作者存档:MayImilae

Leaving a Legend: Saying Goodbye to Windows 7


With none of our active developers using Windows 7 as their primary OS, the userbase dwindling, and Windows 7 starting to meaningfully fall behind newer versions of Windows, it's going to become more and more likely that features are accidentally broken in Windows 7. Eventually, the differences between Windows 7 and newer versions of Windows may increase to the point where we drop support for the aged OS. We don't plan on purposefully breaking support, but, its days are numbered.

Windows 7 had a hell of a run. After the wide rejection of Windows Vista, Windows 7 set the bar for all Windows versions to come. It continued the technical advancements from Vista while righting most of its wrongs, all wrapped up in a friendly, reliable package. This combination was a tremendous success, and users loved Windows 7 so much that it had a support lifespan of over 10 years!

Dolphin has been proud to support Windows 7 for its entire life, and then some. We've supported Windows 7 for 13 years, making it our longest supported single operating system version ever. However, all good things must come to an end. While Windows 7 was able to survive the release of Windows 8 and 8.1, Windows 10 finally provided another popular option, and users have moved on. With Microsoft ending support for Windows 7 a few years ago and more and more software abandoning it, supporting Windows 7 has become a liability for us.

After several months of breaking/restoring Windows 7 support, we've decided to drop support for Windows 7... and Windows 8 and 8.1. We did not take this decision lightly, but after evaluating the situation, we knew what had to be done in order to make sure we can keep working on Dolphin without having to make compromises.

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Dolphin Progress Report: February, March, and April 2022

After a long wait, the Progress Report is back! This time it wasn't so much from a lack of content, but from a lack of content creators. The past three months had illnesses hit one of our writers and the other had a very challenging move. Even with these major hurdles jumped, we're not even close to 100% yet. It's been a battle to get caught up with all of the big changes to Dolphin the past couple of months and because of that this report is a tad late.

Needless to say, there's only one way to start catching up, and that's to get to digging through the past three months of Notable Changes. Enjoy!

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Dolphin Progress Report: November and December 2021, January 2022

This year, we've hit an important milestone that's been in the works for nearly a decade. In late 2012, Sonicadvance1 began work on Dolphin's ARM JIT. Back then, there weren't any devices that had even a sliver of hope of running Dolphin close to full speed, but that wasn't really the goal. All he wanted to do was see if it could be done; it sounded like a fun, challenging project. However, as time passed the idea turned into more than just a passing curiosity. Users were more than happy to donate to cover the hardware cost of staying on the bleeding edge of a rapidly evolving ecosystem, allowing ARM development to flourish. By 2015, Sonicadvance1 astounded developers and the community alike with footage of Mario Kart: Double Dash!!'s time trial mode running close to full speed.

We've come a long way.

On that note, we're happy to announce that Dolphin's AArch64 JIT has finally reached feature parity with Dolphin's x86-64 JIT. This means that every PowerPC instruction that the x86-64 JIT supports along with every major JIT feature are now supported in the AArch64 JIT! And this is a great time for ARM in general, with each generation of processor pushing the boundaries and companies like Apple adopting the architecture for larger and higher power devices like their M1 Mac line. For those on mobile phones and tablets, Adreno powered devices provide decent enough graphics drivers to get a reasonable experience at this point. And with a critical bottleneck getting fixed just days ago, performance on Adreno GPUs has skyrocketed. You won't have to scroll far for that news, we promise.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg; we've had three months worth of changes pile up and some other important infrastructure news. We've improved the user experience on macOS significantly and restored support for older devices. In fact, enough has happened that we'll be detailing the status of Dolphin's macOS support near the end of the report.

And... we haven't even talked about any emulation fixes yet. The past three months have had tons of changes that would have normally been the highlight of a Progress Report. The three month gap between reports was not because of a lack of changes. Want to take Riivolution games on netplay? You can. Hate the EA VP6 bugs? Make them a thing of the past with a new option. Wish your favorite LogicOp game worked on GLES or MoltenVK? Odds are, it does now! The list goes on, but outlining everything would take way too long, so let's just dive in. Please enjoy the November, December, and January Progress Report!

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Dolphin Progress Report: September and October 2021

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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Dolphin Progress Report: August 2021

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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Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

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

Oh shi-

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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Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1

From the announcement made on November 10th, 2020, users have had high hopes for the new Apple M1 devices. With its powerful Apple Silicon processor smashing benchmarks all over the place, users and developers were both asking if a native Dolphin build would be possible. Now we have the answer.

Apple's M1 hardware is incredibly powerful and excels at running Dolphin. This announcement has been in the works for some time, eagle eyed users may have noticed that earlier this month macOS builds were now being designated as "Intel". That's because …

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Dolphin Progress Report: February and March 2021

Sometimes the introductions to the Progress Reports are the hardest part to write. The Dolphin Blog has been running for many years, and we've gone through hundreds of changes that affect thousands of titles. We've gone into detail on all kinds of games, from top sellers on the consoles to obscure titles that most of us wouldn't have known existed if not for some random bug report. Despite all of these exciting changes, despite seemingly seeing it all over the years, we still see things that amaze us. The GameCube and Wii library still have a few tricks up their sleeves and developers continue to come up with crazy new optimizations and features that keep pushing Dolphin forward.

It's hard to express how happy we are to not only be writing these articles, but still have interesting things to write about. In fact, we were working on a feature article spotlighting some new features, but things were unfortunately delayed. As such, this month's Progress Report is a little hurried. What exactly got delayed? Well, we'll have more on that later this month. For now... please enjoy this slightly belated Dolphin Progress Report!

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Dolphin Progress Report: December 2020 and January 2021

Welcome to the Dolphin Progress Report for December 2020 and January 2021! Things ended up running a little behind for this report due to some technical details that we needed to hammer out for a few of these entries. We on the blog team are familiar with the emulator, however there are a lot of technical details that are simply beyond our expertise. Going from things like the AArch64 JIT to GUI changes to IOS updates to game patches that go into low-level hardware behavior is enough to make anyone's head spin! More often than not, we rely on core developers and the authors of a specific change to help us understand what a pull request does so that we can express its purpose accurately here on the blog.

With Progress Reports coming at a mostly bimonthly schedule at this point, this means that sometimes authors have moved onto different things or aren't available to talk. As a blog about emulation, getting these details correct about the various changes and how the emulator works is one of our highest priorities. So, with that out of the way, we hope you enjoy this belated Dolphin Progress Report!

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Dolphin Progress Report: October and November 2020

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!

There's something missing in this picture... or is there?!

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

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