With the recent news of the Dolphin Emulator going open source and adding support for some Wii games, I just had to try it out. Not wanting to download some illegal Wii ISO’s off the Internet, I have ordered a special DVD-ROM for my workstation to rip some of my Wii games to test them out.
In the meantime I have connected my old GameCube up and using the ISO Loader/GameCube Ripping Server was able to rip a copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Luigi’s Mansion and Animal Crossing. Below are some screenshots of them. Enjoy!
As for the computer these were tested on, I am running an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU at 2.4GHz a core, 4GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 3600 XT graphic card. On The Legend of Zelda, during the opening credits I was able to achieve speeds of about 15-74 FPS. It jumped around a fair bit. On Luigi’s Mansion the opening screen came in at a ridiculous 385FPS and then dropped down to 15-30FPS during the opening screens. Animal Crossing started up and on the bottom of the screen I could see a tiny 1 pixel sliver of game play but the rest of the screen was overlaid with a giant black box so you couldn’t see what was going on at all.
Unfortunately game play on both titles that did boot was non-existent and there was no sound on any of the games. In game FPS on Zelda never got above 15FPS so while you could play it was way too slow. For Luigi’s mansion only showed the onscreen text but rendered none of the game play elements so you couldn’t play it even if you wanted too.
Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Luigi’s Mansion
Now that the Dolphin Emulator is open source hopefully GameCube games will actually become playable on it. As for Wii games, from what everyone is reporting if you’re lucky you can boot into a loading screen and the opening credits but at the moment that is all you can do since there is no way to emulate the Wii’s controller at the moment. Hopefully if all goes well some clever programmer out there will figure out a way to connect the Wii’s Bluetooth ‘wiimote’ to Dolphin.
Be on the lookout for more screenshots as I test more games!
Source: EmuTalk.net
Download: TehSkeen (x86 and x64)
SVN: Google Code