Dolphin Progress Report: Release 2606

Welcome to the Progress Report for Dolphin Release 2606. We usually prefer to launch toward the beginning of the month, but a slew of important, large, and technically challenging changes had us working overtime. Strap in, because we have a lot to cover! For April Fool's we teased that Dolphin now had support for the Game Boy Player, but the joke was that it was real! We'll detail exactly how it happened and the challenges that surrounded getting the emulated hardware and software working together. The last unplayable Triforce game, The Key of Avalon, no longer has that title! It is now functional in Dolphin, supporting up to five instances of the emulator together for 4 player (and a server) action. And Graphics Mods quietly fixed a major visual issue at high resolution that has plagued many flagship games for Dolphin's entire existence! All of that and more in this Dolphin Progress Re- ✱ knock knock knock ✱ Huh, someone's at the door. Could you get that? That's right! Since the last Dolphin Progress Report, RetroAchievements support has come to Wii games. You can now waggle your way up the leaderboard! We'll go over some statistics of the launch in a section down below, which you can reach with this handy link! Without further ado, let's get to the Notable Changes for Dolphin 2606! Notable Changes¶ All changes below are available in Release 2606. 2603-175 - HW: Game Boy Player Support by Billiard and endrift¶ The Game Boy family of handhelds are legends of a bygone era. Under the crushing weight of incredibly primitive technology, Nintendo chose to focus on portability and great games rather than pushing the latest and greatest hardware. They were right. The Game Boy line outsold every single competitor they ever faced! However, as great games accumulated on the platform, demand began to build for a way to play them on nicer, larger, lit screens. Nintendo eventually answered it with the Super Game Boy for the Super Famicom/Super Nintendo, and its Advance'd successor, the Game Boy Player for the Nintendo GameCube. These devices were literally Game Boys without a screen that plugged into a home console, transmitting audio and video to the host console and receiving input from its controller.

Software running on the host console would handle interfacing between the two systems and sometimes could add additional features if a game supported it. We imagine that Nintendo chose to use actual Game Boy hardware because of the difficulty of making a general-purpose software emulator. The perfect demonstration of this is a third-party competitor to the Game Boy Player, the Advance Game Port, which attempted just that! By creating a Game Boy Advance emulator, Datel was able to ship a lower cost way to play GBA games on a GameCube. It was very ahead of its time, but also very flawed. Nintendo showed that they could do emulation better on a per-game basis with titles like Pokémon Box, but they didn't see it as a plausible solution for the entire library. By shipping actual GBA hardware, the Game Boy Player was able to bypass all performance and compatibility concerns. Being a peripheral for the GameCube, emulating the Game Boy Player has always been in the back of our minds. There was even an feature request for it for over 16 years! But it languished on the issue tracker and became the oldest open issue for one simple reason: emulating the Game Boy Player would essentially mean emulating a Game Boy Advance (which potentially involves making a new GBA emulator from scratch) and how it communicates to the GameCube. There was no way anyone would be willing to volunteer the gargantuan effort necessary just for an amusing curiosity. Ultimately, the feature request was accepted, but there was really no path forward for it back then. We just recommended that users use one of the many available GB/GBC/GBA emulators already available, and figured that would be the end of it. They could even use the Advance Game Port in Dolphin if they really needed to run GBA games in Dolphin, as that peripheral has been partially supported since the 4.0 era. For the longest time, the feature request was completely dormant, until around five years ago. Support for the Game Boy Player became a bit more realistic when mGBA was integrated into Dolphin. It was the ultimate solution to emulating the Game Boy Advance connectivity features found in some GameCube games, fixing all of the synchronization and communication issues that had plagued the feature for years in one fell swoop. With this, the tables had turned on Game Boy Player emulation. Couldn't we just use the integrated mGBA to emulate the Game Boy Player hardware?

