Ishiiruka-Dolphin (GameCube/Wii Emulator) for Linux

You may have heard about Dolphin, not our file manager but the GameCube and Wii emulator of the same name. What you may not have heard of is Ishiiruka, a fork of Dolphin that prioritizes performance over emulation accuracy – and clean code if comments by an upstream Dolphin author on Reddit are to be believed.

Although Ishiiruka began as a reaction to remove the Direct3D 9 renderer in the Windows version of Dolphin (which is probably why the Linux community ignored it for the most part), it also began to tackle other performance issues such as “micro stuttering”.

Recently the Git master branch of Ishiiruka shipped compilation fixes for Linux, so I decided to dust off my old dolphin-emu.spec file and give it a try (I’m hardly an expert packager). So after some dabbling I succeeded. For now only Fedora 24, Fedora 25, and openSUSE Tumbleweed are supported. The packages are available from https://software.opensuse.org/package/ishiiruka-dolphin-unstable.

openSUSE Leap requires some workaround because it defaults to GCC 4. I plan to look into it at a later time. Once Tino creates a new Stable branch that incorporates the Linux fixes, I’ll post it under https://software.opensuse.org/package/ishiiruka-dolphin. (Quick update: It is now available on openSUSE Leap. The Stable builds as well. In addition to that, all openSUSE builds now build against shared wxWidgets 3.1 instead of statically linking the included one.)

If anyone of you is interested in Arch, Debian, Ubuntu,… packages (anything supported by OBS), I’ll gladly accept Submit Requests for PKGBUILD etc. files at https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:KAMiKAZOW:Emulators.

Get it from https://software.opensuse.org/package/ishiiruka-dolphin and https://software.opensuse.org/package/ishiiruka-dolphin-unstable.

Join the Conversation

2 Comments

  1. Thank you for the writeup. I had never heard of it, indeed.

    Is this fork able to use Gallium nine on Linux? I am curious how it could affect performance.

    1. On Linux it just uses OpenGL or Vulkan. I don’t think anybody ever ported the DX9 renderer to Linux.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.