GoKawiilJoe Hindy / Android Authority
TL;DR The Dolphin emulator now lets desktop users load games into RAM.
The team explains that this is ideal for people playing games over a network or NAS.
The latest update also brings major performance upgrades for several demanding titles.
The Dolphin emulator for GameCube and Wii games is one of the best emulators in general, but the team continues to deliver meaty updates after all this time. Now, the Dolphin team has announced a slew of tweaks and additions to the emulator.
Perhaps the most notable addition to Dolphin v2603 is the ability to load games into RAM on desktop builds of the emulator. The team noted on its blog that Dolphin also emulates the GameCube and Wii’s slow disc read speeds (a whopping 8.5MB per second). So running the game via RAM won’t ordinarily deliver a speed boost.
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However, the team decided to implement the option to load games into RAM for desktop users who emulate games from a hard drive over a network. This includes Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, which have become increasingly popular.
“The NAS isn’t aware of what some device far away on the network is doing, and since GameCube and Wii games need so little data so infrequently, it may decide to put a hard drive to sleep while someone is actively playing a game that’s on it,” the team explained. “This results in a hard stutter the next time the game asks to read the disc, as now Dolphin has to wait for the NAS to wake up the drive.”
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