Dolphin is an emulator for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii. It allows PC gamers to enjoy games from both consoles in full HD (1080p), along with a range of enhancements – including support for all PC controllers, turbo speed, networked multiplayer, and more.
To run the Windows version, the 64-bit Visual C++ redistributable for Visual Studio 2022 must be installed.
What games can you plan with Dolphin Emulator?
Dolphin lets you enjoy Nintendo GameCube and Wii games on PC. For a complete list of playable games, you can check out the list here.
What kind of CPU do I need to run Dolphin?
You'll need a quad-core CPU or better. With four cores, Dolphin has two cores for the main emulation threads, a third core for other tasks, and another core for the OS and background tasks.
Do I need a powerful GPU to run the Dolphin emulator?
A discrete graphics card that supports DirectX11.1 and OpenGL 4.4 is highly recommended. The more powerful the graphics card, the more pixels and enhancements you can throw at it.
- Nvidia: A GeForce GTX 1060 or better Nvidia GPU will be able to play Dolphin in HD resolutions with Ubershaders well.
- AMD: A Radeon RX 570 or better AMD GPU will perform well in Dolphin with Ubershaders. AMD generally favors D3D over OpenGL.
- Intel: Iris Pro iGPUs will handle Dolphin well in D3D in Windows. Integrated graphics older than HD 4000 are not supported.
How much RAM do I need to run Dolphin?
Dolphin requires at least 2GB of RAM. RAM speed generally has no effect on emulation performance.
Can I use two or more controllers for local multiplayer on Dolphin emulator?
Yes, if you have two or more friends connecting from the same computer, you can give a single computer multiple controllers. You only need to configure the first two ports of the Controller Configuration page.
What operating systems are supported?
Dolphin is a cross-platform emulator that runs on Windows 10 and Windows 11, Linux, macOS (10.15 Catalina and up), and Android (5.0 and above). Dolphin requires 64-bit operating systems to run properly.
What's New
Welcome to the Dolphin Progress Report for Release 2506! As we've alluded to a few times, we've had major changes in the pipeline that we've been very excited to show off. Some of those changes are finally here! Headlining this report are major adjustments to how Dolphin handled audio lag under slowdown by default. No longer will users have to choose between high-latency audio stretching or popping when dealing with small hitches in performance thanks to the new Granule Synthesis Audio System.
If the game is already running full speed, we still have some improvements for you. Dolphin has seen a suite of frame pacing improvements that will give you a smoother experience across almost every game. And, if your system is very powerful, there are a select group of games that can now push past the 60 FPS barrier for high frame rate gaming. Before you get too excited, this feature does not work with most Nintendo developed titles and has incredibly low compatibility in general. For a list of what games support this, we'll get into it later in the report.
If you care about preserving oddball Wii add-ons, we've got you covered here too. Wii Speak emulation is finally here after an incredibly long journey. In addition, long time incompatible game The Daring Game For Girls is finally compatible with Dolphin. We'll get into that game's story and more, but first, we need to get through quite a bit of housekeeping.
The Release Hotfix Fiasco
We finally had some big enough problems in a release that we had to create a hotfix using our new versioning system. First, the macOS build for 2503 had the wrong version number attached, causing it to be incompatible with cross-platform NetPlay. We also found that GBA connectivity in compatible GameCube games was broken, and that there was a crashing bug when running Dolphin on older macOS versions. To rectify these problems, we created hotfix 2503a. However, in doing so, we inadvertently caused all development builds from that point on to take the "a" suffix. Some of our systems temporarily broke in the immediate aftermath while support for the suffix was hastily added. We technically could have removed the suffix, but we decided not to in the end because removing it would have caused even more disruption.
In future releases, if a hotfix is needed it will not apply a suffix to the development builds. This should make things easier on us and anyone else that is maintaining Dolphin builds of their own. We apologize for any inconvenience that this error has caused.
For reader convenience and future consistency, the hotfix suffix has been removed from all changes in this article.
Notable Changes
2503-51 - Granule Synthesis Audio System by samb
When reporting performance issues, sometimes users don't even realize that the game is slowing down. They instead report audio hitching or stuttering as the main issue that's bothering them. In order to provide low latency audio, Dolphin employs a ring buffer. And, as long as the game is running full speed, this buffer remains full and you'll get a constant stream of audio.
