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Check out Dolphin's GameCube/Wii emulator running smoothly on the NVIDIA Shield Android TV

The developers behind the Dolphin Emulator for Android have just released a progress report, showing that Nintendo Wii and GameCube emulation on Android may not be too far off.
By
July 2, 2015

There might be a lengthy list of video game emulators available in the Google Play Store, but not many that can handle titles from more recent consoles like the Nintendo GameCube or Wii. It’s pretty clear that getting more recent games to run well on Android can be quite difficult, but that’s not stopping the development team behind the popular Dolphin Emulator.

Dolphin is an emulator for the PC that runs Nintendo GameCube and Wii titles, which has been around for a few years now. The dev team launched its first build of Dolphin for Android back in 2013, though it never really performed all that well. Although the final version isn’t quite complete yet, the Dolphin team has just shown off one of the latest builds running on the Tegra X1-powered NVIDIA Shield Android TV.

The video attached above shows the emulator running a handful of popular Wii titles such as Resident Evil 2, Phantasy Star Online 1 & 2, Ikaruga, Animal Crossing, Luigi’s Mansion and even Super Smash Bros. Melee. The video shows off some of the best GameCube emulation we’ve seen on Android to date, but it’s clear that the tech is still not quite there yet. Most of the games experience stuttering problems, though it looks quite nice to us. It should be noted that the audio issues in the video weren’t present when the team was playing the game, so keep that in mind when you watch.

The Dolphin team says they needed to drop support for ARMv7 devices to ensure the emulation quality is at its best, but it still seems like the developers are making some great progress. We’ll be sure to update you if we hear anything more from the team behind this emulator.