Notable Removed Features and Support

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Revision as of 10:33, 15 January 2023 by MayImilae (talk | contribs) (oops fix)
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This is a list of notable features and support that Dolphin has dropped. The primary purpose of this list is to serve as a reference for those who want to revisit and explore interesting features that we have moved on from, as well as for historical documentation. Do not use these old features if you want performance - the latest development or beta builds will always be faster on modern hardware.


Features

Major Features

Feature Introduction Version Final Version Removal Version Reason for Removal Notes
Xaudio2 Audio Backend r6371 (2.0-987) 5.0-10947 5.0-10950 Progress Report Oct 2019
WX GUI Megacommit 5.0-8277 5.0-8279 Dolphin Blog - The Legend of Dolphin: A Lens Between Worlds and Progress Report June 2018 In the Megacommit, Dolphin used a mixture of wxwidgets for the main GUI and W32 for some plugins. W32 was slowly removed over time around 2.0, and was completely removed by the unification of GFX plugin interfaces in r6422 (2.0-1038).
Triforce AM Baseboard r4437 (1.0-4437) 5.0-412 5.0-414 Progress Report August 2016 The first step of a Triforce implementation that never materialized. It never actually did much. To explore Triforce emulation, try the old Triforce Branch.
32-bit ARM Support + ARMv7 Support 3.5-476 4.0-6674 4.0-6676 Progress Report June 2015 First Android merge was 3.5-1243, but the ARM JIT was in Dolphin well before.
Dsound Audio Backend ALPHA 4.0-2715 4.0-2717 Progress Report Aug 2014
32-bit x86 Support ALPHA 4.0-1609 NA Dolphin Blog - Obituary for 32-bit Removed from Dolphin's build system and officially unsupported by the blog post. However there is no explicit removal commit - the 32-bit parts of the x86 JIT were slowly cleaned out over time. Notable cleanup commits are 4.0-1959 and 4.0-2612.
D3D9 Graphics Backend ALPHA 4.0-146 4.0-155 Dolphin Blog - D3D9: Why It's Not a Part of Dolphin's Future
OpenGL 2 Support Megacommit 4.0-26 4.0-27 Making way for tev_fixes_new, removing hacks Explicitly OpenGL 2.1, set as our min version by 3.5-1203. Before that is complicated.

Minor Features

Feature Introduction Version Final Version Removal Version Reason for Removal Notes
ASCII Art Shader 3.5-1025 5.0-12879 5.0-12881 Progress Report Oct 2020 Original commit was in the GLSL branch, merged into Dolphin with the GLSL merger.
3D Vision r6347 (2.0-963) 5.0-10943 5.0-10945 Progress Report Aug and Sept 2019 The first implementation was removed with D3D9 in 4.0-155. However a new implementation was made in 4.0-4643.
Fractional Internal Resolution ALPHA 5.0-5094 5.0-5097 Progress Report July and Aug 2017 Can corrupt saves in some cases, revisit with caution. Originally Dolphin just presented typical PC game resolutions which were always fractional. However, Dolphin switched to controlling EFB Scale (Internal Resolution) after 2.0.
Frameskip r3949 (1.0-3949) NA 5.0-1033 Broken Was broken long before it was removed. Even when it did work, it only worked with certain settings (such as XFB Disabled), only worked on certain games, only worked on 50 or 60FPS titles, and had minimal performance improvement if any. Possible versions to try to see it "working" would be versions before major graphics overhauls, such as tev_fixes_new (4.0-1192) or the GLSL Rewrite (3.5-1025).
Disable EFB Copies r988 (1.0-988) 4.0-5653 4.0-5656 Progress Report Feb 2015 An extreme hack to work around Dolphin issues. First appeared as "Disable copy EFB to texture" before eventually being renamed to "Disable EFB Copies".
OpenMP r7284 (2.0-1900) 4.0-4085 4.0-4087 Glitchy and didn't improve performance It is unclear if this ever improved Dolphin's performance, as we have never been limited by texture decode.
OpenCL r4346 (1.0-4346) 4.0-519 4.0-520 Terrible Added with the intention of additional interoperability with OpenGL that was never implemented in Dolphin. It just made Dolphin worse.
Asynchronous Audio ALPHA 3.5-33 3.5-78 for the AX µcode and 4.0-7286 for Zelda µcode Dolphin Blog: The Rise of HLE Audio and The New Era HLE Audio Caused tens of thousands of bugs and rampant crashing, revisit with caution.
Disable Textures r988 (1.0-988) 3.0-691 3.0-692 No longer necessary An extreme hack to work around Dolphin issues.
Disable Lighting r988 (1.0-988) 3.0-690 3.0-691 No longer necessary An extreme hack to work around Dolphin issues.