When the emulator is not running at the target frame rate, the buffer won't be filled up. And when Dolphin runs out of audio in the buffer, there will be a small gap in audio that sounds rather unpleasant.
To combat this, Dolphin has given users the ability to enable audio stretching. At the cost of higher audio latency, Dolphin can stretch the existing data in the buffer to keep audio running smoothly. For many users, the increase in audio latency is large enough that this feature isn't worth the trouble.
samb wondered if there was a better way to handle things. While stuttering was annoying, he wanted a solution that improved the situation without the downsides of audio stretching. Enter the Granule Synthesis Audio System.
Frame Pacing Improvements - 2503-54, 2503-56, and 2503-186, by Billiard
"Frame pacing" is a term used to describe the consistency at which frames are presented to your screen. This is an extreme example, but if you have a screen that refreshes every 16.6ms (60 Hz) and half of your frames present in 11.1 ms (90 FPS) and the other half present in 22.2 ms (45 FPS), you are in for an extremely bad time despite having an average frame rate of 60 FPS. It's not enough to simply run at 60 frames per second! The rendering and presentation of those frames needs to be consistent frame to frame and synchronize with your display for best results. We call that frame pacing.
Historically, Dolphin's frame pacing has been pretty good... when it was not bogged down by Windows 7's terrible borderless window mode, or getting screwed over by terrible graphics drivers, or if you were trying to run a 30 FPS title before we implemented skip duplicate frames... But those issues were solved, and Dolphin's frame pacing is now good! ...Right?
We thought we were doing a pretty good job, but after the merge of samb's FrameTime/VBlank Analyzer + Graph, it was made apparent that there was still a lot of room for improvement.
2503-122 - Use Game Requested Anisotropic Filtering by Pokechu22 and Billiard
Anisotropic filtering is a texture filtering technique that improves the quality of textures at oblique angles. It is very memory bandwidth intensive, making high levels of anisotropic filtering still uncommon even on consoles today. When gaming on a PC, it's common to just crank it to the max and forget about it. Naturally, Dolphin has offered anisotropic filtering as an enhancement from nearly the beginning.
You may not know this, but the GameCube and Wii actually support anisotropic filtering. It is fairly uncommon across the library due to it being exceedingly expensive performance-wise, but it is still a feature that these consoles support. However, rather than applying it to every texture, developers would instead apply anisotropic filtering to specific textures as needed - usually repeated textures on large floors or walls.
However, Dolphin's anisotropic filtering enhancement is not emulation of the consoles' anisotropic filtering. In fact, Dolphin completely ignored all anisotropic filtering requests from the game entirely! Dolphin's enhancement was everything or nothing, and there was no way to only enable anisotropic filtering just for the textures that would have used it on console. As such, it was impossible to get console-matching texture output - without the enhancement some textures would be too soft, and with the enhancement some textures would be too sharp. It was never quite right.
This has now changed! If Dolphin's texture filtering is set to Default and a game requests anisotropic filtering, Dolphin will now listen to the game's request and apply the specific anisotropic filtering it asked for.
Read the complete 2506 release notes here.
Previous Release Notes:
It's time for us to again delve into the latest changes hitting the newest release of Dolphin Emulator. If you've been keeping tabs on development channels, you'll know there are some exciting bombshell features waiting for us just over the horizon. Unfortunately, given the close proximity to this release, we've decided to hold a lot of them off so they can get more widespread testing in the development builds before hitting a release. Think of the March 2025 release as an iterative improvement that focuses on user experience and stacking many small iterative improvements instead of swinging for every homerun.
Having said all of that? We do have a few major changes that made the cut.
Probably the most requested of the features in this progress report is the ability to finally set custom graphical settings on a per game basis. Our advanced users may be thinking, "Wait, couldn't we already do that?" and they'd be right. The major change here is that per-game graphical settings has been added directly to the game properties page, allowing for a very easy, visual way to change settings and see what settings are force enabled.
For our achievement hunters out there, RetroAchievements has seen its first major upgrade that will bring a huge amount of quality of life to many games. And if you're into weird old game behaviors? A developer dove into Summoner: A Goddess Reborn to determine why it crashes so much. The catch with this one? Some of these crashes have been confirmed to happen on official hardware!
