Thursday, 10 January 2013

Play Wii Games on PC - Dolphin

Dolphin is a free and open-source emulator of Nintendo GameCube, Wii and Triforce that runs on Microsoft Windows, OS X andGNU/Linux. It was the first emulator to successfully run commercial Nintendo GameCube and Wii games, and is the only emulator capable of running commercial Wii games. Its name refers to the development codename for the GameCube.
Dolphin Emulator Window



High-definition support
Dolphin, like most PC emulators, supports arbitrary resolutions, whereas the GameCube and Wii only support up to 480p. This feature has been widely lauded by the gaming community and has received features on numerous gaming networks, as the emulator has surpassed the limits of the original console.

Dolphin runs best on a computer with a 3 GHz or higher dual-core processor, and a graphics card that supports the latest versions of DirectX, OpenGL, and OpenCL. Note that Dolphin only utilizes a maximum of three cores; it is a dual core program, with an optional additional thread for low level DSP processing. Preferable graphics cards are those manufactured by Nvidia or ATI. Integrated cards (like the Intel HD series) are not recommended due to lower average performance. Dolphin is able to accept input from a mouse, keyboard, joypad, joystick, Wii Remote, and microphone.

Dolphin's performance varies between operating systems, with the Windows version generally being the best optimized. For example, the only video backend available on the OS X releases is OpenGL, while Windows allows DirectX9, DirectX11, or OpenGL. Other emulator features like Free Look only work on certain operating systems or are not correctly implemented otherwise. Thus the same game running on a Windows operating system will usually perform better than under OS X, even under the same hardware by dual-booting.



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