OS Support

Windows

Current minimum is Windows 10 1809

Feature Became Minimum Version Final Version Removal Version Reason for Removal Notes
Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 5.0 5.0-16391 5.0-16393 Dolphin Blog - Leaving a Legend The minimum Windows version set in 5.0 was specifically Windows 7 SP1.
Windows Vista 4.0-296 Unknown NA Lack of use Officially unsupported as part of the 5.0 Release, however it would continue to work for an indefinite period of time. The exact failure point is unknown. Our move to Qt in 5.0-8279 is a guaranteed breaking point for Vista as Qt had already dropped the OS, however it may have failed before that.
Windows XP ALPHA 4.0-295 4.0-296 Updated to Visual Studio 2013

macOS

Current minimum is macOS 10.15 (Catalina)

Feature Became Minimum Version Final Version Removal Version Reason for Removal Notes
macOS 10.14 (Mojave) 5.0-16564 5.0-18184 5.0-18186 Code Improvements / Relatively painless
macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) 5.0-14901 5.0-16557 5.0-16564 Making way for the update to Qt6
macOS 10.12 (Sierra) 5.0-11458 5.0-11686 5.0-14901 Qt Update Dolphin's macOS builder was updated to Qt 5.14.1 which no longer had macOS 10.12 support. This was not caught until reported by a user so Dolphin's builds were broken on macOS 10.12 until we officially dropped support.
macOS 10.10 (Yosemite) 5.0-9449 5.0-11455 5.0-11458 Simplifying Dolphin's code, fixing macOS bugs
macOS 10.9 (Mavericks) 4.0-4274 Unknown 5.0-9449 Already kind of dropped / blocking new features 10.9 support was broken in 5.0, with builds from our buildbot giving a Symbol not found: _OSAtomicIncrement32Barrier error. It was fixed by 5.0-820, however the site's FAQ unofficially dropped support for 10.9 at that time because 5.0 did not work in 10.9. When 10.9 support became a blocker for new features, 5.0-9449 officially dropped support for macOS 10.9 in Dolphin's code, citing the site's FAQ. The precise final working revision of Dolphin for macOS 10.9 is unknown. Unofficial Dolphin builds with macOS 10.9 support.
macOS 10.7 (Lion) 3.5-1116 4.0-623 4.0-4274 Broken macOS 10.7 and 10.8 do not support "GL_ARB_sampler_objects", which Dolphin's OpenGL Backend (the only graphics backend on macOS at the time) required following the merging of the GLExtensions branch in 4.0-651. Went unnoticed until reported in issue 7243 and officially dropped by 4.0-4274. The builds inbetween could work in some circumstances, but for macOS 10.7 and 10.8 users they were more or less broken.
macOS 10.5 (Leopard) NA 3.5-1108 3.5-1116 Removed as part of the move to C++11 There is no exact start date for Dolphin's macOS support. Work started shortly after the Megacommit, but there was no single commit where it was finished and it was extremely DIY in the early years. During that time, there was no explicit minimum supported version. A minimum supported version was first added by 3.0-267 with a minimum macOS version of 10.5.4. The first macOS build available on Dolphin's website was r7167 (2.0-1783).

macOS started the transition from the libstdc++ stdlib to the newer libc++ stdlib in macOS 10.7. Apple only brought C++11 support to the newer libc++, so to move Dolphin to C++11, any version of macOS that didn't support libc++ was going to be cut off. So 10.7 became our new minimum version.