Dolphin v3.5

On behalf of the Dolphin Emulator development team, I’m happy to announce the release of Dolphin 3.5. This release is exactly 18 months after the release of Dolphin 3.0 and is just in time for Christmas. This latest version of the emulator brings several new features as well as a lot of small improvements and compatibility fixes that include:

• Gamecube BBA support: Gamecube games supporting online mode using Nintendo’s BBA (ethernet adapter) can now be played online on Dolphin. This includes Mario Kart: Double Dash 8 players mode support, as well as Phantasy Star Online.

• Gamecube microphone support: The 6 Gamecube games using a microphone (Mario Party 5/6 for example) can now use your system configured microphone to get audio input.

• WBFS support: If you dumped your games as WBFS files in order to play your dumps on a real Wii, you can now use the same WBFS files on Dolphin. WBFS includes features such as compression and splitted files (to avoid the FAT32 4GB file size limit).

• Free replacement for the DSP LLE ROMs: DSP LLE normally requires you to dump ROMs from your real Wii. This free replacement, while working only with some Mario and Zelda games, removes this requirement.

• Wiimote support on OS X Mountain Lion: The latest version of Mac OS X brings several Bluetooth changes, breaking Wiimote support with Dolphin 3.0. Dolphin 3.5 supports real Wiimotes, including MotionPlus addon, on OS X 10.8.

• TAS and recording improvements: Read only mode, better determinism, more checks to avoid using wrong settings or wrong version of a game when playing back a movie, bongo recording support.

• FreeBSD support: Rather theoretical than anything else, but worth a note. OpenGL backend may or may not work for you.

• UI refinements: New wiimote configuration dialog, improvements to the game list sorting, minor changes to simplify usage.

• Wii disc integrity checking: Use Dolphin to check if your dumped Wii game is corrupted.

• Improvements to the custom textures feature: Improved stability, added support for custom mipmaps, removed texture size limit.

• Shader cache optimizations: Reduced stuttering to a point where Red Steel 2 got playable with full FPS.

• A lot of minor emulation fixes: Texture preloading implementation, better FIFO emulation, HLE audio fixes, more accurate DSI/FPU exceptions, …

You can download this new version from our downloads page: http://dolphin-emu.org/download/

With this release also comes a new website for Dolphin: http://dolphin-emu.org/. From now on, please avoid using and linking to the old Dolphin website (dolphin-emulator.com) as it is unofficial and not kept up to date. Read http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dol…ew-website for more information.

I would like to thank all the developers who contributed to this new release:

• Andrew de los Reyes
• Braden
• calc84maniac
• degasus
• Glenn “glennrics” Rice
• Jordan “Billiard” Woyak
• kostamarino
• LPFaint99
• Maarten “mth” ter Huurne
• marcosvitali
• Marko Pusljar
• Matthew Parlane
• neobrain
• nitsuja
• Pierre “delroth” Bourdon
• rodolfoosvaldobogado
• rog
• Ryan Houdek
• Scott Moreau
• Shawn “shuffle2” Hoffman
• skidau
• sktsqrl

While Dolphin 3.5 is a great step forward, a lot of features are still missing and emulation is still not perfect. The development team is already working towards the next major version of the emulator: Dolphin 4.0. Some of the planned features include a complete rewrite of the HLE audio emulation (bringing it close to LLE accuracy while keeping it fast), basic GLES and Android support, a rework of the user interface, custom 3D models support, Wii online play support, USB emulation support, and obviously more compatibility fixes.

Merry christmas to you all, and have fun with Dolphin 3.5!