Dolphin - A GameCube and Wii Emulator

Homepage | Project Site | Buildbot | Forums | Wiki | GitHub Wiki | Issue Tracker | Coding Style | Transifex Page

Dolphin is an emulator for running GameCube and Wii games on Windows, Linux, macOS, and recent Android devices. It's licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPLv2+).

Please read the FAQ before using Dolphin.

System Requirements

Desktop

• OS
  • Windows (10 1903 or higher).
  • Linux.
  • macOS (11.0 Big Sur or higher).
  • Unix-like systems other than Linux are not officially supported but might work.
• Processor
  • A CPU with SSE2 support.
  • A modern CPU (3 GHz and Dual Core, not older than 2008) is highly recommended.
• Graphics
  • A reasonably modern graphics card (Direct3D 11.1 / OpenGL 3.3).
  • A graphics card that supports Direct3D 11.1 / OpenGL 4.4 is recommended.

Android

• OS
  • Android (7.0 Nougat or higher).
• Processor
  • A processor with support for 64-bit applications (either ARMv8 or x86-64).
• Graphics
  • A graphics processor that supports OpenGL ES 3.0 or higher. Performance varies heavily with driver quality.
  • A graphics processor that supports standard desktop OpenGL features is recommended for best performance.

Dolphin can only be installed on devices that satisfy the above requirements. Attempting to install on an unsupported device will fail and display an error message.

Building

This tree builds the parallel_gamecubewii libretro core with the static Makefile. Pull all submodules first:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Then run make from the top of the tree. Linux, macOS and Windows (MSYS2, any environment) are detected; other targets take platform=:

Target	Command	Output
Linux, webOS	make	parallel_gamecubewii_libretro.so
Windows (MinGW-w64)	make	parallel_gamecubewii_libretro.dll
macOS	make	parallel_gamecubewii_libretro.dylib
iOS	make platform=ios-arm64	parallel_gamecubewii_libretro_ios.dylib
tvOS	make platform=tvos-arm64	parallel_gamecubewii_libretro_tvos.dylib
Android	make platform=android-arm64 (or android-x86_64), NDK from ANDROID_NDK_ROOT	parallel_gamecubewii_libretro_android.so

Cross builds pass the compilers, e.g. make CC=aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc CXX=aarch64-linux-gnu-g++. DEBUG=1, LTO=-flto and SANITIZER=address,undefined are available everywhere.

Uninstalling

On Windows, simply remove the extracted directory, unless it was installed with the NSIS installer, in which case you can uninstall Dolphin like any other Windows application.

Linux users can run cat install_manifest.txt | xargs -d '\n' rm as root from the build directory to uninstall Dolphin from their system.

macOS users can simply delete Dolphin.app to uninstall it.

Additionally, you'll want to remove the global user directory if you don't plan on reinstalling Dolphin.

Command Line Usage

Usage: Dolphin.exe [options]... [FILE]...

Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -u USER, --user=USER  User folder path
  -m MOVIE, --movie=MOVIE
                        Play a movie file
  -e <file>, --exec=<file>
                        Load the specified file
  -n <16-character ASCII title ID>, --nand_title=<16-character ASCII title ID>
                        Launch a NAND title
  -C <System>.<Section>.<Key>=<Value>, --config=<System>.<Section>.<Key>=<Value>
                        Set a configuration option
  -s <file>, --save_state=<file>
                        Load the initial save state
  -d, --debugger        Show the debugger pane and additional View menu options
  -l, --logger          Open the logger
  -b, --batch           Run Dolphin without the user interface (Requires
                        --exec or --nand-title)
  -c, --confirm         Set Confirm on Stop
  -v VIDEO_BACKEND, --video_backend=VIDEO_BACKEND
                        Specify a video backend
  -a AUDIO_EMULATION, --audio_emulation=AUDIO_EMULATION
                        Choose audio emulation from [HLE|LLE]

Available DSP emulation engines are HLE (High Level Emulation) and LLE (Low Level Emulation). HLE is faster but less accurate whereas LLE is slower but close to perfect. Note that LLE has two submodes (Interpreter and Recompiler) but they cannot be selected from the command line.

Available video backends are "D3D" and "D3D12" (they are only available on Windows), "OGL", and "Vulkan". There's also "Null", which will not render anything, and "Software Renderer", which uses the CPU for rendering and is intended for debugging purposes only.