Rather than finding your old console from the basement to play your favorite retro titles during this lockdown, one could also opt for emulating them on their Android devices, provided they are powerful enough. Dolphin Emulator is the most popular open-source emulator out there for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii, and it can actually handle the emulation job pretty well on high-end devices like the OnePlus 7 Pro or the NVIDIA Shield TV. The development team behind the Dolphin Emulator project recently published a blog post outlining their progress during the month of April, which also featured a ton of changes specific to the Android client.
Fixed Android TV support
LineageOS/TWRP contributor webgeek1234 fixed a bug that caused the Android TV client to crash. Apparently, Dolphin Emulator was crashing on Android TV devices because the emulator was bringing up a pop-up in a “deprecated way”. The fix for this was a change in one line of code, which essentially brought back all the thrills of retro-gaming on big screens.
Add SD card settings to GUI
The Nintendo Wii had an SD Card slot for storing game data, but it’s basically useless when it comes to Dolphin Emulator since its target platforms (PCs and current-gen Android devices) offer much more storage. However, some mods for Super Smash Bros. Brawl used the SD card, which made it difficult to enable those mods in Dolphin Emulator for Android. In the latest Dolphin Emulator build (since 5.0-11849 to be precise), though, you can enable the “Insert SD Card” option to create a 128MB virtual SD card. Dolphin, however, still can’t use an actual SD card.
Immediately update Wii remote settings
When configuring a Wii remote, you had to fully restart Dolphin in order for changes to take effect. Now, changes are reflected immediately and take effect when you reconfigure Wii remote settings.
Add install WAD functionality
WiiWare (software packages from the Nintendo Wii online shop) are distributed as .wad files. Since build 5.0-11909, it’s easy to install these .WAD files in Dolphin Emulator in Android with a new “Install WAD” menu option.
The team also simplified the external texture loading mechanism, as well as a number of graphics rendering and networking fixes have been made under-the-hood. You can take a look at the full blog post linked below to know about all the changes.
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Source: Dolphin Emulator Blog