The Team
FRES (Main coder:
core, recompiler experiments, plugin architecture, the
first 3d graphics, dsp interface
ector (Main coder:
core, 2d, advanced 3d graphics, user interface,
debugger, streaming audio, audio hle
The System Requirements
GFX: Radeon 9500 series card recommended, but Geforce FX
series also work. Expect severe graphics problems
with lower cards.
CPU: The fastest you can find.
RAM: 256MB or higher strongly recommended.
Audio: Any Windows/DirectX-compatible soundcard.
The Gamecube Information
The main processor of the Gamecube is a PowerPC derivative
running at 485MHz with some additional SIMD instructions.
It is extremely time consuming to emulate and is the main
bottleneck of Dolphin.
The Gamecube "Art-X" graphics chip is probably the most complex ever seen in a console, except maybe the NV20 in the XBox. Unlike the NV20 the Art-X is very different from PC hardware, so it requires a lot of computer power to emulate, and it may not be possible to support all features. It can do some very weird stuff like having two alpha compare operations that can in turn be xored, anded or whatever, and has performance counters that are impossible to emulate properly that may be used/abused for purposes like occlusion culling, as has been seen already (the weird boxes in Mario Sunshine). Coverage queries may possibly be used on hardware that supports them to fake this feature reasonably.
Also its texturing abilities are extremely advanced, right up there with the XBox and in some areas even more feature rich.
That is why Radeon 9500/ Geforce FX is the minimum specification for running Dolphin properly.
The Gamecube has 24 megs of fast RAM and 16 megs of slower "ARAM", primarily used for audio but can also be used as a temporary scratch space.
The Gamecube has a custom DSP for audio with an unknown instruction set. It will be possible to HLE sound in many games, those that use the AX library, but we are not sure about the others yet. A simple type of streaming music (used by a few games) has already been somewhat emulated.
The Dolphin Information
Dolphin was written in C , compiled with Microsoft Visual
Studio .NET 2003. It's not a .NET application of course.
Dolphin uses Direct3D for the graphics, DirectSound for
sound and DirectInput for keyboard.
For the graphical interface plain Win32 code was used.
The Future We will most likely do more releases of Dolphin, we'll continue coding until it's no longer fun. Will we open the source code someday? yes!
Contact Info Use the Dolphin subforum at to leave your comments or contact the authors. Please do not request any ROMs or ISOs or GCMs or whatever, don't ask how to copy games etc.
The End Of File See the Help feature of Dolphin for more information.