Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL;DR Dolphin release 2509 turns off Dual Core mode by default on desktop, fixing common crashes.
The update also adds compatibility for three tricky Disney Wii games thanks to clever hacks.
Bluetooth passthrough, which enables Wii Remote support, has been patched to work with more modern Bluetooth adapters.
Dolphin has long been one of the most impressive emulators around, but despite more than 20 years of development, there’s still more work to be done. In the latest release 2509, some of that work actually had to be undone to finally fix crashes that have plagued the emulator for years.
Dual Core mode was first implemented over a decade ago, and it was key to emulating GameCube and Wii games at playable framerates. At the time, processors simply weren’t fast enough to keep up with the demands of the emulator, so by taking a note from the original hardware and utilizing additional cores, performance jumped significantly.
However, it also created a lot of instability. On the original hardware, the different processors worked exactly the same on every machine, so developers could easily keep them in sync. In Dolphin’s Dual Core mode, which emulates the different processors using different cores in your multi-core processor, the timings were completely different on every machine, which often led to crashes.
The team has tried to fix this over the years by adding more synchronization points, but the results were never perfect. And now, after all these years, the team has decided it’s no longer worth the trouble.
This update disables Dual Core mode by default on desktop, which should fix most crashes.
Starting with this release, Dual Core mode will be disabled by default on the desktop release. For anyone playing on modern hardware, games will still easily run at or beyond full speed, so you won’t notice a difference. Apart from fewer crashes on a few games, of course.
However, Dual Core mode will remain on by default on Android devices. The team explains that Android devices often have weaker hardware and more overhead, so performance will take a bigger hit when disabling Dual Core mode.
Don’t want to miss the best from Android Authority? Set us as a preferred source in Google Search to support us and make sure you never miss our latest exclusive reports, expert analysis, and much more. Find out more here.
Release 2509 also fixes longstanding issues with three particular Disney Wii games: Toy Story 3, Cars 2, and Disney Infinity. The developer behind these games, Avalanche Software, put a “dcashe suicide pill” into the code, which appeared to be designed specifically to hinder emulation efforts.
Once that issue was solved, the games still ran incredibly poorly. With a few clever hacks to the way the games handle memory addresses in this release, the team finally got the three titles to play at full speed. They are still demanding to run, but any modern gaming PC should be able to handle them just fine.
This update also fixes a new issue that has prevented some users from connecting Wii Remotes. Dolphin uses Bluetooth Passthrough to bypass your hardware’s default Bluetooth drivers and take advantage of Nintendo’s unique 200Hz polling rates and non-standard descriptors. However, certain newer Bluetooth adapters based on the Realtek RTL8761 chipset were no longer working with the existing code.
After some investigation into the issue, the team overhauled the Bluetooth Passthrough code to improve performance, and included a fix specifically for adapters that use this chipset. This should greatly improve compatibility and allow more users to connect Wii Remotes to Dolphin for a more authentic experience.
The update contains a few more minor tweaks, so be sure to check out the full blog post for more details. You can download the update from the official website, although it may be a few days before it’s pushed to the Google Play Store.
Follow