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More distressingly, it's likely only a matter of time before the Wii Nintendo Update Servers (NUS) themselves go down. Dolphin relies on the NUS servers for installing a fully updated Wii System Menu in Dolphin. Users with unscrubbed Wii discs can rely on them as well to install the System Menu after they go down, but, depending on when the game was released, it may not be fully updated. It's also rather disappointing that the many unique titles released on WiiWare can no longer be legally purchased by users. Say what you will about the average quality of WiiWare releases, these titles are a part of the Wii's legacy, one that is slowly being locked out to those who would want to experience them in the future. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, we have a lot of big changes that hit over the past two months that we need to get through.
The sun may be setting on Nintendo's revolutionary console, but on the emulation front we still have a long road ahead of this. We hope that everyone enjoy's this month's notable changes! For the convenience of our Android users, we've decided to cluster up a ton of important Android changes together If you're on Android 9 or are a big fan of, you definitely won't want to skip out. Even though the Wii's official library is set, both the GameCube and Wii are entering a new golden age as a popular environment for randomizers, full-game mods, incredible cheat codes, and much more. Stalwarts like the, Project M have been around for years, but now there are many other communities around various games breathing new life into them. You can find codes to help balance games like, content mods for that add tons of new rides and hundreds of songs, and trackpacks for that add hundreds of custom tracks to the game. 's also provides their own backup Wi-Fi servers for many unmodified games and their Mario Kart mods!
While most of these mods can be enjoyed on a hacked Wii, many users rely on Dolphin in order to play them. Emulating these mods can be quite the challenge, as they often will do things in ways that game developers would not. Assumptions that Dolphin makes can often be broken and certain features that mod developers use can be extremely slow or downright unreasonable to emulate.
In the case of Wiimmfi's Mario Kart Fun Packs, the mod creators have put in work over the years to improve their experience in Dolphin and even support emulated users playing alongside console users online. So long as you're willing to dump and use your Wii's NAND. Earlier this month, a slight change to Wiimmfi's online networking broke Dolphin support without affecting real Wii Consoles. Not wanting to leave their emulated users high and dry, they.
Quickly took up the mantle of investigating the bug with assistance from the Wiimmfi team. Within a few hours, the cooperation paid off as the list of probable causes was narrowed down to one annoying feature: The Instruction Cache. Dolphin pretty much has no ability to emulate the GC/Wii CPU data cache and likely never will due to the performance implications, but Dolphin does have some ability to emulate the instruction cache, though it's best to avoid testing the emulator. This is normally not a problem with retail games because it's rather bad form for a game to rely excessively on cache quirks,.
There are occasionally, that's something to tackle on another day. Dolphin's emulation of the instruction cache is normally good enough and almost nothing relies on data cache. Mods are different; developers are usually working on a blackbox and don't have the same level of familiarity with the hardware. Unless they specifically tested codes on both Dolphin and Wii, there's a chance they wouldn't even know something was broken. There have been many issues reported around mods that, while Dolphin is at fault, we really don't have any recourse for the users afflicted. If a mod doesn't care about running on Dolphin and uses dcache or perhaps another annoying feature, there isn't much we can do but shrug it off.
In the case of Wiimmfi's server, through cooperation from both sides, we were able to find the cache coherency issue and fix it serverside! Users who already have the latest version of the mod don't have to do anything except try to connect. If you're looking for a more detailed explanation of what was going wrong (as it's rather interesting,) you can find 's full writeup on. In order to track down behavior like this in the future, also added to Dolphin's data collection service, so Dolphin will now automatically let us know what games are instruction cache sensitive in the manner that broke this particular mod. With that, we also have a lot of other exciting changes this month, so now it's time to dive into this month's notable changes! Since the Dolphin 5.0 release, Dolphin has had to help us determine what hardware and builds users are using.
Recently, this feature was also added to Dolphin Android, letting us see that around 10% of our users on development builds are using the Android version of Dolphin. Obviously, Dolphin on Android isn't going to be a perfect experience for quite some time, but in the meantime we will continue to add features and try to make the Android experience as clean as possible, even if the hardware is going to struggle with emulating GameCube and Wii games. As a part of that, a lot of the major GUI features from the desktop version of Dolphin have been ported over. Just this year, we've seen important features like, INI configuration, and even statistics reporting.
Unfortunately, trying to bring the desktop experience to phones has caused some confusion that would seem like second nature to desktop users. Savestates in Dolphin are not compatible between builds and a lot of phone users that had been solely relying on savestates were in for a rude awakening during the next auto-update. An unfortunate series of events lead to some deserved negative reviews on the Appstore and other mediums. With the brand-new auto-update feature came a bunch of broken savestates for users with no warning whatsoever.
Unlike the desktop builds, savestates are immediately available directly from the context menu during emulation without any warnings or other information. Regardless of auto-update, relying solely on savestates for your progress is a risky proposition and we highly recommend using in-game saves as a more permanent way to save your game. ' Updated without warning and my save states were completely lost. The game's save function broke, so those were the only saves I had. For a GameCube emulator on Android it was working really well, but losing all my progress because they couldn't make old save states work with the update was really disappointing.' - User review on the Dolphin App within the Google Play Store Dolphin's design doesn't really allow for savestates to work between different builds safely, so we were left with a difficult decision.
Users randomly losing their save data is not acceptable, but removing savestates on Android would be awful. So as a compromise, we've added an option to enable savestates in the configuration menu, with an explanation of how they are intended to be used so users can understand the risks. We're sorry to anyone who ran into issues in the meantime, but as Dolphin on Android becomes a more legitimate option in the future, we're likely to run into more of these growing pains. All we can do is ask users to be patient and continue to report issues as we go forward.
Now that we've got that out of the way, there's plenty of other notable changes to get through this month so let's start chewing through them! © Dolphin Emulator Project.