Dolphin is Gamecube, Wii and Triforce emulator that gives you the chance of playing your favorite console games straight on a Windows machine.
While the interface is pretty user-friendly and straightforward, not the same thing can be said about the configuration menu which makes setting up the application pretty difficult for beginners.
We're pretty sure that the main issue when it comes to this kind of software solutions is their efficiency, as many similar tools fail when trying to serve their purpose. Dolphin works with some games, but we've experienced many titles that simply didn't load during our test.
It doesn't matter whether you're trying to play a Wii or a Gamecube game, you must be lucky to get a title work in Dolphin, and you can't do much about it.
The program comes with multiple configuration screens concerning not only the main application per se, but also graphics, DSP, the Gamecube Pad and the Wiimote.
It comes with Xbox 360 controller support, anti-aliasing and antisotropic filtering, a memory viewer and dumper, WAD support, memory card manager and action replay simulator.
The main configuration menu lets you enable dual core support, cheats and idle skipping, but also juggle with CPU emulator engine settings, such as JIT recompiler, JitIL experimental recompiler and Interpreter.
Of course, a help file is absolutely mandatory when it comes to such a software solution but, unfortunately, Dolphin provides no offline assistance and clicking on the “Help” menu actually gets you to the official page of the developer. Which, in this case, is useless when looking for help.
All in all, Dolphin remains one of the most effective Wii and Gamecube emulators, even if many of the games don't work at all. But it's still a good thing that it comes with so many configuration options, and the addition of a help file would make it much more appropriate for beginners as well.
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