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In late 2012, Dolphin moved to a brand new website - dolphin-emu.org. With complete control of our own home and infrastructure for the first time, we noticed the accessibility to users that it gave us. Not only did we get a new home, but we also got a platform, one that allowed us to communicate directly to our users! We used it to great effect, explaining big changes to the emulator such as tev_fixes_new, getting ahead of controversy when we removed the popular D3D9 graphics backend, calling out broken drivers, and more! The Dolphin Blog was born!

However, we quickly realized that while single dedicated articles were great for big changes, Dolphin was improving all the time and tons of important and/or interesting changes were being overlooked simply because they weren't "big enough" to warrant a feature article. We needed something that would let us cover the continuing development of the emulator. Something like, a periodical article filled with a collection of notable changes, so we could report on the progress of Dolphin within a set window of time. And after much experimentation, we built a format to fulfill this role, and released the first of its kind to the world on the 30th of April, 2014.

Ten years ago today, the first Dolphin Progress Report was launched! Since then, our blog has exploded in popularity, and tens of thousands of people read every Report! And in that time, we've made 79 Dolphin Progress Reports, with 797 Notable Changes, 54 special sections, and 301,807 words! Thanks for reading!

As the writers of the Dolphin blog, we are proud of what we have accomplished here. We've highlighted tons of cool changes, educated our users (and ourselves!) on how Dolphin works, we've helped reel in fresh talent for the emulator, we've helped people get into universities and launch their careers, and even helped a few people meet their life partners! Progress Reports have been so impactful, that they have reached far beyond Dolphin. The once novel concept of emulator Progress Reports has become a standard means of user communication throughout emulation!

But of course, ten years is a long time, and we've changed along the way and will continue to change over time. The Reports may grow or shrink, become more or less frequent, structure and style may change, and writers may come and go. And truth be told, this is hard, and we nearly reached the breaking point a few times along the way. But no matter what happens, as the writers of the Dolphin Blog, it is our goal and our hope that for as long there are Notable Changes being made to Dolphin, there will be Progress Reports to feature them!

Speaking of which, anniversary or not, this is a Progress Report. We have Notable Changes to cover! So without further ado, please enjoy the Tenth Anniversary Dolphin Progress Report, and the last Dolphin Progress Report of the 5.0 era.

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With the conclusion of the holiday season, it's time for us at the blog to get back to work. And this time around, we have a smattering of changes covering just about everything you could imagine. For those looking to enjoy some of the latest homebrew with DSP-HLE, Dolphin now has support for the latest homebrew microcodes! For retail games, we also have a minor update to the Zelda-HLE microcode to fix a missing effect that's long overdue.

In some more important news, for those of you having disk space issues when running Dolphin on Windows since the last beta, a fix is now available. And for those looking for the clearest picture possible, Dolphin's mipmap heuristic has been backed down to allow for higher resolution mipmaps across more textures. And of course, if you're wanting that perfect image, Custom Aspect Ratios will allow for easier use of ultra-widescreen hacks and more!

Add to all of that a huge bugfix for older revision Steam Decks, another chapter in the Bounding Box saga, seeing a classic in an all new way, and yet another chapter in broken GPU drivers, and you've got yourself a Dolphin Progress Report.

Enjoy.

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It's the beginning of the month and time for another Dolphin Progress Report! ...That line doesn't exactly work when it's midway through the month, huh? This Progress Report ended up being a very technically challenging report to write with several huge rabbit holes that go through the history of Dolphin and the games themselves. The first rabbit hole showcases TMEM, the GameCube and Wii's texture cache. Dolphin's approach to emulating this bit of the hardware has been to effectively ignore it exists. Trying to even begin to rectify the problems with this approach and explain the reasoning behind why it sort of wasn't emulated go very, very deep. This Progress Report also contains collaboration with the PCSX2 development team as they helped us understand some of the behaviors of Floating Point Math on the PlayStation 2. The fact that the PlayStation 2's floating point behaviors mattered to us for this Progress Report should tell you the kinds of things we were up against when writing up the changes.

If that wasn't enough, Dolphin also welcomed support for a wealth of mods through support for Riivolution. An easy to use GUI for launching Riivolution mods was added both to desktop Dolphin builds and Android. Speaking of Android, users may have noticed we pushed out an early beta last month. This beta was mostly to showcase and let users on the Play Store try out the newly finished Cheat GUI! We'll finally showcase that after a lengthy delay between when that extra beta was pushed and this Progress Report. While it's not related to Dolphin directly, Apple released the new M1 Max and we got our hands on one to see how it stacks up against the M1 with some rather interesting performance numbers at the end of the report.

With that out of the way, there's no point in delaying things any further. Please enjoy these rather lengthy Notable Changes!

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Many gaming communities over the years have reached out to thank emulator developers for their efforts. Emulators are an important part of many classic game communities and give players access to features like netplay multiplayer, modding, and savestates, while also opening up the doors to enhancements not possible on console. Sometimes it's simply more convenient to use an emulator that runs on your desktop, tablet, or phone rather than to dig out and hook up the original console every time you want to play one of your favorite games. However, it's important to state that our relationship with gaming communities is mutual, and without the help of players and fans, there's no way we could handle maintaining a library of thousands of games.

