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Dolphin Progress Release 2407 and 2409

dolphin-emu.org

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Re: Dolphin Progress Release 2407 and 2409

#21

Post by Jasper_ »

chucky wrote: post #7
umvi wrote: post #4

Why doesn't Nintendo's lawyer army go after Dolphin when it went so aggressively after Yuzu? Is it just because Gamecube/Wii are EoL'd so they don't care as much (vs. Switch which is still actively supported and selling games)

As I understand it, Yuzu was backed by an actual company that they setup to process their "donations", and by getting donations you could get privileged access to new builds. So for Yuzu there was an legal entity making money off (Nintendo argued) selling access to playing pirated games. Dolphin doesn't accept donations, so there's no good way of arguing anyone is making any money off it. Sure, Nintendo could go afte…

Dolphin runs ads on their main website, and collects the money into a Dutch foundation which helps pay for development-related expenses.

Re: Dolphin Progress Release 2407 and 2409

#23

Post by gary_0 »

MayeulC wrote: post #20
OatmealDome wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dolphin is a GPLv2+ application, and the runtime is under a proprietary license. We currently rely on the "system libraries" exception in the GPL to allow linking with the runtime in the first place. If we ship the runtime with Dolphin, it might not be considered a "system library" anymore. There's some past discussion in this PR, where we made a change to automatically install the runtime DLLs but ended up reverting…

Honestly, given the feedback on the Microsoft site, that makes sense: the redistributable is backwards-compatible, not forward-compatible. Same as with glibc. IMO, the correct option here is to compile against an older version of the build chain. This is the solution offered by Microsoft, and something you would do on Linux for glibc compatibility as well. The other option would be to compile without MSVC, using ming…

> compile without MSVC, using mingw

I believe there are a few open source projects (such as Inkscape[0]) that provide Windows builds this way rather than having to deal with Microsoft's toolchain and runtime. But given its heavy reliance on DirectX APIs and other system libraries, I'm not sure how feasible that route would be for Dolphin.

I do wonder if there would be a performance benefit to compiling with GCC/clang on Windows, as I've seen fairly recent builds of MSVC emit some pretty lousy code in certain cases, and it lacks many of the options that GCC/clang provide, such as an exact equivalent of -fno-math-errno and the like.

[0] https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Compiling_Inkscape_on_Windows

Re: Dolphin Progress Release 2407 and 2409

#24

Post by phendrenad2 »

TillE wrote: post #18
phendrenad2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a "fuck you". What the Dolphin devs want/expect is simply mutually exclusive with how app dev on Windows works. This is a case of Chesterton's Fence, as those decisions have obvious reasons if you think about them outside of the narrow-minded constraints of an open-source emulator project.

So what are those reasons? I mean I ship commercial non-game software on Windows, and the easy solution is just static linkage. Microsoft's preferred solution is that everyone should have an enormous installer which includes their entire redistributable. It's not great.

Given all of the tradeoffs, it seems like the most reasonable solution to me.
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