It was heartwarming to see long-time users able to play Four Swords Adventures with their kids or friends across the world. In contrast to that narrative, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to some of the features added the last few months, including heartfelt reactions from users, make all of the challenges and struggles so much easier.Īs we drift further from the heyday of the GameCube and Wii, we've been seeing a greater impact not only on the past generations of gamers, but the current one. There's a lot of negativity and questions around the merit and purpose of emulation. So, without further delay, let's get started with the August Progress Report! Enjoy.Įmulation is often seen as this suspect gray area of gaming that is tolerated but always on the edge. All of these contributions, even if it's not code, are appreciated and help make Dolphin what it is today. They went on difficult debugging adventures, caught small issues that would be invisible to anyone who wasn't extremely familiar with the game, and even came up with patches to make games friendlier to emulator enhancements. In this Progress Report, the gaming communities were the direct catalyst to many of the changes. However, it's important to state that our relationship with gaming communities is mutual, and without the help of players and fans, there's no way we could handle maintaining a library of thousands of games. Sometimes it's simply more convenient to use an emulator that runs on your desktop, tablet, or phone rather than to dig out and hook up the original console every time you want to play one of your favorite games. Emulators are an important part of many classic game communities and give players access to features like netplay multiplayer, modding, and savestates, while also opening up the doors to enhancements not possible on console. You can find more details about the early tests with Dolphin Emulator on M1 Macs here.Many gaming communities over the years have reached out to thank emulator developers for their efforts.
#Gamecube emulator mac not dolphin pro#
And the poor Intel MacBook Pro just can’t compare.įor now, the native version of Dolphin Emulator app for M1 is only available as a developer release. Compared to an absolute monstrosity of a Desktop PC, it uses less than 1/10th of the energy while providing ~65% of the performance. The efficiency is almost literally off the chart. We were so impressed, we decided to make a second graph to express it.
It absolutely obliterates a two and a half year old Intel MacBook Pro that was over three times its price all while keeping within ARM’s reach of a powerful desktop computer. There’s no denying it macOS M1 hardware kicks some serious ass. As shown by developers, the emulator on M1 can render 8.94 frames with one watt of power, while the Intel MacBook Pro renders 1.38 frames per watt. However, what is even more impressive is the energy efficiency of the ARM architecture. Still, the results were better than on most Intel Macs. Things are not yet perfect, as there are still some things to be implemented in the ARM version of Dolphin. Using Super Smash Bros once again as an example, the game runs at 120 fps with Dolphin’s native version on the M1 Mac. In other games like Star Wars Rogue Squadron II, the performance difference was even more noticeable: only 16 fps on the Intel MacBook Pro versus 49 fps on the M1 Mac with Rosetta 2.īut what about running the emulator natively? Since Dolphin Emulator relies on JIT compilation, recompiling it for the M1 and the 64-bit ARM architecture was much more complicated - but not impossible. Most games ran well and the overall performance was better than on a 2018 MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7 processor.ĭolphin on the Intel MacBook Pro can run Super Smash Bros at 71 fps, while the M1 Mac runs the same game at 79 fps. First, the team has already managed to run multiple games using Dolphin Emulator on M1 Macs with only the Rosetta 2 translation layer, which lets users run apps compiled for Intel processors on the Apple Silicon platform.Įven with the fact that apps running through the Rosetta 2 do not reach the maximum performance provided by the M1 chip, the results were quite impressive. Now early tests shared by Dolphin’s developers show that it performs twice as fast on M1 when compared to some Intel Macs.Įmulating games from older consoles like GameCube and Wii may seem easy, but the process is quite complex and requires a capable hardware.
Since the introduction of the first Macs with M1 last year, the team behind Dolphin - which is a popular Nintendo GameCube and Wii emulator - has been working on support for M1 Macs. Apple’s M1 chip has been around for a while now, and at this point we all know that it performs incredibly well in different situations.