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

System Requirements

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” games 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. Windows users must choose between x86 (32-bit) and x64 (64-bit) versions according to their operating system.

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.

Starting Dolphin

Windows: Windows builds come in archives in the 7z format, so an appropriate program such as 7-zip or PeaZip is necessary to extract it. Users need only extract the archive and double-click on the Dolphin.exe file to launch the emulator. Opening the emulator while it is in the archive will lead to errors.

OS X: All OS X builds come as .dmg files for easy installation: users need only double-click the .dmg file to open it, and click on the Dolphin icon to launch it. Drag the Dolphin icon to the Applications folder to install in on the system.

Linux: After compiling and installing Dolphin, Linux users will need to see where Dolphin placed itself depending on the desktop environment and launch it from the correct menu. Alternatively, Dolphin will run when invoking the dolphin-emu command from a terminal.

Below is a screenshot of what Dolphin looks like when run (after adding some games, see Section 2.3) and a basic description of the interface:

BIG PICTURE HEEEEEERE

Title Bar: Shows program name and Dolphin version.

Menus: Contains entries like File, Emulation, and Options. Provide access to nearly all of Dolphin's options through drop-down menus.

Toolbars: Contains buttons like Open, Play, and Config. Provide quick access to commonly changed options with one-click

Banners: Small graphical icons depicting game logos. Allows users to easily identify games at a glance. Small graphics to the left show which system the game comes from.

Title: The official name of the game.

Notes: Short pieces of text that may describe the game or the developer. Flags to the right show which region (NTSC-U, NTSC-J, PAL) the game comes from.

Size: Approximate size of the game file.

State: A scale using 5 stars that describes how well the game runs in Dolphin. The scale goes as follows:

0: Unknown – Has not been tested yet.

1: Broken – Crashes when booting.

2: Intro/Menu – Hangs/crashes somewhere between booting and starting.

3: Starts – Starts, maybe even plays well, but crashes or major graphical/audio glitches.

4: Playable – Runs well, only minor graphical or audio glitches. Games can be played all the way through

5: Perfect – No issues at all.

Status Bar: Very bottom of Dolphin's screen, reserved for small message such as when a real or emulated Wiimote has been connected, FPS, VPS, and game speed.

Adding Games

When users first run Dolphin, the program will not see their games. It will display the following message in the game list: “No ISOs or WADs found. Dolphin could not find any GC/Wii ISOs. Doubleclick here to browse for files...” Users can add game directories in several ways:

• Double-click the above message to open up a file browser to select the directory containing the games.
• Click the Browse button in the Toolbar.
• Go to the Menu and select File -> Browse for ISOs...
• Go to the Menu, select Options -> Configure, click the Paths tab, and click the Add button. (see Section 3.6 for more details).

Dolphin will recognize .iso, .wad, .gcz, .gcm, .wbfs, .dol and .elf, files as games. Users can add as many directories as they want. Once the directory has been added to Dolphin, the emulator will check those directories every time it launches and automatically add new games to the list. If the user adds games to a directory while Dolphin is running, the list can manually updated by:

• Press the Refresh button in the Toolbar
• Go to the Menu and select File -> Refresh List

Starting, Stopping, and Resetting Games

To launch a game, choose from one of the following actions:

• Double-click on a listed game.
• Select a listed game with a single-click and press the Play button in the Toolbar or the F10 key
• Go to the Menu, select File -> Open and then browse to the game's file. Note, this can play games that are not listed.
• Select a listed game with a single-click, go to the Menu, and select Emulation -> Play.

To stop a running game, choose from one of the following actions:

• Click the Stop button in the Toolbar
• Press the Escape key

To pause a running game instead of completely stopping it, choose from one of the following actions:

• Click the Pause button in the Toolbar
• Press the F10 key

To reset a running game go to the Menu and select Emulation -> Reset. Dolphin by default does not have a hotkey for this action, however users can specify their own by editing the hotkeys (see Section 3.2 for more details).