They posted a write-up of their development infrastructure last year - their system for regression testing rendering bugs is especially impressive.

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2015/01/25/making-developers-mo...

Dolphin is a masterpiece of engineering. The fact that it can emulate consoles so recent so well is a testament to the skill of the coders behind the project.

They do an amazing job. I love reading the update posts.

Note to self: do this.

A few points I can think of:

* It's more mature than many other emulation projects. Work started in 2003, and it has been open sourced 8 years ago.

* From the beginning there were a few people with strong software engineering background working on the project, which helped nail down a good design that still mostly holds today.

* We have people who care deeply about the design and cleanliness of the project. See for example https://lioncash.github.io/2016/06/21/dolphin-50-personal-pl... from one of our developers. We have been using C++11 since ~2013, and we're already relying on C++14 nowadays.

* We have invested a lot of time in developer tooling and infrastructure. Each of our PR is auto-built on 7 OS/architectures and we also run regression tests for our graphics rendering pipeline. This makes it easier to screw up and allows us to move faster.

* Most of our contributors are technical (developers) but we also make a great use of our non technical contributors. We have a great team of translators, community managers, "PR" people, wiki maintainers, etc. that help free time for the developers to focus on what they do best. For example, the whole 5.0 article and video were handled by 2 of our non-developer contributors.

I guess it has a bit to do with Nintendo's choice of architecture. They haven't moved past the Gamecube architecture - the Gamecube, Wii and WiiU all use the same PowerPC CPU, the Wii is just faster and the WiiU has two. Same for the GPU - they keep using pretty much the same Radeon, just newer, faster, etc. This has allowed the project to remain relevant (able to play mostly current games) for three console generations and find the support of qualified individuals.

I agree that it's a bit weird though - the best, most well managed emulators seem to be for Nintendo hardware. From the NES through to the Wii (and I expect Dolphin to support WiiU soon), every console is reasonably well supported and emulated.

Part of it might be due to Nintendo picking architectures that aren't too alien to emulate on a standard PC.

Copy-and-pasting an interesting response from user Asooka, who is hellbanned for no obvious reason:

> I guess it has a bit to do with Nintendo's choice of architecture. They haven't moved past the Gamecube architecture - the Gamecube, Wii and WiiU all use the same PowerPC CPU, the Wii is just faster and the WiiU has two. Same for the GPU - they keep using pretty much the same Radeon, just newer, faster, etc. This has allowed the project to remain relevant (able to play mostly current games) for three console generations and find the support of qualified individuals.

> I agree that it's a bit weird though - the best, most well managed emulators seem to be for Nintendo hardware. From the NES through to the Wii (and I expect Dolphin to support WiiU soon), every console is reasonably well supported and emulated.

> Part of it might be due to Nintendo picking architectures that aren't too alien to emulate on a standard PC.

OpenEmu (multi-console emulator for OS X) is also really polished. No great technical write-ups though.

Thanks, for a while I thought this is about the KDE file manager.

Thank you!

They just want to protect their walled garden. Thankfully Dolphin's word of mouth has been really strong.

If you happen to have some old real Wii remotes and controller accessories lying around, I strongly recommend you pick up a Mayflash DolphinBar [1] from Amazon for around $20.

It's basically a Wii sensor bar combined with Wii-mote compatible Bluetooth radio specifically designed to work with Dolphin (although it will also let you use your Wii-motes as HID controllers and a mouse too).

It will save you a TON of headaches in terms of getting up and running, especially on Windows.

[1] http://www.mayflash.com/products/nintendowiigc/w010.html

You need a way to rip the disks. The best way I've seen is a modded Wii. I think I remember reading there are also some DVD drives that can read the disks, too. Never done it myself.

Oh, here we go: https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Ripping_Games#R...

Rip the ISO from the discs, then load them up in Dolphin on your Mac.

it should run well. integrated works great so long as you don't want to run the games at much higher than native resolutions.

Or the Xerox Dolphin, the first of the post-Alto PARC machines, followed by Dorado, Dicentra, Dandelion (the Star hardware), Dandetiger, and Daybreak. A Dolphin emulator would be neat.