https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/08/gamecube-and-wii-emulator-dolphin-getting-an-official-flatpak-for-linux-and-steam-deck/
Emulation fans might like this! The GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin, is going to finally get an official package for Linux Desktop and Steam Deck.
For anybody confused – or I guess for anybody who wants Dolphin as a Flatpak immediately – Dolphin is already available on Flathub, it just currently isn't verified. It's packaged by a third party.
Honestly it's great to see more first party support for Flatpaks/Flathub.
It's weird that Valve hasn't with Steam tbh - they already use Flatpaks/Flathub on the deck, and they've asked people not to use Ubuntu's Snaps (competing app packaging standard to Flatpak) version of Steam, or system packages for other distros - saying that you should only use SteamOS, the latest Ubuntu with a .deb package, or the Flatpak (which is unofficial!!). Just make it official, Valve! Telling people to use it when it's unofficial seems weird.
Anyway, compliments to the Dolphin team, it's probably the most impressive emulator I've ever used.
Dolphin is such a well fleshed out emulation monster that I'm consistently disappointed with other emulators that don't let me tweak things quite to the same degree. I can't tell if it's just the nature of Nintendo's console architecture from that era, or if there simply isn't the same degree of effort/priority put into exposing those kinds of features in other emulators.
Dolphin is such a well fleshed out emulation monster that I'm consistently disappointed with other emulators that don't let me tweak things quite to the same degree
And yet despite the options, it's not overwhelming like a lot of other highly-configurable software often is. They've done such an amazing job.
Absolutely. Having such good UX is uncommon for these kinds of projects since its most contributors are going to be focused on reverse engineering tasks. It's not to say that good UX isn't associated with good programming, but it's not terribly common that a project focused on reverse engineering puts effort into front-end development.
I just bought a deck yesterday. Now you're telling me I can play my Gamecube games on it? Brain melts
I think that was more collateral damage than anything, as Nintendo hasn't went after clones of Citra the 3DS emulator like they have with clones of the switch emulator.
That was just the Yuzu/Citra team. Main reason they got in trouble (from what I understand) is that they were making money off of it, specifically people had to subscribe to their patreon to get Tears of the Kingdom optimized builds, when the only copy of TotK available was an illegal pre-release one.
There were some more things like messages they sent that were incriminating, but that was the biggest thing afaik.
For what it's worth, that bit about Patreon isn't true. There were fixed builds before release, but they were third party ones unaffiliated with the Yuzu devs.
Finally, whoever has been maintaining the current one hasn't let us have RetroAchievement support last I checked
Nothing will change in that sense.
There is already support for retroachievents, if you don't see it you're most likely on the stable branch.
Retroachievents only work on the dev builds, which are available on flatpak-beta. The readme has some instructions in case you need them.