Dolphin Emulator 4.0, the newest major release of the most compatible & performant GameCube and Wii Emulator comes with about 2500 changes.

New Features in Dolphin 4.0:

Beta support for the Wii official online multiplayer. This is a feature that has been coming for a long time. More than two years ago, Matthew Parlane and Shawn Hoffman started working on emulating the Wii Wi-Fi networking API in order to run Wii online multiplayer games inside Dolphin. While it was not an easy change in itself, it also required a lot of modifications to core components of the emulator to be implemented properly (for example asynchronous IPC HLE) and a lot of debugging. It is now working well enough that we are releasing it to the public as a beta: don’t expect everything to work, but popular games like Mario Kart Wii or Super Smash Bros Brawl can be played online right now.

Alpha support for ARM/Android About two years ago, Ryan Houdek began the implementation of an ARM port of Dolphin, designed to run on powerful mobile phones and other ARM devices in the future. After a long time spent making Dolphin work well on both ARM and x86, Dolphin can now emulate GameCube and Wii games on recent Android phones. This support is still in early alpha stages: crashes happen, it’s slow on Qualcomm hardware because of graphics drivers issues, and it is still missing a ton of features. Nowadays, Dolphin on Android is a two man project: Mathew Maidment is helping Ryan with the UI and making the Android version actually usable.

Global User directory on Windows This is not exactly a major feature, but it is a big change in how Dolphin works on Windows, and requires user interaction to move from the old configuration system to the new one. Before 4.0, Dolphin configuration was stored next to Dolphin.exe, often causing issues when upgrading to a new version of Dolphin. New versions of Dolphin use a centralized location to store the configuration for all builds, usually My Documents\Dolphin Emulator. The documentation article linked above explains the details of this move, as well as what you need to do to migrate your old configuration to the new system (if you were using Dolphin before).

New AX DSP HLE emulation code DSP HLE is the main audio emulation technique used in Dolphin. Before 4.0, it was extremely inaccurate and full of bugs, mostly due to how it was implemented. Dolphin 4.0 introduces a full rewrite of the audio emulation used in 99% of games, fixing hundreds of audio related bugs in Dolphin. On the flip side, it is now required to run a game at full speed to get full speed audio out of it, which is a direct consequence of fixing these bugs.

A new look has been designed by MaJoR for Dolphin (new icon, new icon theme)

Wii Balance Board and GC Steering Wheel support

Wii Remote support improvements

Fastmem is an optimization for Dolphin’s CPU emulation, which was previously only implemented on Windows. Now it supports for Linux and OS X

New OpenAL audio backend

The Dolphin OpenGL video backend was rewritten by Markus Wick in order to use newer features of OpenGL and be GLES3 compatible. As a result, the OpenGL backend is now the fastest Dolphin video backend on NVIDIA cards.

NetPlay stability and usability improvements

Mac OS X support enhancements

In addition to shipping with a new default icon theme, Dolphin now allows you to make your own themes and share them with other people.

official release note

Download & Install Dolphin Emulator:

The official website provides 64-bit deb only for Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail. The PPA contains 32-bit version. Due to the dependency problem, this version won’t work on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise.

Download: Dolphin Emulator 64-bit Deb

For 32-bit, run below commands one by one in terminal (Ctrl+ALt+T) to install it from PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:glennric/dolphin-emu sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install dolphin-emu dolphin-emu-master

If you’re on Ubuntu 13.10 & Ubuntu 12.10, try the DEB from launchpad.net