Dolphin Manual

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS POST THIS FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION AND I WILL FIND YOU AND STRANGLE YOU! - Your friendly neighborhood wiki editor, MaJoR

This is an early version of the new Dolphin Manual, the revised port and completion of the manual Shonumi has created. The plan is to create a guide here that can be easily ported into a PDF document to be included in the 4.0 release. That way, the wiki can just cater to the latest development version, and the official release will have its own manual available for everyone that we don't have to maintain. Then, at every new release, we just polish this guide up and we have another PDF guide.

See the talk page for notes and a TODO list, or to talk about it. This is a huge undertaking, so please give any advice you may have.

Getting Started
Before running Dolphin, users should consider the following:

Operating System
Dolphin will work on Windows, Linux, and OS X environments. For Windows, anything from XP and up will handle the emulator, preferably a 64bit version (post Vista). For OS X, anything from Lion (10.7) and up will do the job. Given the sheer number of available Linux distros, Linux users cannot rely on a specific minimum version of their OS. For the best results, the distro's packages, libraries, and kernel should be relatively up-to-date.

Hardware
The bare minimum for Dolphin to work is the following. All modern systems should have these specifications.
 * A CPU that supports SSE2
 * A GPU that supports Pixel Shader 3.0 for D3D9 and D3D11, or OGL3 for OpenGL
 * 2GB of Ram

Satisfying these requirements does not necessarily mean Dolphin will run smoothly. The nature of emulation is that some games are more demanding than others. “Light” and do not take much power to run, for example, Crazy Taxi. “Demanding” games need a very strong machine that may have to be overclocked, for example The Last Story or Metroid Prime. Consequently, GameCube games are not necessarily any easier to run than Wii games.

Users should ask questions about their hardware on the Dolphin forums or check the Dolphin Wiki to see the results other systems had for specific games.

Additional Software
Windows users must install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable (SP1) and the DirectX End-User Runtime. The Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions; choose according to your operating system. Generally for any OS, keeping drivers up-to-date is the best practice. Linux users have more extensive software requirements (see Section 2.1).

Games
Users “dump” or “rip” their Gamecube and Wii discs to get an exact 1:1 copy of the game data. The best method is to use homebrew software on a hacked Wii. For more information, see Ripping Game Discs.

Obtaining the Dolphin Emulator
For users of Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu, the main Dolphin website provides both the latest builds and the last stable release online at http://www.dolphin-emu.org/download. All OS X builds come as .dmg files for easy installation. Windows users must choose between x86 (32-bit) and x64 (64-bit) versions according to their operating system. The archives files come in the 7z format, so an appropriate program such as 7-zip or PeaZip is necessary to extract Dolphin.

Please note that the developmental versions of Dolphin represent the very latest work added to the emulator. Every time a developer commits changes to Dolphin, a build-bot automatically compiles the source code. While these versions provide the most recent improvements, they may not always be stable.

Non-Ubuntu Linux users have to compile the source code themselves or rely on the repositories set up for their specific distros in order to obtain Dolphin. See Building Dolphin on Linux for instructions.