The open-source Dolphin emulator has been able to run nearly every GameCube title since 2009 , but one title has stumped it — Star Wars: The Clone Wars . It turns out that the 14-year-old game used some pretty clever, tricky-to-implement memory tricks. However, the team says it finally cracked the game with a more accurate memory emulator, which had the added benefit of other GameCube titles more stable. More than any other GameCube title, Star Wars: The Clone Wars takes advantage of the GameCube’s mappable memory to set up its own custom RAM structure. Unfortunately, it can change those on the fly in mid-game, crashing the emulator. To fix the problem, the Dolphin team had to rewrite a large chunk of the code that deals with so-called “block address translations (BATs).” The result is an emulator that can run every single official GameCube title with fewer crashes, but is a tad slower (8-15 percent) with those that use a different type of memory addressing. So, even though you can run the Dolphin software on a Mac, PC, Linux or Android machine, the team recommends as fast a computer as possible for certain titles. The Dolphin emulator was created as a software research experiment to do retro gaming, but because it runs Wii games (which Nintendo still sells) , it has been exploited for piracy. You can still legally run GameCube titles on a Wii console, but the last one, Madden NFL 08 , was released in 2007. Since they’re now moving into a preservation phase, the updated emulator is good news for gaming history geeks, despite the potential for misuse. Source: Dolphin
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Dolphin emulator now supports every GameCube game
