[HN Gopher] Dolphin Progress Release 2603
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Dolphin Progress Release 2603
Author : BitPirate
Score : 286 points
Date : 2026-03-12 09:23 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dolphin-emu.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dolphin-emu.org)
| DonThomasitos wrote:
| Fantastic! I always wonder if the original console devs would be
| able to provide bonus insight.
| pjc50 wrote:
| If they're still working for the same employer (quite possible
| with Nintendo), they may still be under NDA.
| eleveriven wrote:
| I imagine some of the original devs would be surprised anyone
| is still digging into their work at this level of detail 20+
| years later
| love2read wrote:
| I really enjoy how clearly excited the author is about what they
| wrote here.
| jofzar wrote:
| JMC is the goat, I had the pleasure of reporting melee netplay
| bugs with him and he is just so Inquisitive and interested in
| everything.
| bpierre wrote:
| Do they accept donations? I couldn't find anything on the
| website.
| jsheard wrote:
| They don't: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-
| donations?pid=...
| Meneth wrote:
| Wise.
|
| I've seen many a fine volonteer project become enshittified
| because they started optimizing for financial income rather
| than for having fun.
| agoodusername63 wrote:
| It's also a smart legal strategy.
|
| Nintendo's lawsuits they won against emulator projects in
| the past had donation systems as one of, if not the sole
| main point they drove to win the case.
| flykespice wrote:
| Yep like yuzu did monetize their emulator, it didn't help
| that they were also shipping cracked on their discord
| server
| favorited wrote:
| From a practical perspective, they "won" in their recent
| attacks on emulation by shutting big projects down, but
| we can't know what would have happened at trial because
| they never got that far.
|
| NoA sued the Yuzu devs and settled out of court, with the
| devs paying $2.4 million and shutting down the Yuzu and
| Citra projects. The $2.4 million was noted as being a
| reasonable estimate of what Nintendo's lawyers would have
| billed if the case went to trial, not a reflection of
| Yuzu's collection of donations.
|
| NoA used some combination of carrot-and-stick to get the
| Ryujinx developers to shut that project down as well, but
| we won't know what that combination was because they
| never filed a lawsuit, so there are no public records,
| and there was likely an NDA.
| MBCook wrote:
| I suspect you would quickly attract a lot of the wrong kind
| of "developers" the moment a financial reward appeared.
| Especially now that it's so easy to use AI to make
| something that looks slightly plausible.
|
| Although I suspect the other sibling comment is the real
| reason.
| ralusek wrote:
| What is the most reliable place for ROMs these days? Is there any
| sort of checksum that can accompany them to ensure safety? While
| I trust Dolphin, I don't trust most ROMs.
| lmz wrote:
| Now there's an interesting challenge. A ROM that does a VM
| breakout and runs a command on the host.
| jsheard wrote:
| It's been done, the ZSNES and Project64 emulators have both
| had exploits which allowed a malicious ROM to run arbitrary
| code on the host. ZSNES is written mostly in assembly so that
| was kinda asking for trouble though.
| mfjordvald wrote:
| There's tons of options, no-intro, redump, tosec, mame are all
| doing DAT files with file checksums.
|
| That said, ROMs are basically never a malware vector as they
| have to exploit an issue in the emulators themselves and
| historically that hasn't really been seen. Typically malware
| related to roms happens with files included in the zip archives
| or by sites offering "downloaders" with embedded malware.
| anthk wrote:
| gstreamer, 6502 code from a NES music decoder, and maybe c64
| SIDs would exploit it too.
| joenot443 wrote:
| In all my years of emulation, I've never come across a
| malicious ROM for a major console.
|
| Dolphin runs its own VM. Obviously anything is possible, but
| developing some kind of breakout-ROM which would infect the
| host machine is just way more engineering than I could imagine
| ever being worth it. The vector is just too complex, and the
| target (nerds downloading retro games) just isn't worth the
| squeeze.
|
| Archive.org actually hosts a good chunk of the major Gamecube
| ROMs. Good luck!