Additionally, there are a plethora of small, but tangible, changes that are the hallmark of an Open Source project. The desktop versions of Dolphin also saw a lot of improvements to input configuration and a few extra upgrades that might make people who want to track their time spent in games very happy. But, let's not spoil everything and get into the notable changes of the March 2025 release!
Notable Changes
Cheat Code Whitelist for Hardcore RetroAchievements
RetroAchievements in Dolphin has received its first major update, and it's... cheat support in hardcore?! What gives?
Up until around the 7th generation, video game consoles did not have operating systems, and software had complete control over the hardware. While "running on the metal" is simple and efficient, the only security on such systems was the proprietary interfaces needed to load code onto the machine. If someone could fashion a device that could access the memory of one of these consoles, they could do effectively anything.
What did gamers do with this incredible power? Cheat at video games of course!
An entire cottage industry developed around cheating, with dedicated hardware, companies, jobs, and entire communities, all built on cheats! By the time the GameCube arrived, a cheat device video game enhancer was guaranteed to come out shortly after a console launched, a customer could buy one in the same retail store where they bought the console and buy games, and they could find tens of thousands of codes readily available for free on the internet! For a moment, cheating was mainstream (within the niche market that was video gaming at that time).
During this era, the kind of player who would buy a device to cheat at video games was also the kind of player who would dump their games to emulate them on PC. In fact, many game enhancers had the ability to dump games! This overlap made cheat support an essential feature for emulators. Because Dolphin's development began in this era, Dolphin supported Action Replay codes before it supported Wii games.
However, cheat systems are still just a way to edit memory. It didn't take long for emulator users to figure out that they could use cheat systems for far more than just cheating at video games. They could use cheats to change the game itself. Widescreen aspect ratio codes, anti-invert stick codes, bloom removal codes - most of the "cheats" being developed today aren't for cheating at all, but to adjust games to better fit modern sensibilities, add quality of life changes, or improve accessibility.
When RetroAchievement support in Dolphin launched late last year, cheats and many other features were disabled whenever RetroAchievements' hardcore mode was active. The leaderboard is for those that take achievements seriously and want a record of their accomplishments, so cheats could trivialize their efforts. But once RetroAchievement support was merged, those same overachievers pleaded with RA staff for limited cheat support in hardcore mode. Cheats remain the primary way to patch unfortunate game behaviors and add quality of life improvements, and the hardcore community wanted to be able to utilize those kinds of cheats while climbing the leaderboard.
After some deliberation within the RetroAchievements staff, the conclusion was an allowlist. Select and specific cheat codes are now able to be used in RetroAchievements' hardcore mode. Most of them are widescreen aspect ratio codes, but there are other changes as well, such as unlocking the C-Stick to smash feature in single player Super Smash Bros. Melee modes, or codes to fix game issues like freezes and bugs. Now overachievers can enjoy the thrills of Gotta Get 'Em All in the comfort of 16:9.
As part of this effort, LillyJadeKatrin went through our wiki looking for cheat codes, then spent hours adding hundreds of new cheats to Dolphin's built in cheat code database. Everyone benefits from this, whether achievement hunting or not!
Read the complete release notes.
Previous Release Notes:
Dolphin 2412 is here and we've got the details for what's new in the latest release. The biggest thing to note is that there's a lot of polishing to help make playing games a little more pleasant. Several key fixes to Dolphin's HLE audio helps bring a few more games toward audio perfection, and adjustments to Dolphin's CPU <-> GPU syncing reduces the number of harmless, but annoying, popup errors that happen in certain games.
That isn't to say there aren't any titles seeing significant improvements. LIT (School of Darkness) had a unique problem that exposed yet another unemulated hardware behavior. And if you're looking for a deep dive into problematic behavior in a game? We have one of those as well. Eternal Darkness has been a thorn in our side the past couple of months and required some special attention to get working again in time for this release.
All of the changes below are available in Release 2412.
