The Dolphin emulator has been one of my favourite emulators for so many years now. It also seemed to survive Nintendo’s recent attempt to cull any emu off the face of the earth last year and long may it continue.
Towards the end of last year Dolphin moved to a monthly update cycle and the March release brings with it some major changes and enhancements – finally we can now set custom graphical settings directly from the game properties page, meaning we no longer need to mess around and making it easy for less advanced users to squeeze a little bit more performance out of their games library.
There is plenty more in this 2503 update, and you can get deep into everything by reading the official blog post, but for ease of use let’s sumerise the best bits for you here.
Main Dolphin changes – version 2503
Back in July, Dolphin added RetroAchievements support but disabled cheats to stop people claiming kudos they did not deserve. This didn’t please everybody as certain “cheats” that were quality of life improvements were also blocked. Now, this version adds a whitelist which will enable you to activate certain cheats in RA’s Hardcore Mode. Don’t expect any Infinite Lives jive here, it is mainly cheats to squash bugs and add widescreen modes, but it is still very welcome.
Another new feature allows you to track game playing time, in the same way that something like your Steam library does. You can now see exactly how long you have spent playing obscure JRPGs. Excellent news.
The other big addition here is a great deal of work has been put into the input mapping, or at least the look and feel of it. One of the issues you could always level at Dolphin was that it was not always super clear that you had added your keybinds and they had worked. This now changes and you will see (on the desktop version at least) something you would probably be more used to it from things like Windows controller mapping.
If you are looking for some great GameCube games to play within Dolphin, why not check out the lists below?
