Skylanders: Giants

Skylanders: Giants
Developer(s)	Toys for Bob
Publisher(s)	Activision
Series	Spyro, Skylanders
Platform(s)	Wii
Release date(s)	AUS October 17, 2012 EU October 19, 2012 NA October 21, 2012 SA November 22, 2012
Genre(s)	Platform
Mode(s)	Single-player, Multiplayer (2), Co-op (2)
Input methods	Wii Remote + Nunchuk, Skylander Portal
Compatibility	4 Playable
GameIDs	SKYP52, SKYZ52, SKYE52, SKYX52, SKYY52
See also...	Dolphin Forum thread Open Issues Search Google Search Wikipedia

Skylanders: Giants is a 2012 video game in the Skylanders series, and a direct sequel to the 2011 game Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure. The game involves connecting a physical toy to the video game console through a "Portal of Power"; whichever toy is used creates a respective character in the game. New to Skylanders Giants are "Giants", as the name suggests, which are larger toys with new gameplay elements revolving around them. Toy figures from the first game are also forward compatible with Giants, although there are also new versions, called "Series 2", which have more powerful attributes than the originals. The game also has a new and improved "Battle Mode", for head-to-head play, featuring more areas and gameplay options.

Emulation Information

Portal of Power

Skylanders: Giants requires a USB device called the Portal of Power. As of Dolphin 5.0-18299 you can choose to emulate this USB device directly within the emulator. If you have a physical Portal of Power and wish to continue off of saved progress in your existing figurines, you can use third party dumping tools to dump the figure data off of your existing Skylanders figures for use in the emulated Portal or create IDs directly within the emulated Portal of Power. Up to eight figurine data dumps can be used at a time.

If you wish to use a physical Portal of Power you can do so by installing the proper libusb drivers with Zadig. Follow the same install instructions for the GameCube Controller Adapter for Wii U but instead of selecting "WUP-028" in the pulldown menu, use "Spyro Portal". After doing this, the Portal of Power will work in Dolphin just fine whenever plugged in. You cannot use a physical portal and an emulated portal at the same time.

Problems

There are no reported problems with this title.

Enhancements

Bloom Offset at Higher IR

When playing at higher internal resolutions, bloom effects will scale incorrectly, with multiple copies of the bloom spread out from the source, which can be very distracting.

A workaround is to disable Scaled EFB Copy, which will cause all EFB effects to be rendered at native resolution.

Since 5.0-16763, Graphics Mods can be used to make only bloom render at native resolution, or to disable it altogether.

Because it was often rendered at low resolutions, the bloom may appear shimmery when rendered at native resolution.

60 FPS

$60 FPS
040293E8 60000000

Tested on the NA version (may work on others). Requires overclocking for full speed.

Configuration

Only configuration options for the best compatibility where they deviate from defaults are listed.

Graphics

Config	Setting	Notes
Manual Texture Sampling	On	Required to remove artifacts from FMVs on some GPUs

Version Compatibility

The graph below charts the compatibility with Skylanders: Giants since Dolphin's 2.0 release, listing revisions only where a compatibility change occurred.

3.5

5.0-18299

Δ

5.0-21401 (current)

Δ

Δ

Δ

Δ

Δ

2.0 (r5384)

Compatibility can be assumed to align with the indicated revisions. However, compatibility may extend to prior revisions or compatibility gaps may exist within ranges indicated as compatible due to limited testing. Please update as appropriate.

Testing

This title has been tested on the environments listed below:

Test Entries
Revision	OS	CPU	GPU	Result	Tester
5.0-18299	Pop!_OS	AMD Ryzen 9 5950X @ 3.4 GHz	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060	Game ran well. Tested with both a physical portal and the new emulated portal.	JMC4789

Gameplay Videos

Skylanders Giants - part 1 -Wii -HD -Dolphin emu 40-2x Master