If you're into playing classic console games on your smartphone, you probably would have come across Dolphin Emulator, a free, open-source video game emulator for Nintendo GameCube and Wii. It's available on all major platforms such as Android, Linux, Windows, and macOS. And thanks to the active developer community, the emulator keeps getting better with new features and improvements. Case in point: the team behind the project has just shared the progress report for the month of October, detailing various changes and improvements they have made to the emulator.
Dolphin Emulator: What you should know about GameCube and Wii emulation!
Most notably, Dolphin for Android is finally making it easier to use cheat codes. While the Android version always has had the ability to hook into various types of cheat codes and patches, it lacked the proper GUI for it. But that is no longer the case as the team has finally incorporated a new cheats menu that lets users access Dolphin's Cheat interface. Previously users had to go through the trouble of setting up cheat codes using text editors or use the desktop version to create the settings file they wanted.
Another big improvement for users running Android 11 and above is that Dolphin Emulator is now fully compliant with Google's Scoped Storage requirements. As the team explains, "Dolphin is reliant on accessing tons of files in quick order. If access to those files is too slow, the user may see noticeable lag, or in dual-core games could even crash. When using directories other than the app-specific one, performance on accessing files is terrible, so much so that it would impact emulation in a negative manner." The team says they have done their best to make sure Scoped Storage changes don't negatively affect performance and overall experience on Android 11 and above devices.
Dolphin has also added support for Riivolution, an on-the-fly game patcher that lets you create large-scale game mods for Wii. The team says Dolphin's Riivolution support uses the same mods you download for consoles, and you can try it out in the latest desktop Dolphin builds and Android.
For a complete rundown of various new enhancements and technical/low-level changes in Dolphin Emulator, check out Dolphin's official blog post.