2409-17 - DSP-HLE: Fix Low Pass/Biquad Clipping by Tilka
Tilka has been perfecting DSP-HLE over the last few years. A majority of their changes have been minor and fix subtle effects that most users won't notice unless they've recently played the game on console with a high-end sound system. In the last progress report, we covered their implementation of the Zelda microcode's low-pass and biquad filters, but we didn't mention that Tilka also took the time to implement the biquad filter in the AX microcode! Doing so fixed an issue in I SPY: Spooky Mansion where the wind was too loud.
Unfortunately, it also started causing issues in Need for Speed: Nitro's audio.
Thankfully, the issue was found relatively quickly after it was reported. The implementation of the filters didn't take into account that the real AX microcode was using the DSP's set40 (40-bit sign extension) mode, which caused some calculations to be incorrect. After fixing an off-by-one error and adding some clamping, Need for Speed: Nitro's issues were resolved.
Previous Release Notes:
All of the changes below are available in Release 2409.
5.0-21462 - Windows: Remove rounded corners on emulation render window by Filoppi
When Windows 11 released in late 2021, it brought the first major visual overhaul to Windows since Windows Phone from 2010. Gone were the sharp edges, bold colours, and dense squares of the Live Tile era, and in their place were soft tones, spacious design, and friendly round edges.
However, as part of this new aesthetic, Windows 11 applies round edges everywhere, even to game windows! Pixels that your computer spent your hard-earned money rendering are now hidden in windowed mode by default.
Read the complete release notes here.
Previous Release Notes:
On the 24th of June, 2016, Dolphin 5.0 was released. The product of a long and hard transition period, the fundamental inaccuracies that plagued Dolphin for over a decade had successfully been undone, and Dolphin was now free of its burdens to swim forward into a new era of accuracy and performance.
Eight years have passed since that great release, and we have seen the dividends of that effort time and time again. Dolphin has seen constant updates, with new features and enhancements coming side by side with bug fixes and stability improvements. Users are now able to upgrade without fear, knowing that even in the unlikely event of a bug it will be fixed within hours. And of the thousands of titles that Dolphin can run, the number that do not function can now be counted on one hand!
All of this was achieved without a new release. In fact, Dolphin has been in the 5.0 era longer than any other, and with almost twenty-two thousand commits over the past eight years, the 5.0 era now makes up over half of Dolphin's entire commit history! But users haven't forgotten our past releases. They have been waiting for years, patiently anticipating when our next release may arrive.
That wait ends today.
However, the purpose of our old stable builds is now no longer relevant to Dolphin Emulator. We no longer need a benchmark to compare against or an anchor to ground us. We have grown beyond them. So in leaving the 5.0 era behind, we are also leaving behind that release scheme and all it offered. In exchange, we're not just giving you a release today, but also a commitment to continuous releases from now on. The long drought of Dolphin releases is no more and will never happen again!
Welcome to a new era of Dolphin Emulator - the Release Era!
Announcement
We are pleased to announce that Dolphin has adopted a rolling release cycle! Building upon our highly successful "beta builds", we will have a release every few months, with a Progress Report launched alongside as a changelog. These are proper release builds however, with the full infrastructure and support that comes with them. They are tagged as releases in Git, allowing our distribution partners to properly support us and our users. Our new releases can receive hotfixes, so if any issues arises we can release small updates instead of a full on new release. And, of course, every release will advance Dolphin's version number.
However, our new releases are fundamentally different from our prior releases, so we didn't want to just add a number to our last release. As such, we are abandoning the X.0 release numbering and moving to a new date-based versioning scheme!
Accompanying this article is our first rolling release - Dolphin 2407! This release is available for download immediately, for Windows x86-64, Windows ARM64, macOS, and Android from our official website: dolphin-emu.org.
Here are the details of the new rolling release scheme:
- The first two digits are the year, and the second two are the month. 2407 codifies a release from July 2024.
- All subsequent dev builds after a release will be numbers added on to it. For example, 144 commits after 2409 would result in dev build 2409-144.
- Our next release will be 240X. Yes, it will be in just a few months from now!
- Hotfix releases will have the addition of a suffix. For example, a single hotfix to Dolphin 2409 would be "Dolphin 2409a".
- Beta builds are being replaced by releases. All users in the beta update track will be moved to the new release track.
A New Look!
To herald and symbolize this new era, we also have a new logo! MayImilae, the designer of our previous logo and long term Dolphin blog writer and contributor, has refreshed our logo for the modern day!
