more developer attention. There are multiple forks with different goals, eg, Dolphin MMJR has much higher performance than official Dolphin at the cost of stability and accuracy.

Snapdragon 845 is the entry level where you can play maybe 50 percent of games at full speed, and a few at full speed and higher than native resolution. If you want to run at double or triple native gamecube resolution I'd recommend at least an 865.

Also keep in mind some phones like Pixels disable video out. Get an HDMI+PD adapter to keep your phone charged while outputting to a TV. If your phone's USB port is limited to USB 2.0 speeds you'll have to get a DisplayLink adapter.

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