It’s been a long time since I’ve been excited about console emulation. Back in the late 90s I was an avid participant in the scene, writing for one of Zophar’s old rivals and testing various emulators for developers. My typical haunts were the different gaming and emulation-related channels on DALnet, EFnet, and Undernet. For the uninitiated, console emulation is the act of being able to run console video games on a system other than the one the game was originally meant to run on by using software to mimic the hardware of the original console. Confused? Basically, it means you can play Sonic the Hedgehog on your computer.
When I was first introduced to console emulation on the PC, Nesticle (an old NES emulator) was the big kahuna. New emulators were popping up right and left, with increasing frequency and increasing quality. I remember when SNES9X got emulation of the SuperFX chip running – man, that was a good time. Being able to run Starfox and have it actually look correct was a big deal. Over the years, lots of progress was made. Bleem! and UltraHLE were released to much fanfare because of the advanced nature of the applications, and the fact that the consoles they emulated (the Playstation and Nintendo 64) were still considered modern consoles.
The console emulation scene came to a slow crawl around 2003, when both the lack of ability and lack of interest was making it increasingly difficult for programmers to work on emulators for even the previous generation of consoles. One needs only to look to Emulator Zone to see what I mean. Whereas back in the emulation heyday, there would be in upwards of twenty posts per day about various goings-on, there is now roughly one post each month. For what was once a flourishing community, this is very sad, indeed.
To get to the point of this writeup, I’d like to introduce to you, Dolphin. An emulator for both PC and Mac, Dolphin emulates both the Nintendo Gamecube and Wii systems and claims to do so nearly flawlessly. Judging by their Wii compatibility page on their wiki, they aren’t lying. Me gusta.
Having not had the chance yet to try it out for myself, I can only wait patiently until I’m able to dump a game of my own and give it a spin. If you’re so inclined, take it for a whirl and let us know how it goes in the comments.
