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

dolphin-emu.org

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

#41

Post by olliej »

DonHopkins wrote: post #6

>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…

Changing memory modes on osx/m1 is cheap, it doesn’t involve a syscall, and it has to happen any time you want to make a change to generated code (unless you do code on a separate thread from execution)

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

#44

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

ativzzz wrote: post #42

How has Dolphin avoided getting sued by Nintendo? They seem very uptight about controlling their IPs

It might be instructive to flip the question around: what would Nintendo sue for? For which works of authorship is Dolphin infringing the copyrights? Which Nintendo patents or trademarks does Dolphin infringe? If the angle is contributory infringement based on users running illegally copied games, how does Dolphin fail to pass the "substantial non-infringing uses" test?

The only emulator project I know of that was apparently successfully stopped by Nintendo wasn't an emulator of a Nintendo system at all. It was actually a Neo Geo Pocket emulator that had "Pokemon" in its name (for stupid reasons that are not relevant to this discussion) and was threatened for trademark infringement on that basis.

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

#45

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

umvi wrote: post #27
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Wii U Virtual Console games only run on the Wii U.

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

#46

Post by CobrastanJorji »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #44
ativzzz wrote: post #42

How has Dolphin avoided getting sued by Nintendo? They seem very uptight about controlling their IPs

It might be instructive to flip the question around: what would Nintendo sue for? For which works of authorship is Dolphin infringing the copyrights? Which Nintendo patents or trademarks does Dolphin infringe? If the angle is contributory infringement based on users running illegally copied games, how does Dolphin fail to pass the "substantial non-infringing uses" test? The only emulator project I know of that was ap…

And yet, so many amazing emulator projects have been sued out of existence. Remember Bleem, the Windows program that played contemporary Playstation games? Bleem actually won the court case, but the legal costs forced them out of business.

And then there was the time Sony sued Connectix for their emulator. Sony got an injuction, and while Connectix won in appeal, they also ran out of money and closed.

Nintendo, on the other hand, focuses less on suing emualator developers and more on suing distributors of ROMS for old, unavailable titles, like LoveROM.

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

#47

Post by DSMan195276 »

chungy wrote: post #39
umvi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how it works technically under the hood. I got Paper Mario as a ".wad" file instead of the normal .iso that you see for GC/Wii/WiiU games, and Dolphin was able to load the .wad file.

Shall I assume you didn't copy it from your Wii U console? if you downloaded it from somewhere, it probably was the original Wii version.

My understanding is that `wad`s are specifically for the Wii (and Google seems to back me up on that), so regardless of where they got it from the fact that it was a `wad` means they were playing the Wii version. If it was an actual Wii U version it would be some other format.

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

#48

Post by my123 »

Reason077 wrote: post #29
my123 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was probably a sane technical choice for them. RPi4 is made on the same node as the Snapdragon 800 (28nm), but with a much more recent (and bigger) CPU complex, using the Cortex-A72.

As a bunch of RPis are headless anyway...

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

#49

Post by giantrobot »

Reason077 wrote: post #12
my123 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raspberry Pi hardware is way, way too weak.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is on the order of 10 - 20X more powerful than the Gamecube's 20 year old, single core ~400 Mhz 32-bit CPU. The GPU is a bit more difficult to compare, but I'd guess a well optimised emulator with JIT/code translation ought to run very well on Pi 4 hardware. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gekko_(microprocessor)

The differences aren't just raw CPU and GPU power though. The GC, Wii, and Wii U had a couple different high bandwidth and low latency RAM[0] types in the GPU. The low latency and speed likely led to access patterns that are harder to emulate with a Pi's unified and relatively slow DRAM.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1T-SRAM

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

#50

Post by swiley »

DonHopkins wrote: post #6

>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…

Apple doesn't acknowledge emulators as valid software and would prefer the world not have access to them.
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