| 0x0 wrote:
| The breakout engineering to exploit Dolphin has already
| happened, see for example:
|
| * https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2016/11/13/exploiting-
| dolphin...
|
| * https://gist.github.com/hthh/502ae16db55612f64d3966769a154c
| 3...
|
| * https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/4447
| joenot443 wrote:
| Woah! This I was not aware of - that's really cool
| actually. Hats off to u/dougall.
| zeta0134 wrote:
| I've had pretty good success with CleanRip
| https://wiibrew.org/wiki/CleanRip#Wii_DAT_download for
| acquiring ROM files. With it, I was able to backup my entire
| personal collection with minimal fuss, and can now enjoy that
| collection in HD with Dolphin's various enhancements.
|
| For verification you generally want the Redump database, which
| has checksums for most disc-based console releases.
| Unfortunately they seem to be offline at the moment, or I'd
| share a canonical link. Look around for that.
| MurkyLabs wrote:
| I always love reading the dolphin progress reports. They do a
| good job of explaining how things work and parsing it out into
| something easy to understand
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Right? I started reading them before I became a programmer. I
| think they helped me learn how to think about the inner
| workings of programs
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think they're the best status reports I've seen anywhere.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Agreed. They've been consistently high quality for the 12
| years they've been put out at this point. I'm glad they
| stopped trying to force them into the "monthly update" mold
| because so many ended up being like "April/May/June/July
| Update!"
| eleveriven wrote:
| What stands out to me is that they explain not just what
| changed, but why it was hard in the first place
| someperson wrote:
| I think the lede is somewhat being buried here.
|
| Dolphin is bringing back support for the Triforce arcade cabinet
| that was jointly developed by Nintendo, Sega and Namco that was
| dropped by Dolphin in 2016.
|
| Notably games includes F-Zero AX (not to be confused with F-Zero
| GX on Gamecube) and Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 and 2.
|
| This is pretty big!
|
| https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2026/02/16/rise-of-the-triforce...
| jtvjan wrote:
| There was a thread on it a few weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040524
|
| Though I don't know if you can count it as a "buried lede" if
| the first paragraph of the article is dedicated to it, with a
| big clickable banner, haha!
| bspammer wrote:
| > All of this just to let Dolphin play online with real Wii
| consoles in a game whose official servers are since long dead and
| whose replacement servers have a peak of only 15 concurrent
| online players.
|
| Knowing there's people out that who have such absurd levels of
| dedication makes me so happy.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Imagine what humanity could achieve if we worked together. If
| robots/AI work out and we do have 100% spare time then you'd
| hope there would be more of this sort of thing.
|
| Such a shame that it'll probably just mean more inequality, at
| least in the short term.
| marklar423 wrote:
| In the discussion of the Triforce arcade compatibility, there's
| some discussion of "IC Card" support needing to be implemented,
| and doing so unlocking a lot of missing functionality.
|
| I think this is referring to the Japanese rail payment cards? I
| know you can use them on things like vending machines, but from
| the article it seems like the Triforce cabinets let you save game
| progress on them too, which would be a great feature I've never
| seen in US arcades.
| someperson wrote:
| > Triforce games can support two types of cards for saving:
| Magnetic Cards (magcards) and Integrated Circuit (IC) cards.
| Magcards are cheaper, fragile, and can only survive so many
| writes before failing. They have the added bonus of having a
| printable side, where the game can print a player's
| achievements and more. IC cards are more like old credit cards
| with a thicker plastic. They weren't printable, but were much
| sturdier.
|
| Source with photos: https://dolphin-
| emu.org/blog/2026/02/16/rise-of-the-triforce...
| marklar423 wrote:
| Cool! Thanks for the clarification.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| It's referring to memory cards. This is _the_ Triforce feature,
| almost every game on it uses cards for savegames. The arcades
| you 're thinking of almost certainly had a version of Mario
| Kart Arcade GP - you may just not have played it.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It exists in US arcades. It's a similar concept as an AIME card
| which you use to authenticate when playing maimai, chunithm,
| dance dance revolution, dance around, beat mania, etc. Triforce
| IC cards store data instead of just being for authentication.
