Dolphin 3.0 Emulation

Each version gets better and better. I've played a bunch of Windwaker, Metroid Prime, and a couple Resident Evil games with it using a wired 360 controller. Lots of fun, and hopefully they continue to improve the compatibility.

Some of the biggest GameCube and Wii games currently run at near perfect audio/video emulation with Dolphin. You will need a good CPU and GPU to make them run smoothly.

It is worth going out of my way to backup my GameCube and Wii discs onto hard drive.

I've been playing Donkey Kong Returns and Tatsunoko vs Capcom lately. Although, now that my Wii broke, I'll be playing all the compatible Wii games on the PC.

Does this emulator do anything for the Wii's 480p graphics? Can it run them at 1080P or at least make them look more hi-res?

I just bought a compatible optical drive off ebay so I can dump my wii games onto my PC and use Dolphin. I hope it works on all my games, and not just the bigger releases. But even if it did just that, it'd be worth it.

doesnt dolphin emu also let up upscale the graphics to HD rez. I remember seeing a video for I think Mario Galaxy running on dolphin in hd..well sorta

Yes, Dolphin allows you to render the games at a much higher resolution. Games played through the emulator can look much, much better than playing them on an actual GameCube or Wii console.

Windwaker looks particularly delicious, IMO. Games like Resident Evil are a mixed bag, the character models get rendered at high res, but the backgrounds don't.

I actually just tested out a few GC games with this yesterday, and was surprised at how well it worked. I remember an early version that was much worse, and a huge hassle to get running.

For the games I tried, this was easier than digging out the GC controller and memory cards to use with the Wii.

thanks for the update, the past versions i was using/tried were buggy with super smash bros...so i'm looking forward to trying out the new one.

wii games look so much better on the pc than the wii!

This likes like a great emulator. I would love to play Mario Kart in high resolution.

My question is: How would one get the game data onto the computer? My sister has a Wii and I have a Gamecube, so I have legal copies of the games that I want to play. But how would we be able to get the PC to read the data on the disks (especially the GC disks, which are so small in comparison to standard disks)?

you have to find a compatible disk drive, you can google it and then pick one up off ebay

You can also use a Wii with the homebrew channel installed to dump the games to an .iso, using the program CleanRip.

CleanRip retains garbage data and so you'll have every game at 4.7GB, despite many games actually being much smaller, so there are other options to get rid of that too.

Thank you guys. I will look into that. I will be very nice playing Mario Kart at such high resolutions.

It still requires a pretty powerful system. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that CPU is more important than GPU. So far, I'm getting the best results with the Direct3D11 setup, so you'll probably want a GPU that supports that.

That being said, I'm running at 3x resolution internally, with 2xAA and 2xAF, on a 1080p display, and so far, with the Gamecube games I've tried, it's running fullspeed (as long as I don't use the DSP LLE options for audio, which I believe give better sound but run much slower). That's on a Q6600, 8GB RAM, and a AMD 6850 all running stock, so I'd have to imagine more recent systems would run it even better.

I haven't tried any Wii games yet, since as far as I can tell, you need to use the Microsoft bluetooth stack to use a Wii remote, and my Bluetooth 3.0 dongle uses a Motorola stack.

:d

Is Dolphin able to render 4:3 GCN games at 1080p with the correct aspect ratio like N64 emulators are able to do?

I'd like to play Twilight Princess in 16:9 but I can't stand Wiimote controls and prefer the Gamecube controls so much better.

I played a little of Windwaker perfectly in 4:3. There's a setting to crop or stretch the video, but I haven't used either of them, instead preferring it letterboxed.

I take this back. Apparently Dolphin can pair inside the app using the MS stack, but with my Motorola-based stack I just needed to pair as with any other device and Dolphin detected it.

Keep in mind you'll need a sensor bar with an alternate source of power though.

The sensor bar of the Wii is just two sets of IR lights; it doesn't actually 'sense' anything.

So, if you want to use the one that comes with the Wii, you'll need a power source for it. Or, you can get a third party one.

I had some time today, so I tried to put the dvd drive I ordered off ebay into my rig and came to find out not only did the drive not have a SATA port, but my MOBO doesn't have any IDE connectors. So now I gotta wait for Amazon to send me a converter before I can try this out.

Yeah, just about all of the compatible drives use IDE data and molex power connectors.

Make sure not to get one of those cheap external IDE-to-USB and power adapters from Amazon (such as this one). Numerous people, including myself, had a drive die upon powering on. That's what ultra-cheap Chinese made crap will get you.

Ive been looking at the gt750 projector, it's 720p not 1080p like the hd33 but it also does 3d.

I read in a review that it has zero input lag, so it sould be amazing for games.

I got this one.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000Z3K47G