In this Progress Report, the gaming communities were the direct catalyst to many of the changes. They went on difficult debugging adventures, caught small issues that would be invisible to anyone who wasn't extremely familiar with the game, and even came up with patches to make games friendlier to emulator enhancements. All of these contributions, even if it's not code, are appreciated and help make Dolphin what it is today.

So, without further delay, let's get started with the August Progress Report! Enjoy.

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Your eyes are not deceiving you. As of 5.0-14690, Dolphin now has mGBA directly built into it as a new way to handle Game Boy Advance connectivity with GameCube titles. For those who don't know, mGBA is the most renowned and accurate GBA emulator of this era and has been rapidly improving since its inception. Recently, we wrote about mGBA adding support for our TCP GBA protocol, but this is something completely new. With integration and synchronization work done by bonta, connecting your favorite GameCube titles with a Game Boy Advance for multiplayer and other bonus features is now greatly simplified. Dubbed the Integrated GBA, a stripped-down version of mGBA will boot up alongside Dolphin when set to one or more controller ports. These mGBA instances are clock-synced to GameCube emulation for impeccable connection stability. By bringing these two emulators together in one package, GBA connectivity features now work with popular features like savestates, input recordings, and netplay! All of this comes with the added bonus of improved performance and compatibility. If you don't believe us, check it out yourself!

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After finishing up the macOS M1 article the blog staff took a little break. Then they saw the date.

Upon looking at the actual changelog, however, something became readily apparent: this wasn't going to be just a Progress Report; this was going to be a MEGA Progress Report. The long rumored time era of developers merging everything at once had finally come to pass. We have graphical fixes for Super Mario Galaxy and Luigi's Mansion, crash fixes for Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III, Xenoblade Chronicles, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (AArch64), and new features that make playing games more pleasant! And about AArch64, there are a litany of optimizations and fixes that will change things across most of the library.

And we could go on: Bounding Box, Interpreter, GBA to GCN connectivity, GPU Syncing, Mouse Locking, and still more! There's even a lengthy dev diary at the end for good measure explaining how the great mystery of Pokemon Box's was finally solved. The only way to do it justice is to do it right. So buckle up and get ready for the April and May MEGA Progress Report.

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Connecting multiple emulators together is a complicated and difficult task. This task becomes even more difficult when you consider connecting two different emulators together. You have to understand two different consoles, how these systems communicate with each other, adapt to latency restrictions, and have expertise across two different projects. In the case of GameCube to Game Boy Advance connectivity, we are incredibly lucky to have had talented developers from both GBA and GameCube circles create our current protocol for supporting "GBA" controllers. Dolphin's GBA connectivity has stagnated for some time with …

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The past two months have been quite busy with a lot of features and fixes spread out between a lot of contributors, new and old. It's only fitting then that we've seen some important fixes for ancient bugs and new ideas bringing in new features. Even if the game you've been playing is already running fine, developers are hard at work coming up with ways to make things even better. Take for instance a new infrastructure that allows Custom Texture Packs to customize what controls show up in games depending on how you've configured your controller in realtime! Also, getting that perfect angle is a bit easier with the new "virtual notches" system, perfect for difficult platforming challenges in games like Super Mario Sunshine!

Enough teasing, we've made you wait long enough. It's time for the October and November Progress Report!

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It feels like it's been some time since we've had actually had a monthly Progress Report. This is because there haven't been as many major changes landing, making it harder to fill out a substantial article. That isn't to say that things have slowed down, these smaller changes increase the quality of life for users and add up, especially when jumping from older builds to the latest. However, these changes are a lot harder to show and feature in a Progress Report compared to things that actually affect the core emulation and games. This time around, we had more than enough on our plate to write about, including support in the latest builds for a very interesting game: The Metroid Prime 3's E3 2006 Beta.

But before we get to the new changes, we need to cover something we missed last month. So, without further delay, please enjoy the mostly April Progress Report!

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One of the most enjoyable parts about being a part of emulation is seeing the classic gaming community use the tools we provide to find hidden bits of joy that would be impossible to reach otherwise. Freelook has found secret after secret hidden away just off-screen, and there's even a youtube series that focuses entirely on them! Savestates basically made speedrunning and TASing possible, allowing for quick testing of routes and sequence breaks to push games to their limits. But communities can go far beyond that, with tools now allowing us to look directly into game files and expose unreleased and rare relics. In the past couple of months, we've had two incredibly interesting leaks: A TGC file ripped from a store preview disc containing a pre-release version of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and a very early prototype of the never released Spider-Man 4.

Each of these games give a very specific look into their development. Wind Waker's prerelease demo is very close to the retail product and fully playable beginning to end without the imposed timer. Those that have looked into it have found a plethora of minor differences and glitches between this build and the one Japan would see a few weeks later. Spider-Man 4 on the other hand, never saw release and this was just about everyone's first look at the game. While it emulates just fine in the latest development builds, it does not run in Dolphin 5.0, due to broken support for unencrypted Wii discs. If you do run it, you get to see an incredibly early preview of the game with many non-existent textures, placeholder graphics, and incomplete collision detection. Still, we're happy that Dolphin was chosen as a platform to test out this unique prototype and the game worked without needing modification. With that bit of interesting news out of the way, let's get back to our regularly scheduled Progress Report.

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