Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Super Smash Bros. Brawl, known in Japan as Dairantō Sumasshu Burazāzu Ekkusu (大乱闘スマッシュブラザーズX), often abbreviated as SSBB or simply as Brawl, is the third installment in the Super Smash Bros. series crossover fighting games, developed by an ad hoc development team consisting of Sora, Game Arts, and staff from other developers, and published by Nintendo for the Wii video game console.

Like its predecessors, the object of Brawl is to knock an opponent off the screen. It features a greatly expanded single-player mode known as The Subspace Emissary (SSE). This mode is a plot-driven, side-scrolling beat 'em up featuring FMV cut scenes and playable characters from the game. Like all Smash games, Brawl supports multiplayer battles with up to four combatants, but it is the first game of its franchise to feature online battles, via the Nintendo WiFi Connection.

Accessing "With Friends" menu Causes FPS Drop and AlphaRead Warnings
After connecting to the Nintendo WiFi Connection, when you enter into "Brawl", "Friend roster", "Team Multi-Man Brawl" or "Home-Run Contest" sub-menus the game will suddenly drop to 1-5 FPS and display "Src\PixelEngine.cpp:193 W[PE]: (r16) ALPHAREAD" errors in the Log. This is due to a known slow/problematic codepath, and can be avoided by enabling "Skip EFB access from CPU". This error only appears when interacting with Nintendo WiFi Connection menus. See.

Classic Mode Rectangle
After winning a stage in classic mode, the game is supposed to zoom in on the character, and then partition them off into a rectangle with the game stats around them. Depending on what backend and settings are used, the rectangle either shows nothing but a green box or shows a partial view of the character. Enabling Real XFB fixes the issue, but results in low resolution and distorted graphics.

Master Pieces
Prior to, attempting to load a Master Piece will freeze the emulator, showing nothing but a black screen with FPS 0, VPS 60, and Speed 100%. As of and later, Masterpieces will try to load but they will kick you back to the menu instantly. Attempting to use a cheatcode to disable the timer doesn't work since the masterpiece doesn't actually load. There is no solution at this time, but a fix is in development.

Saving Screenshots
With EFB to Texture, taking a screenshot with the in-game tools will no longer crash the game; but all that will be saved to the album is a garbled mess. You can fix this enabling EFB Copy to RAM. Or you could just use Dolphin's screenshot tool instead (default F9).

Controls
Brawl is capable of using both GameCube controllers and Wii Remotes at the same time. If you have a physical controller set to emulate both a GC Pad and a Wii Remote concurrently, the game will use both inputs and the physical controller will operate both player 1 and player 2 at the same time. To fix, disable one of the emulated controllers or move one of them to a second physical controller.

Subspace Emissary Videos
Many disc images of this game are DVD5 (4.7 GB) altered versions of the original DVD9 (8.5 GB) release. In these most of the videos are removed, resulting in black screens or the same video being repeated all the time when playing the Subspace Emissary. Following these videos, the character select screen may appear; however the names represent the characters for the next level. Dolphin cannot fix this problem; the only solution is to rip a full unaltered ISO.

Saves not working
On rare occasions the game will create a save but be unable to read or write to it, the exact reason why this happens is unknown. A fix for this:


 * Create a save in-game, then exit emulation
 * Right click on the game and select "Open Wii save folder"
 * Copy the contents of the folder (C:\Users\[YOUR NAME]\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Wii\title\00010000\52534xxx\data) to C:\Users\[YOUR NAME]\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Wii\
 * Launch the game again and when given the option to create a save file, say yes. This should take longer than when you did it the first time, and a confirmation message will also be shown after if it was successful.