How to Play Wii and GameCube Games on Your PC with Dolphin

Contrary to popular belief that GameCube and Wii were inferior to their predecessors, lots of gamers still play Resident Evil 4, The Legend of Zelda: Four Sword Adventures, and Super Mario Galaxy and consider them the best titles ever created by Nintendo. And the players whose physical consoles are out of order avail themselves of emulators, special programs allowing them to play retro games on modern computers.

Nonetheless, it should be noted that not all emulators are capable of running GameCube and Wii games that are more sophisticated and demanding than their predecessors. If you’re eager to revisit your favorite games, but cannot choose a reliable emulator for this purpose, go on reading our article. You’ll learn about the Dolphin emulator which can run the majority of Wii and GameCube ISOs (games) almost flawlessly.

A Few Words about the Dolphin Emulator

Some five years ago, fans of GameCube and Wii games scoured the Internet for a stable emulation tool that could help them quench their gaming nostalgia. Though many websites were replete with the “best” and “most stable” GameCube and Wii emulators on offer, none of the emulators was really capable of running the said games.

In 2003, Dolphin was released. It made a splash in the hardware emulation market. Much to GameCube and Wii fans’ disappointment, Dolphin’s pilot version was underdeveloped. The emulator crashed oftentimes and was unable to run a vast majority of the games. Still, over the following years, Dolphin underwent considerable improvements which couldn’t but please the gamers looking forward to playing their favorite games.

Thus, by 2009, the emulator became quite playable. Most commercial games, GameCube and Wii alike, run well on Dolphin. Due to the incorporated adjustments, the emulation speed improved, so much so the speed of games on some PCs was even higher than on original consoles. The quality of sound emulation also was considerably improved.

By late 2009, Dolphin could boast of such new features as automatic frame-skipping, which substantially increased its performance and stability, and a network game, which allowed users to play games online.

By the end of November 2010, developers had eliminated most sound problems, improved the emulator’s compatibility with a large number of games, and increased its speed and accuracy. Dolphin was capable of running most games at higher, 1080, resolution in a full-screen mode.

How to Get Dolphin

Looking for Dolphin right now?

Head to Dolphin Emulator official website and select the latest emulator’s version from there, provided that you own a powerful computer meeting Dolphins hardware requirements. Otherwise, your emulator may crash, freeze, or run games improperly.

In the “Download” section, you’ll find all Dolphin versions and more information about the available updates. Make sure to select and download the version compatible with your operating system (Mac or Windows).

How to Get GameCube and Wii Games for Dolphin

Now that you have the best emulator, it’s time to get some cool games for it.

If you still have old CDs, the ones you played on your console back in the day, you can rip their images, also known as ISOs, and start running them on Dolphin. Search the web for useful programs that can help you create such ISOs or visit ROMsMode, a website devoted to ROMs and emulation software, to get ready-made ISOs of your favorite games.

There’s a special game folder within Dolphin where you can put all the downloaded ISOs. You can access and load them easily any time.

Now you can start playing GameCube and Wii games on Dolphin.