Dolphin emulator finally leaves beta

The Dolphin emulator is one of the most well known in the scene, with the GameCube / Wii emulator being by far the best way to experience Nintendo’s games from the 6th/7th generation. Already a pretty mature platform, Dolphin emulator is set to enter a new era as it switches from lengthy beta and stable releases to a rolling release model.

Making the announcement on their website, the Dolphin Emulator team detailed this major change, saying “On the 24th of June, 2016, Dolphin 5.0 was released. The product of a long and hard transition period, the fundamental inaccuracies that plagued Dolphin for over a decade had successfully been undone, and Dolphin was now free of its burdens to swim forward into a new era of accuracy and performance.”

They continued, “Eight years have passed since that great release, and we have seen the dividends of that effort time and time again…All of this was achieved without a new release. In fact, Dolphin has been in the 5.0 era longer than any other, and with almost twenty-two thousand commits over the past eight years, the 5.0 era now makes up over half of Dolphin's entire commit history! But users haven't forgotten our past releases. They have been waiting for years, patiently anticipating when our next release may arrive. That wait ends today.”

Moving forward, Dolphin will now be using a rolling release model for its updates, meaning “we will have a release every few months, with a Progress Report launched alongside as a changelog. These are proper release builds however, with the full infrastructure and support that comes with them. They are tagged as releases in Git, allowing our distribution partners to properly support us and our users. Our new releases can receive hotfixes, so if any issues arises we can release small updates instead of a full on new release.”

Full details on exactly how this new release will roll out can be found HERE, but in essence, Dolphin Emulator is going from being an already excellent piece of software to an even more impressive and reliable emulator – making it the only GameCube / Wii emulator you’ll likely ever need.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of the new release model? How often do you use Dolphin Emulator? What do you think of the (slightly) updated logo? Let us know down below.

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