Dolphin January 2018 Progress report.. in a nutshell – Major Android updates, major UI improvements and lots more!
Dolphin is perhaps one of the most actively developed emulator nowadays and due to that, a monthly report is almost always published. This article is here to condense down the January 2018 to a few hundred words rather than a few thousand.
Summary of the report
Last January’s progress updates have something in store for virtually everybody, from macOS users to Android ones. A generalised list of what can be found in the report is:
- Various UI improvements on desktop platforms since Dolphin’s UI got rewritten in Qt, a vastly multi-platform GUI solution that’s widely used nowadays.
The Qt UI is now in pretty decent shape, This means that the less stable wxWidgets UI will eventually become a thing of the past!
- Many Android improvements including a feature that saves you the headache of accidentally losing your progress when accidentally pressing system buttons, support for games that use disc switching, shader improvements and more! The shader improvements make GameCube games run better on not-as-high-end Android devices.
- A major macOS bug was fixed in which WiiMotes couldn’t be used in Sierra/High Sierra.
- The custom texture format was improved to let you customise subtle effects.
- Many other bug fixes,
UI improvements and Android improvements
The memory card manager got cleaned up and now has much less buttons cluttering it up!
The fact that Dolphin is switching to Qt from WxWidgets, a GUI solution whose latest version still support Windows 95(!), means that the GUI will be much more stable.
The folks who worked on rewriting the UI in Qt decided to leave most of the old GUI intact so that all functionality could be left intact and complaints from people not wanting a redesign could be eliminated. That being said, some bits of the GUI such as the Memory Card Manager and Action Replay Code inserter were slightly changed up.
Android improvements are plenty and they include:
- A special save state that automatically gets created when you press system buttons to switch to other applications, whether it was accidental or not. This allows you pick up your game again if you happened to accidentally switch to another application.
- For those who like using VirtualConsole, PanicAlerts were implemented properly in the Android version. This means you can play unsigned WADs (not the DOOM files but VirtualConsole games) on your Android device.
- Support for disc swapping is now present in the Android port. You may now enjoy your Resident Evil 4 (and other games) without reaching a barrier at the disc change message!
- Dual-source blending in shaders is now done properly. This lets GameCube games run much better on lower-end devices that can still run Dolphin.
Games like Tales of Symphonia can be played in their entirety on Android thanks to disc swapping support!
WiiMote fixes on macOS and other updates
Macintosh users also got some love since now, WiiMotes work properly on macOS Sierra/High Sierra thanks to developer ‘VinDuv’.
Other improvements done in January include:
- Custom Texture format improvements – You may now customise subtle effects such as lava effects, light rays etc
- The Auto-Adjust window size option was fixed for resolutions higher than 1x native. You’ll no longer get oversized windows!
- Many bug fixes and various core improvements under the hood!
Conclusion
No more stupidly over-sized windows while auto-scaling your game windows!
If you wish to read more about Dolphin’s progress last month, simply follow the link below. There are also a lot of screenshots if you prefer to feast your eyes on those rather than plain text!
Source: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/02/03/dolphin-progress-report-january-2018/
Hmmm…nice… i feel that there is force to make improvements to emulators. Someone who is gonna make emulator for ps vita? I know that everyone who reads my comment doesn’t give matter but isn’t it interesting, right? :p
Check out Vita3K. It’s a WIP Vita emulator that already runs some homebrew games!
Hello. Thank you for answering. I have already emulators of Vhbl which are same with the Retroach ( if I said that ) in my microsd card. Could you please tell me if somebody has started with Nds, GameCube or Wii ( for new developing emulators ) ? 🙂 Any news?
Trust me. This could be pretty cool in ps vita to have fun with something surprising or amazing thing that you couldn’t imagine that! 😀 I was just wondering watching that but this is on psp and again pretty cool 😀 Donna. I have sent the website ( if you can see it…)
I agree with the aforementioned nonsense.
will this be ported to vita ps4 ?
Android needs ALOT of work. I still cant play on a SD820 phone Resident Evil 4 and others with Vulkan.
Gimme gimme gimme an Helios who fůčkş, like, every forum user he doesn’t want to .
This article got me thinking, is the ps vita powerful enough to run a dreamcast emulator which was optimized for the vita, not some poor retroarch emulater? Is the vita powerful enough?
No
So… id preffer Ishiiruka for all the tweaks, can I just install this versión and wait for the ishiiruka team to launch a fork of this??
Lots of things have been changing with time and technology has made it easy to understand. new UI of our devices are uniques and easy to operate and getting so techy. not only in use but in design it looks so great. thanks for technology as it is making our life so easy. overall interesting information.
visit Bitdefender customer services to resolve its issues.