The Dolphin team is unbelievably talented. How talented? They've moved GC emulation to approximately where PSX emulation is today. Compare this to Dreamcast emulation, which barely works if you're lucky, or Xbox emulation, which is nonexistant.
But those projects aren't heavily worked on, so let's compare it to PCSX2. Dolphin is faster, and has better game support, and is actually emulating more powerful hardware.
OTOH, Dolphin doesn't have to deal with the PS2's... interesting design, and the horrors of the Emotion Engine.
That's basically it. The Gamecube and Wii's architectures are fairly close to the PC's. Besides that, I'm biased, since I'm a Dolphin developer, but I think our community is fairly welcoming to new developers. Good CI infrastructure, pretty good bug management squad, knowledgeable, friendly team, etc.
Part of the problem is almost any popular Xbox game can be found on PC or Playstation 2. GameCube has a TON of exclusive games, there's no Zelda or Mario Kart available on the other consoles for example.
From the little I remember about the original Xbox I thought it was a Celeron CPU with Nvidia GPU running a Win2K-based cut down kernel? I would have thought that would be very easy to emulate??
Actually, the CPU's a 733MHz PIII according to Wikipedia, which is even easier to emulate. The problem is the OS, which isn't win2k at all, AFAIK, although we don't really know, and the fact the nobody could be bothered to actually cut the code.
Okay, partly wrong, there. There are some issues emulating the hardware. But given how crazy intel is about backwards compatability, the PIII itself might not be too hard...
"based" is the key word there - The Xbox 1 1 has a CPU, GPU and an APU that are almost-but-not-quite like regular PC processing units.
Couple this with the fact that there's no documentation about how any of these work, it would take a lot of man hours and guesswork to start approximating how the system works.
Interestingly, XENIA (360 emulator) is coming on a lot better, and it's looking like it will be able to use the 360's backwards compatibility feature to play Xbox 1 1 games before we ever get a dedicated Xbox 1 1 emulator.
The testing infrastructure they've built up around the project is incredible.A handful of developers spent years building it out and now the entire project benefits immensely from it. It's the kind of thing developers fantasize about having on a project they work on.
Dolphin is one of the most impressive open source projects I've ever come across. It works flawlessly, especially compared to other emulation efforts.
The thing that absolutely blew my mind though is that I can play Zelda: Windwaker in VIRTUAL REALITY using Dolphin.
It's not just some sort of tech demo, it's fully playable and actually quite fun.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 59.6 ms ] threadBut those projects aren't heavily worked on, so let's compare it to PCSX2. Dolphin is faster, and has better game support, and is actually emulating more powerful hardware.
OTOH, Dolphin doesn't have to deal with the PS2's... interesting design, and the horrors of the Emotion Engine.
I encourage you to contribute if you want to!
Sadly, I doubt I'd be able to contribute meaningfully: I am unskilled and out of practice in C/C++.
And we have an IRC channel for developers on Freenode.
I feel like an idiot now.
Wouldn't one be easy to write being that the Xbox was based on a PC? Or at least a WINE-like layer instead of a true emulator?
Couple this with the fact that there's no documentation about how any of these work, it would take a lot of man hours and guesswork to start approximating how the system works.
Interestingly, XENIA (360 emulator) is coming on a lot better, and it's looking like it will be able to use the 360's backwards compatibility feature to play Xbox 1 1 games before we ever get a dedicated Xbox 1 1 emulator.
The thing that absolutely blew my mind though is that I can play Zelda: Windwaker in VIRTUAL REALITY using Dolphin. It's not just some sort of tech demo, it's fully playable and actually quite fun.