> All of this just to let Dolphin play online with real Wii consoles in a game whose official servers are since long dead and whose replacement servers have a peak of only 15 concurrent online players.

Knowing there's people out that who have such absurd levels of dedication makes me so happy.

The most interesting part to me is how often emulator development turns into discovering that the original games were doing something deeply strange but completely intentional

I always love reading the dolphin progress reports. They do a good job of explaining how things work and parsing it out into something easy to understand

On the topic of Dolphin progress reports, one of the people who author them has written an interesting blog post on the state of open source emulators and the kind of community problems they deal with: https://emucross.com/rethinking-open-source/

TL;DR if you open source a project prone to hype before you are established with a community, identity, and results to speak for, you risk entitled and uninformed users demanding more than you can deliver. Others may take your half-baked feature branches and release them (to fanfare from users who were able to use it with the exact one game it worked with), taking your credit.

Running these projects ain't easy and the Dolphin team deserves a lot of credit for doing it with a level of professionalism I'm sure many in here don't even see at work. The social work involved in this kind of project should not be taken for granted either.

Dolphin is a rare example for really smart development. Instead of it becoming ever bigger and also slower, it moved from using all 4 cores of an old machine of mine to run Metroid Prime, to using 25% of the cores, for the same game a few years later, just by being smarter (much smarter) about JIT and emulation. The efficiency improvement was an outstanding achievement. Whenever I read about emulators, I am reminded of this.

I really enjoy how clearly excited the author is about what they wrote here.

What is the most reliable place for ROMs these days? Is there any sort of checksum that can accompany them to ensure safety? While I trust Dolphin, I don't trust most ROMs.

In the discussion of the Triforce arcade compatibility, there's some discussion of "IC Card" support needing to be implemented, and doing so unlocking a lot of missing functionality.

I think this is referring to the Japanese rail payment cards? I know you can use them on things like vending machines, but from the article it seems like the Triforce cabinets let you save game progress on them too, which would be a great feature I've never seen in US arcades.

> Thankfully, the game's community narrowed down the issue and eventually found that the fnmsubs CPU instruction was implemented incorrectly in Dolphin's JIT but worked correctly in our interpreter.

Sounds like a good opportunity for differential fuzzing!

"... we've identified the touchscreen protocol as being similar to Elo's SmartSet Data Protocol..."

Chuckled out loud at that one. Figures they went for an ol' reliable when they built the arcade cabinets for The Key of Avalon.

I think the lede is somewhat being buried here.

Dolphin is bringing back support for the Triforce arcade cabinet that was jointly developed by Nintendo, Sega and Namco that was dropped by Dolphin in 2016.

Notably games includes F-Zero AX (not to be confused with F-Zero GX on Gamecube) and Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 and 2.

This is pretty big!

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2026/02/16/rise-of-the-triforce...

Do they accept donations? I couldn’t find anything on the website.

Fantastic! I always wonder if the original console devs would be able to provide bonus insight.

I really thought this was talking about the year 2603 at a glance.

In all my years of emulation, I've never come across a malicious ROM for a major console.

Dolphin runs its own VM. Obviously anything is possible, but developing some kind of breakout-ROM which would infect the host machine is just way more engineering than I could imagine ever being worth it. The vector is just too complex, and the target (nerds downloading retro games) just isn't worth the squeeze.

Archive.org actually hosts a good chunk of the major Gamecube ROMs. Good luck!

There's tons of options, no-intro, redump, tosec, mame are all doing DAT files with file checksums.

That said, ROMs are basically never a malware vector as they have to exploit an issue in the emulators themselves and historically that hasn't really been seen. Typically malware related to roms happens with files included in the zip archives or by sites offering "downloaders" with embedded malware.

I've had pretty good success with CleanRip https://wiibrew.org/wiki/CleanRip#Wii_DAT_download for acquiring ROM files. With it, I was able to backup my entire personal collection with minimal fuss, and can now enjoy that collection in HD with Dolphin's various enhancements.

For verification you generally want the Redump database, which has checksums for most disc-based console releases. Unfortunately they seem to be offline at the moment, or I'd share a canonical link. Look around for that.

Now there's an interesting challenge. A ROM that does a VM breakout and runs a command on the host.