How to Play Wii and GameCube Games on your PC with Dolphin

Why Dolphin is Better than a Wii

• If you have good hardware, you can crank up the graphics settings on older games. In fact, even games for the GameCube, which had a maximum of 480p and were stuck at a 3:4 aspect ratio, upscale very well to full widescreen HD or even 4K. There are hacks that let games run at 60 frames per second. There are also many community made texture and shader packs which improve the look of the game substantially.
• If you don’t have good hardware, you can still run Dolphin. Some games may emulate poorly, but most can be run on systems with old hardware, and even in laptops with integrated graphics.
• All your games are in one place and load extremely fast. This can also be done by installing USB Loader GX on the Wii, which is actually required anyway to legally get your game disks to play on Dolphin, but it is still an advantage over a regular Wii.
• You can use Wii Remotes with Dolphin, along with any other gamepad, including Xbox 360 and One Controllers. You could also use a GameCube Controller, but you will have to buy a USB adapter.
• It’s compatible with nearly every computer; Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Dolphin is not without its problems; there are still games that do not emulate properly and have bugs or glitches, but there is excellent community support in their forums, and new releases come out every few weeks which include bug fixes.

Downloading Dolphin

Dolphin is open source and is available at their download page. The latest official version is 4.0, though a release candidate for version 5.0 is already available. All versions support a large percentage of Wii and GameCube games, though newer versions fix a lot of bugs in older versions and run better on current hardware. The Mac version is stand-alone, the Windows version requires an installer.

Getting Wii and Gamecube Games to Play

Unlike most Nintendo emulators, which have a problem getting ROMs to play, Dolphin allows you to play legally, provided you own a copy of the game and a Wii. The process is a little complicated, and involves installing the Homebrew channel on your Wii, which is a useful thing to do anyway as it lets you turn your old console into a DVD player, run emulators, and install games to a hard drive. We will be homebrewing in order to install games to a hard drive, which can be then be connected to a computer to be used with Dolphin.

First, homebrew your Wii, and install USB Loader GX. These can both be long processes, and may differ depending on what system version you have. After this, you can use USB Loader GX to rip your game disks to an external hard drive. Each game can take up to an hour to rip, and can be anywhere from 1GB to 5GB, though double-layer disks like Super Smash Bros: Brawl can be 8GB in size. Even still, a 1TB external drive can store over 300 games.

It is worth pointing out that some DVD drives can actually rip Wii and GameCube games without the need for a Wii, though this method is not recommended as it only applies to a few drives.

Getting the Most Performance out of Dolphin

While higher-end gaming PC’s can likely run Dolphin in 4K at 60 FPS, most computers are not going to get that much performance.

Dolphin is very CPU heavy, but is locked at running on only two cores. This means if you have a quad core processor, Dolphin will only utilize half your CPU power. This is fine on most Intel chips, but most AMD chips focus more on multi-core performance, making Dolphin run poorly on AMD-based PC’s, especially in multiplayer, multi-controller games.

The optimal graphics settings for your PC depend nearly completely on your GPU. If you have a laptop with integrated graphics, you will get great performance at 480p, but if you try to run in 1080p, you may run into some problems. Likewise, if you have a great graphics card and a poor CPU, the graphics setting won’t matter if the CPU can’t keep up.

Post processing effects, like Anti-Aliasing, can go a long way toward making games look better, but it is always easier on the GPU to increase the resolution of the game rather than try to make it look better at a lower resolution.

Dolphin will get better performance on Windows because of DirectX. Mac users are currently stuck with OpenGL, which works fine, but is noticeably slower than DirectX.

Connecting a Controller

One of the benefits of Dolphin is that you can play with any controller you like, including controllers from other consoles and third-party gamepads. If you don’t have a controller, you can use the keyboard and mouse, which is fine for GameCube games but isn’t that great for Wii games. If you have a Wii controller, you can connect it over Bluetooth. GameCube controllers require a USB adapter.

Open Dolphin’s ‘Controllers’ panel. You can see here which controllers are connected. If you’d like to connect a real Wii controller, choose ‘Real Wiimote’, hold down 1 and 2 on your controller, and click ‘Refresh’ under ‘Real Wiimotes’ until you see your controller. You can connect up to 4 Wii remotes to Dolphin.

You can also edit the controls very easily. Click on one of the buttons in the menu and press the button on the controller that you want to use.