With the holiday season reaching its apex, we have a few surprises for those of you that have been patiently waiting. The latest release of Dolphin is stuffed with treats. Our first present is presentation - frame presentation, that is. Two new options have arrived and will help users both reduce latency and smooth out games that struggle with frame pacing.
Some games do outright naughty things that make emulation difficult. A slew of them are being coerced onto the nice list this year thanks to a sack full of patches that bypass their troublesome behaviors. Fans of the Broadband Adapter (BBA) have a great present tailored just to them: a new local mode BBA! Designed for allowing multiple instances of Dolphin on the same computer to connect together, it's perfect for use with Parsec or other similar services. And perhaps another gift will have you singing your favorite Wii hits?
But alas, what fun would the holiday season be if we spoiled all the gifts? Read on to unwrap the latest edition of the Dolphin Progress Report.
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Huh? We've received word that apparently the Android users have made the nice list? Really? That can't be right... but this gift is addressed to them.
After more than a couple bumps in the road, RetroAchievements support has finally arrived on the Android version of Dolphin! In Release 2512, the core achievement experience is now available in your pocket. This initial version hasn't quite reached parity yet with the desktop experience, but we didn't want to hold things up any longer. The important thing for Android RetroAchievements users is that you can log in and unlock achievements in supported GameCube games. Because some menus are incomplete, it may be best to have the RetroAchievements website open in the background for achievement lists and other things while we finish up the in-app UI.
Notable Changes¶
Latency was once a huge challenge for emulators, and it is still a major concern. At one point not too long ago, it was pretty much infeasible for most emulators to match the latency of their console counterparts. Compared to a dedicated game console racing the beam on a CRT television, emulators had to deal with sluggish OS window managers with on-by-default triple-buffer V-Sync holding three frames back, first-gen wireless controllers that added latency right at the source of input, slower displays that added several additional frames of latency (much more if that display was a TV without game mode), and on top of everything the emulator still needed to do its job and take time to actually emulate everything.
Dolphin just missed out on the worst of this. By the time Dolphin's performance and compatibility were good enough for users to worry about things like latency, the overall situation had improved dramatically. Low latency and high refresh rate monitors paired with features like Exclusive Fullscreen removed most of the major bottlenecks that emulators had to fight against.
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