The answer was yes, and endrift got to work on a Game Boy Player implementation in Dolphin! However, for various reasons, the project stalled out. And so it sat as years went by, forgotten by everyone... except the users who would occasionally ask us why we teased it as coming soon at the end of the integrated mGBA article. Oops. Fast forward to 2026, and in the waning days of March, Billiard stumbled upon endrift's mostly-finished Game Boy Player project, and had an idea. A wonderful, awful idea: wouldn't it be funny to complete the work and add Game Boy Player support to Dolphin on April Fools' Day? With just days until the first of April, the plan rapidly unfurled and developers pounced on the code, rushing to polish things up for a quick pull request, review, test, and merge. Game Boy Player support ended up being merged a few hours into April Fools' Day. Post by @dolphin@dolphin-emu.org View on Mastodon The final part of the gag was this image, which we posted without explanation on our social media and Discord on the first day of April. Watching the confusion and disbelief give way to excitement was delightful. While we did a lot of testing to make sure Game Boy Player support was working, when legendary GameCube sage extrems started typing in our developer chat shortly after the pull request was merged, we knew we had !#@%ed up. Not only are they a living reference book for GameCube hardware, they are also the author of the definitive Game Boy Player homebrew software, Game Boy Interface (GBI). And Game Boy Interface exposed a lot of problems in Dolphin's Game Boy Player implementation. If you don't have a headache, this will fix that for you.Click/tap to play, file has audio How did we miss this? During the rush to polish and test the code, we primarily used the official Game Boy Player Start-Up Disc. That software heavily processes everything from the Game Boy Advance hardware, crushing its video contrast and applying filters to its audio. The processing was so heavy that the audio issues went unnoticed during our rushed testing - the audio sounded a little muddy rather than piercing.

In all honesty, Game Boy Player support really should have gone through a lengthy review process to allow people like endrift and extrems to test and comment heavily on the code and implementation. But if we did that, it probably would have just sat around in our open pull requests and ended up bitrotting again. By pushing things straight to production, we forced ourselves into the position of needing to fix the issues fast. And after at least a few very minor fixes and improvements, the situation wasn't nearly as dire. All of that work has paid off. As Game Boy Player support enters a Dolphin release and sees wider availability, we think it is ready. Ahh, no more ear bleeding.Click/tap to play, file has audio To use the Game Boy Player in Dolphin, simply load a Game Boy game into the Game Boy Player via the "Game Boy Player ROM" setting in our GUI, then run the Game Boy Player Start-Up disc or Game Boy Interface. That's it! And that's all there is to it. Dolphin will automatically attach the Game Boy Player hardware when necessary through INI settings. If desired, users can manually attach the emulated Game Boy Player by adding HSPDevice = 2 under [Core] in Dolphin.ini or a GameINI. This should do nothing to actual GameCube games though. ...Probably. Note: For importing/exporting saves from other Game Boy emulators, the Game Boy Player technically counts as GBA slot 5 in Dolphin (after the 4 Integrated GBAs) and will load saves that have "-5" appended to them. Now, we need to take a moment to go over the limitations of our Game Boy Player support. Dolphin is not a Game Boy emulator; we emulate the GameCube, Wii, and Triforce. Our integrated GBA is only there to support things that a GameCube can do, such as connecting a Game Boy Advance to the controller port in supported games, or attaching a Game Boy hardware peripheral and funneling its audio and video to a large screen. As such, we are not trying to replicate every part of the Game Boy experience. We are only trying to recreate the Game Boy Player experience specifically, along with all of its quirks. Game Boy Player support in Dolphin should be considered a curiosity rather than the premier way to run these handheld games in an emulator.

Not only does Dolphin have much higher system requirements, but dedicated Game Boy emulators will provide a superior experience in almost every way, with better fitting UIs and support for many more Game Boy features. They also don't need additional software to use their Game Boy hardware. But if you have a Game Boy Player and Start-Up Disc lying around and desire some nostalgic fun, or want to explore the Game Boy Player experience with GBI in Dolphin, or if you just really need those sweet borders (we get it), Dolphin's Game Boy Player emulation is for you. Most importantly, you can finally play Pokémon in Dolphin Emulator.Click/tap to play, file has audio 2603-37 and 2603-100 - Triforce: Implement Necessary Hardware for The Key of Avalon by Billiard and Crediar¶ The Key of Avalon games on the Triforce represent an incredible emulation challenge unlike anything else that Dolphin has encountered before. And it's not because the game itself is difficult to run; at its core, it's a relatively simple game to emulate. There's no crazy graphical effects, wacky CPU tricks, or any MMU manipulation. It's just a basic game. The problem we encountered was that this game is so rare that we were never able to actually get our hands on the cabinets, only the GD-ROMs that the games came on. And this is a pretty big problem, because the unique hardware was the whole point of the game - four satellite Triforces with touchscreens and card readers that communicated with a central Triforce connected to a large screen to allow for multiplayer trading card monster battling in full 3D! The biggest hurdle was the touchscreens inside the pedestals. They were completely foreign to anything we've ever seen, Triforce or GameCube! As it became increasingly clear that we may never get a chance to see the real hardware, we employed the tried and true strategy of "poke at it until you find something". It's not a particularly efficient way forward, but it was the only option available. Any signs of life moved us closer, and after a few weeks of throwing stuff at the wall, we eventually made a breakthrough. We had stumbled across the Elo SmartSet Data Protocol for touchscreens, which ended up being similar to the protocol the game actually uses.