One of the best ways to emulate your GameCube and Wii games just got even better

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.

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.”

However, the Dolphin team said copying the game into the host device’s RAM addressed this issue:

When enabled, Dolphin will continuously copy the disc in the background until the entire game is cached in RAM, and then the NAS can turn off the drive whenever it wants and the player will be none the wiser.

This isn’t the only notable improvement to the emulator. The Star Wars Rogue Squadron games are notoriously difficult to emulate due to developer Factor 5’s esoteric and innovative programming methods. This made for games that looked amazing and ran well on original hardware, but suffered from performance issues under emulation. Fortunately, the team implemented some memory-related tweaks (to put it mildly) and other code optimizations to enable “absolutely massive” performance improvements in these titles and a few other games (e.g. Spider-Man 2 and Cars 2).

Check out the graphs below to see the difference on a lower-end laptop and a high-end desktop. The team specifically notes that the high-end desktop allows users to play Rogue Squadron 3 at full speed for the first time. It’s unclear whether some or all of these improvements are available on the Android version too, but this is still great news for GameCube emulation.

Otherwise, the latest Dolphin release also brings a multitude of Triforce arcade additions and improvements (including GameCube memory card support for F-Zero AX), a major fix for online play in Mario Strikers Charged, and performance improvements for the Wii menu.