Dolphin Adds Game Boy Player Support Sixteen Years After the Request

Sixteen Years Late, and Real

Dolphin's June progress report shipped Release 2606 for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, and the headline feature is Game Boy Player support: a request first filed more than sixteen years ago. The team had teased it as an April Fool's joke earlier in the year, the joke being that it was actually real. Users select a GBA title through a new "Game Boy Player ROM" setting, then boot either the Game Boy Player Start-Up disc or the community's Game Boy Interface.

The Last Triforce Game

Release 2606 also boots The Key of Avalon, the final previously unplayable title on the Triforce arcade platform that Nintendo, Sega and Namco built from GameCube hardware. Support includes running up to five Dolphin instances together, four players plus a server, which is the sort of feature that exists purely because someone decided the arcade original deserved to be reproducible.

Performance and Everything Else

The less glamorous work may matter more. Major MMU emulation optimizations mean every Full MMU game, including the notoriously demanding Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike, now runs at full speed on powerful hardware. A Graphics Mods fix resolved a longstanding visual bug that affected many flagship titles at high internal resolutions. RetroAchievements support was extended to Wii games, and DualSense speaker audio now works. A follow up release, 2606a, arrived on 11 August with security patches and a Wii save state fix.

The Compatibility Picture

Coverage in July put Dolphin's overall compatibility at 97.8 percent, with the share of Wii titles rated perfect climbing from 38 percent to 69 percent. Those numbers describe a project that has quietly moved from "mostly works" to "effectively finished" for the two consoles it targets, which is a rare thing to be able to say about any emulator.

Sources: Dolphin, Ubuntu Handbook