Tag archives: mali

Dolphin Progress Report: October 2019

We apologize for the late Progress Report, but at this point it's partially by design. There's been an ongoing issue with Dolphin's updater being recognized as a trojan by Window's Defender Cloud AI scanning. The good news is that Microsoft has acknowledged that Dolphin's updater isn't a trojan, however for now they have to manually whitelist our executables. In order to ensure that the monthly builds distributed through our update track aren't deleted by Window's antivirus, we've been verifying that the build we've chosen is whitelisted. If you're interested in learning more about how something like this happens, MayImilae researched the issue and wrote up a detailed report below on what is happening and where we stand on the problem for now.

Until further notice, please keep reporting these erroneous detections so our builds can be whitelisted by Microsoft until they get their AI sorted. Thank you. Without further ado, let's jump into a smattering of significant changes that hit this month, including a way motion features in some of your favorite controllers.

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Dolphin Progress Report: June and July 2019

As seems to be happening annually, due to a short summer lull, we decided to combine the June and July Progress Reports. As you may have noticed, we're a few days into August at this point and things ended up running a bit late. That's actually a consequence of how we do these Progress Reports - we sometimes will go through big changes, test them, and get developer input on how they work in order to better explain them. In late July, a mixture of late changes, unexpected behaviors, and an extremely subtle game bug forced us to delay things while we sorted everything out. In this case, the end result didn't actually affect Dolphin, but does make for a better read as everything finally came full circle.

While we apologize for things being late, we do have a rather wide variety of changes that hit over the last two months to make this Progress Report extremely well-rounded. Whether you're looking for GUI updates, Android, fixes to ancient bugs, and even one feature inspired by a developer who saw Dolphin being used during Summer Game's Done Quick!

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The Current State of Dolphin on Android

Dolphin on Android has had a bit of a checkered history since its inception. Users loved the idea of being able to take their favorite GameCube and Wii games on the go, but expectations and reality have never quite aligned. When Dolphin was first uploaded to the Play Store, developers tried to make it absolutely clear games wouldn't be playable, even going as far as calling it "Dolphin Emulator Alpha". Unfortunately, despite many warnings, many people got their hopes up the moment they saw Dolphin was on the appstore and were ready to play their favorite games, even if their device wasn't. While not everyone had false pretenses as to what should be possible, a lot of users blamed Dolphin for being poorly optimized rather than understanding that it wasn't even meant to run full speed yet.

The endless stream of poor ratings and angry comments eventually reached a breaking point and Dolphin was removed from the Play store mid 2016. That didn't mean development on Dolphin on Android had ceased, though. Instead, builds were provided on our download page, safely tucked away from the majority of users who may not understand the current state of the app.

Suddenly, earlier this month, the Official Dolphin Android app returned to the Google Play Store* complete with all the latest and greatest improvements featured in the Progress Reports!


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Dolphin Emulator and OpenGL drivers - Hall of Fame/Shame

In light of the recent announcements by NVIDIA and AMD in support of Linux for their graphics drivers, we would like to share with the world some of the experience we had developing our open source project, Dolphin, a GameCube and Wii emulator for Windows, Linux, Mac and recently Android.

At the beginning of this year, after the successful release of Dolphin 3.5, Markus Wick (degasus) and Ryan Houdek (Sonicadvance1) started working on a rewrite of Dolphin's OpenGL backend in order to be compliant to the OpenGL ES 3.0 standard. While this rewrite was needed for other reasons (it provides the foundations for very cool optimizations), compatibility with mobile devices and the future Android port of the emulator (now in beta) was one of the key goals. This rewrite was merged into the main Dolphin codebase a few months back and started to be used by tens of thousands of Dolphin users, either on OS X and Linux where it is the only viable graphics backend, or on Windows where it is available alongside our D3D11 graphics backend.

Sadly, using recent, advanced OpenGL features also meant we got to discover how bad some graphics drivers actually are at doing their job. It turns out very few applications use some parts of the OpenGL standard we need to rely on to accurately emulate a GameCube GPU. More than that, on Android, OpenGL ES 3.0 support is extremely recent and only a couple applications on the Play Store use ES 3.0 features.

Here is basically our hall of shame of graphics drivers, sorted by the number of issues we found, how hard it is to report issues to the company and how many bugs were actually fixed.

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