Dolphin v1.02
by F|RES and ector
2005-01-08
An experimental Nintendo Gamecube emulator


The Team
===========================================================
* F|RES (Main coder):
	core, recompiler experiments, plugin architecture, the 
	first 3d graphics, dsp interface

* ector (Main coder):
	core, 2d, advanced 3d graphics, user interface, 
	debugger, streaming audio, audio hle


The System Requirements	
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GFX:   Radeon 9500+ series card recommended, but Geforce FX 
       series also work. Expect severe graphics problems
       with lower cards.
CPU:   The fastest you can find.
RAM:   256MB or higher strongly recommended.
Audio: Any Windows/DirectX-compatible soundcard.


The Gamecube Information
===========================================================
The main processor of the Gamecube is a PowerPC derivative
running at 485MHz with some additional SIMD instructions.
It is extremely time consuming to emulate and is the main
bottleneck of Dolphin.

The Gamecube "Art-X" graphics chip is probably the most 
complex ever seen in a console, except maybe the NV20+ in 
the XBox. Unlike the NV20 the Art-X is very different from 
PC hardware, so it requires a lot of computer power to 
emulate, and it may not be possible to support all features. 
It can do some very weird stuff like having two alpha 
compare operations that can in turn be xored, anded or
whatever, and has performance counters that are impossible 
to emulate properly that may be used/abused for purposes 
like occlusion culling, as has been seen already (the 
weird boxes in Mario Sunshine). Coverage queries may 
possibly be used on hardware that supports them to fake 
this feature reasonably.

Also its texturing abilities are extremely advanced, right 
up there with the XBox and in some areas even more 
feature rich.

That is why Radeon 9500+ / Geforce FX is the minimum 
specification for running Dolphin properly.

The Gamecube has 24 megs of fast RAM and 16 megs of slower 
"ARAM", primarily used for audio but can also be used as a
temporary scratch space.

The Gamecube has a custom DSP for audio with an unknown 
instruction set. It will be possible to HLE sound in many 
games, those that use the AX library, but we are not sure 
about the others yet. A simple type of streaming music 
(used by a few games) has already been somewhat emulated.


The Dolphin Information
===========================================================
Dolphin was written in C++, compiled with Microsoft Visual
Studio .NET 2003. It's not a .NET application of course.
Dolphin uses Direct3D for the graphics, DirectSound for 
sound and DirectInput for keyboard.
For the graphical interface plain Win32 code was used.


The Future
===========================================================
We will most likely do more releases of Dolphin, we'll 
continue coding until it's no longer fun. 
Will we open the source code someday? yes!


Contact Info
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Use the Dolphin subforum at www.emutalk.net to leave your
comments or contact the authors. Please do not request any
ROMs or ISOs or GCMs or whatever, don't ask how to copy
games etc. 


The End Of File
===========================================================
See the Help feature of Dolphin for more information.
