Metroid Prime (Metroid Prime: Trilogy)

Metroid Prime: Trilogy is an action-adventure video game compilation developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo for the Wii video game console. It features Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption on a single dual-layer disc.

Metroid Prime in Trilogy has been updated with many features from Metroid Prime 3, such as its aiming system, bloom rendering, 16:9 aspect ratio, and reduced difficulty level (to play the original difficulty, play "veteran" instead of normal). The update also has higher resolution textures, and uses Trilogy's menus, save system, achievements, and unlockable soundtracks.

Game Pages
This page should be used for specific issues with the Metroid Prime sub-game of Metroid Prime: Trilogy. For other Metroid Prime: Trilogy games or launcher information, please see the following pages.



Performance
Performance in general seems reduced compared to the game's GameCube counterpart. This may be related to the higher resolution textures and various new screen effects added for the Trilogy versions.

Shader Generation Stuttering and the Black Bar
This game suffers from severe stuttering during shader generation. Because of the differences between how the Wii works compared to personal computers, whenever something uses the Wii's GPU, Dolphin must generate a shader to emulate it on a PC GPU. Shader generation causes a slight emulation delay while it's being created, so Dolphin caches these shaders in its shadercache folder to help keep things smooth. Most games don't care about this and play fine, but with all of the games in Metroid Prime Trilogy, the shaders are so massive that they cause a significant delay, which creates a hard stutter and desyncs the GPU and CPU threads. The game freaks out over this desync, creating a black bar at the bottom of the screen, which takes up 15% of the screen space and "squishes" the game in the remaining space. The black bar will remain there from then on whether stuttering continues or ceases. Going into new areas or showing new effects will cause the stutter and black bar, as well as going in and out of fullscreen and even taking a screenshot. Building up a shadercache of an area helps, but it will still desync if a new effect or region is loaded.

There is no solution at this time. Playing with Dual Core disabled or using Sync GPU Thread is the only solution currently available, and both result in a significant performance hit on one of Dolphin's most demanding games. See.
 * PAL users can disable "PAL60 Mode (EuRGB60)" in the Wii settings to prevent the black bar from appearing. The stuttering during shader generation will remain, however.

Constant Wiimote Disconnects
Since, when using the MS Bluetooth Stack (the default bluetooth stack on Windows) this game will think that the wiimote is constantly disconnecting. Pressing Alt-F5 will restore it, but it will disconnect again seconds later. Windows users can disable "Enable Speaker Data" to solve this problem, or move to either the Toshiba Stack or the DolphinBar.

Bloom Offset
Like Prime 3 and all the Trilogy games, Prime 1 Trilogy has bloom offset problems. Fortunately, it is not very noticeable with this game. The only solution is to disable Scaled EFB copies, which creates issues of its own. See.

Refraction/Lava Slowdown
Refraction effects, such as raindrops on Samus' visor, cause slowdown in OpenGL. Even the strongest computers are affected by this issue, and there is no solution with the OpenGL backend at this time. D3D is not affected by this problem in this game.

There are also severe slowdowns with OpenGL in the Magmoor Caverns when you look down to a lava basin. Reducing the internal resolution helps a bit. It affects even strong systems.

Visors
Visors will only work if EFB to Ram is enabled. Though EFB to Ram is forced by the GameINI, visor corruption may still occur if you open the graphics configuration window during gameplay. Turn on EFB to Ram in the Dolphin GUI to avoid any problems.

Dot
When playing above 1x Native internal resolution, there is a dot in the center of the screen. It's small and easy to ignore, but it's always there. There is no fix for this problem, but the dot can be removed by hiding the helmet display in the game's options (i.e. Visor, the 3rd option below Controller and Display, slide the Helmet Opacity sliders all the way to the left).