I've used it, but not recently. It was always a novelty to connect an actual Wii controller with bluetooth, set up some LEDs for motion tracking, and play Wii on my laptop.

As for performance: Using software to implement behavior equivalent to specific hardware is almost inherently inefficient. JIT-style processing of the opcodes helps, but you're still going to use multiple operations on the host CPU for each one that you execute from the guest code. Plus emulation of device synchronization that would've originally been done in hardware and that don't have direct equivalents on the host hardware.

Emulation has been used for mainframe line-of-business type stuff for quite a while, perhaps the longest. But games get much more attention since emulating the system is an extremely popular way to preserve access to the experience. That said not all systems are made equal, and high accuracy treatments of old consoles(e.g. bsnes/Higan) can also be heavyweight.

> I'm also always amazed at the hardware reqs for emulators. They suggest at least an i5 or i7 and recommend a dedicated gpu! For a gamecube! Released 15 years ago!

But it works well enough for most games even with an integrated Intel GPU, as long as you don't try to improve on the base game too much (resolution, filtering, etc..)

Emulating something as humble as an NES authentically takes way more computing power than that. We're talking about trying to faithfully recreate the characteristics of a digital computer with multiple CPUs that are highly sensitive to timing delays as well as a good amount of analog circuitry on top of that.

The emulators that exist today don't have to emulate a single CPU, that would be trivial, but the surrounding hardware.

Here's an example of someone trying to emulate a 6502-based computer (BBC Micro) and the problems they encountered when trying to run Elite, just one game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiE5pTisEd8

Older games used any optimization they could get, and they'd often exploit quirks in the hardware if it made things work better. Elite flips video modes part-way through the rendering of the screen since it was made in an era of CRTs. Trying to reproduce that effect in a frame-buffer type system is hell.

So most of the emulators out there have to fake a lot of things in order to get software and games to run properly, or at all.

> So most of the emulators out there have to fake a lot of things in order to get software and games to run properly, or at all.

Not really. The emulators for recent systems don't try to emulate the hardware anymore, they emulate the outcome of the system calls and convert them to OpenGL most of the time (HLE).

That's actually necessary for stuff like the PSP. Sony made multiple revisions of the hardware over the course of the PSP life, and therefore relies on such a system anyway to maintain the output identical despite the hardware changes.

If you're not emulating the hardware then by definition you're faking it.

You're calling it "emulating the outcome" but that usually means in practice "approximating what the original system does by faking it."

> I'm also always amazed at the hardware reqs for emulators. They suggest at least an i5 or i7 and recommend a dedicated gpu! For a gamecube! Released 15 years ago!

And that's still nowhere near the requirements for cycle-accurate emulation. I'm not sure you can even run a cycle-accurrate N64 emulator on a standard machine.

This is one of the few emulators that will run _well_ below the suggest specifications. I've played it on much older hardware with a very low end GPU, and it runs quite well (depending on the game, of course.)

It supports the Wii also, not that that's anew console or anything particularly demanding. Software emulation is always pretty hard, I remember playing N64 games on a Power PC iMac and having them chug.

Not surprised at the system requirements- it has to emulate a 486 MHz PowerPC CPU. I have no idea why it would require a discrete GPU though. It only needs to output SD-quality video. Maybe shader performance is a limiting factor in the GPU emulations?

That requirement is a bit outdated. At native (not higher than a real gamecube) resolution, I find that the vast majority of games play just fine on Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics, and I imagine newer chipsets perform even better. When Dolphin was first released though, Intel graphics were pretty much garbage, so the discrete graphics requirement made sense.

> Not surprised at the system requirements- it has to emulate a 486 MHz PowerPC CPU.

Yeah, to anyone who has tried to optimize a CPU interpreter before; dynamic recompilers are nothing short of magical.

You'd be quite talented to emulate just a 50 MIPS interpreter core from a sufficiently awkward CPU at 100% speed on modern processors. Let alone all the other parts of the emulator, and synchronization between components.

Of course, dynamic recompilers sacrifice huge amounts of synchronization precision in return for that raw speed. But it's very much a necessary evil -- otherwise we wouldn't have playable modern emulators at all. The developers of dynarecs deserve extra special praise for being willing to give up both idealism and portability when writing them.

If you sacrifice synchronization you can also hit some pretty good performance with an interpreter. Until fairly recently CEMU was interpreter-only and they managed to hit 100% speed in a few games. The trick: they were running 50K instructions at a time without checking external interrupts or scheduling other components. At least, that's from what I can tell from reverse engineering...

I can only see full speed on a Wii U CPU interpreter happening when the game has huge idle loops that you can skip over.

If you're saying they hit it at 100% Wii U CPU load at fullspeed, then that's really impressive! :)

The graphics are output at arbitrary resolutions, which can be demanding. Also IIRC the GameCube GPU had an architecture different from mainstream PC hardware of the time.

Twilight Princess works fine on a new-ish i5 with the Intel graphics. Smash Brothers Brawl works fine too. So the older Gamecube stuff is alright on modern computers.