[HN Gopher] Dolphin Emulator Progress Report: May, June, and Jul...
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Dolphin Emulator Progress Report: May, June, and July 2023
Author : thepbone
Score : 99 points
Date : 2023-08-13 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dolphin-emu.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dolphin-emu.org)
| DylanSp wrote:
| For anyone curious about the "Disney Trio of Destruction", that's
| Disney Infinity, Cars 2, and Toy Story 3 (all for the Wii) which
| have pretty subpar performance on Dolphin. https://dolphin-
| emu.org/blog/2022/05/17/dolphin-progress-rep... has some more
| info.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| As eager as people are to get the Disney Trio to work, thank
| god it's only forgettable shovelware and not something actually
| important like Mario Galaxy.
| genman wrote:
| [dead]
| matsemann wrote:
| Android allows apps to use an arbitrary GPU driver? How does that
| work?
|
| (I didn't even know Dolphin existed for Android, nothing on the
| web page points to that. Not that I've ever even used Dolphin,
| they just have so good release notes that I always check them)
| hrydgard wrote:
| Only the user mode part of the driver is replaced, the kernel
| interface is actually shared between the closed source and the
| open source driver. So it's just loaded like a DLL/.so and
| hooked up to the API.
| sylware wrote:
| android is linux, and linux kernel interface is the drm
| (Direct Rendering Manager).
|
| BTW, the NVIDIA opensource vulkan driver was dropped in
| mesa...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| This is only possible because of a very specific quirk of
| Linux: the interface between the kernel and user mode halves
| of the GPU driver is considered as sacrosanct as normal Linux
| syscalls[0]. If you want to get a graphics card driver in
| kernel you have to get your driver's UAPI approved by the
| kernel maintainers because it will be supported in Linux
| until the end of time.
|
| No other operating system does it this way, nor will this
| work on Nvidia proprietary drivers. Everywhere else, the
| point of demarcation for graphics is OpenGL, DirectX, Metal,
| or Vulkan entrypoints in userspace. To be clear, there IS a
| UAPI here too - hardware isolation demands it - but it breaks
| constantly and nobody bats an eye. If you were willing to
| deal with that fragility, you could do the same trick on
| Windows or macOS.
|
| [0] For those unaware, Linux has a very explicit policy of
| never breaking userspace. That means no ABI changes
| whatsoever.
| zirgs wrote:
| > Linux has a very explicit policy of never breaking
| userspace.
|
| And when someone tries to do it - Linus gets very angry.
| https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
| ftaghn wrote:
| > For those unaware, Linux has a very explicit policy of
| never breaking userspace
|
| But has no qualm with constantly refactoring the kernel
| side of the coin for the most minor of reasons, which
| causes endless trouble when it comes to supporting out of
| tree drivers and is the true reason why Android will never
| be able to provide long term support. SOC manufacturers are
| not interested in the churn involved in updating their
| drivers to support the newer kernels that come with new
| android versions. Most often, it's because they want to
| keep their driver proprietary, but it is not the only
| reason, there is a cold hard truth about the nature of the
| market: new phones are released at a high cadence, while
| the process of mainlining a driver into upstream linux
| kernel is arduous, depending on the attitudes of kernel
| maintainers, truly painful, and no company out there could
| see any value in waiting for this process to end before
| releasing their hardware onto the market. Since they're
| already going to make it out of tree and release it as is,
| why would they bother? a year later, they'll repeat this
| process again, and again. Then Android updates, and the
| devices are obsoleted.
|
| On the other hand, you can install the latest GPU driver on
| Windows 10 just fine, and it is the same driver as the one
| on 11. Windows doesn't constantly break your not-
| maintained-by-microsoft drivers with newer versions of
| their kernel.
| TillE wrote:
| Game console emulators are surprisingly popular on Android.
| Even with a bluetooth controller, it seems like a terrible
| experience with a tiny screen that's even tinier if you're
| playing retro games with a 4:3 aspect ratio.
| rodgerd wrote:
| I mean we played the originals on screens where 14-21" TVs
| were very normal for people.
| andrepd wrote:
| >tiny screen
|
| I wish! Have you seen phones nowadays? They're bigger than
| tablets were in 2014!
| ls612 wrote:
| Yuzu has a similar feature on their android release. I bet
| that's the big reason why these emulators are on android and
| not iOS, the graphics hardware on modern iPhones is certainly
| capable.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Dolphin has had a native Metal renderer for a bit now,
| there's no graphics driver issues conceptually.
|
| DolphinIOS exists though it's a fork and requires somewhat
| unfriendly steps to get installed just due to iOS as a
| platform.
| matsemann wrote:
| I'd guess missing the ability to sideload is also a huge
| factor. If Google doesn't allow Dolphin, they can use a
| different store or distribute the apk themselves. If Apple
| doesn't allow Dolphin, all the effort is in vain.
|
| Walled gardens, eh?
| [deleted]
| mdwalters wrote:
| > If Apple doesn't allow Dolphin, all the effort is in
| vain.
|
| With a jailbreaked iPhone device, you can possibly install
| Dolphin through a separate package manager (Cydia, Sileo,
| etc.)
| mod50ack wrote:
| Yes, but iPhones are not uniformly jailbreakable, and
| restricting yourself to a niche like that makes it harder
| to get people in (as users or as developers). You've
| essentially moved from a popular platform (iOS) to a very
| niche one ( _jailbroken_ iOS).
| echelon wrote:
| We should use a term like _liberated_ rather than _jail_
| broken. The phrasing leads to a conclusion about the
| behavior which isn't correct.
| ozarker wrote:
| A Dolphin build for iOS exists and works well. You just have
| to jump through a bunch of hoops to sideload it. See
| https://altstore.io/
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Does this not require a Jailbreak anymore? I thought you
| needed a kernel exploit in order to enable JIT (without
| which Dolphin would be terribly slow).
| chrnola wrote:
| Correct. No jailbreak required!
|
| The caveat for enabling JIT support is you have to
| "attach a debugger" first. AltServer automates this
| process...provided your iOS device can communicate with
| it when launching the app.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Ew, that sounds annoying, but also very clever, thanks
| for explaining!
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(page generated 2023-08-13 23:00 UTC)