| petterroea wrote:
| On the topic of Dolphin progress reports, one of the people who
| author them has written an interesting blog post on the state of
| open source emulators and the kind of community problems they
| deal with: https://emucross.com/rethinking-open-source/
|
| TL;DR if you open source a project prone to hype before you are
| established with a community, identity, and results to speak for,
| you risk entitled and uninformed users demanding more than you
| can deliver. Others may take your half-baked feature branches and
| release them (to fanfare from users who were able to use it with
| the exact one game it worked with), taking your credit.
|
| Running these projects ain't easy and the Dolphin team deserves a
| lot of credit for doing it with a level of professionalism I'm
| sure many in here don't even see at work. The social work
| involved in this kind of project should not be taken for granted
| either.
| rustyhancock wrote:
| I was going to say that I'm glad it sounds like trifoce support
| is in mainline now.
|
| Because some time ago I had multiple incompatible branches of
| Dolphin to support the games I played.
|
| I'm not sure it was a half baked triforce fork but it was
| definitely not as polished as the main branch
| petterroea wrote:
| As far as I know it is mostly more immature emulators that
| struggle with straight out "stolen work" - something tells me
| the triforce branch is more a matter of "let's get triforce
| to work and then we can get it working well with the main
| branch again afterwards"
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's got to be a major struggle maintaining motivation in the
| face of aggressive and ungrateful users. It's bad enough when
| they're giving you money, it must be much worse when they're
| not.
| kotaKat wrote:
| "... we've identified the touchscreen protocol as being similar
| to Elo's SmartSet Data Protocol..."
|
| Chuckled out loud at that one. Figures they went for an ol'
| reliable when they built the arcade cabinets for The Key of
| Avalon.
| eleveriven wrote:
| The most interesting part to me is how often emulator development
| turns into discovering that the original games were doing
| something deeply strange but completely intentional
| jonhohle wrote:
| I've been decompiling for the past (almost) two years, and it's
| fun to see the bugs, compiler quirks, programmer superstitions,
| things that coincidentally work because of compiler behavior
| not because of correctness, as well as the things modern
| tooling would have caught that 30-year old versions of GCC
| hadn't gotten around to yet.
|
| There were even things I thought I had to manually optimize in
| the early 2000s that the GCC optimizer was already taking care
| of in the mid-90s.
| WalterGR wrote:
| Have you written about your discoveries anywhere? They sound
| pretty interesting.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| How can you tell the difference between something manually
| optimized and something automatically optimized?
| Philpax wrote:
| There's not really an exact science to it, but manually-
| optimised code is usually more structured/systematic to
| make it easier for the human author to manage the
| dependencies and state across the board, while
| automatically-optimised code is free to arrange things
| however it would like.
|
| As an example of the kinds of optimisations that the best
| human programmers were doing before compilers took over,
| see Michael Abrash's Black Book:
| https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/index.html -
| you can intuit how a human might organise their code to
| make the most of these while still keeping it maintainable.
| anthk wrote:
| Heh. Today I found thanks to the 9front people that some GB
| games used carts' sram as 'swap'.
|
| games/gb didn't save the sram in the _emulator_ save files, so
| upon restoring the snapshot and saving in the _cartridge
| memory_ you got a mismatch. It got fixed really fast, the
| emulators are really simple plan9 C compared to anything else.
| suprstarrd wrote:
| I really thought this was talking about the year 2603 at a
| glance.
| landr0id wrote:
| > Thankfully, the game's community narrowed down the issue and
| eventually found that the fnmsubs CPU instruction was implemented
| incorrectly in Dolphin's JIT but worked correctly in our
| interpreter.
|
| Sounds like a good opportunity for differential fuzzing!
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(page generated 2026-03-12 23:00 UTC)