One of the best emulators of all time, Dolphin, has been ported to the Xbox and the performance is already great.
Dolphin, the Gamecube and Wii emulator, has been ported to the Xbox thanks to the inclusion of a development mode included with every console. With Microsoft allowing any console to become a devkit, it has opened the world of emulation on their consoles.
Through this, someone has not only ported the Dolphin emulator to UWP, but also got it working flawlessly on Xbox consoles. It supports up to 1440p on the Xbox Series S, and includes the same level of support for texture mods to upgrade the visuals on certain games.
UWP is the file type that Microsoft created to run apps from their own app store. It’s what gets installed when you play a Game Pass PC game.
The only real catch is setting up the controller, which has to be done via the PC. Once you’ve configured an Xbox controller on the regular version of Dolphin and transferred the file over to your console, you’re good to go.
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Dolphin was already working via Retroarch, a complete emulation framework that uses ‘cores’ for each console. A core has to be maintained independently of the main emulator, leaving the Dolphin core much further behind than the current version.
This meant that not only was the needlessly complex setup of Retroarch a barrier, but the games didn’t even run as well as they should.
Dolphin emulator on Xbox performance
According to YouTuber Modern Vintage Gamer, it also supports the One X and even the Xbox One, but will not support playable framerates. In his video, it appears that Metroid Prime can reach about 20 to 25 FPS at full load.
We’ll have the full guide for you soon, as we’re in the process of setting up our Xbox Series S to show you how to do it. However, it appears that most, if not all games are running without much issue. We do hope that someone works on bringing the Prime Hack fork of Dolphin to the Xbox at some point. It allows you to play Metroid Prime like a regular first-person shooter.
