Nearly a decade and 22,000 updates later, legendary Dolphin Emulator gets a new version and look

If you are remotely interested in the world of emulation you will be aware of Dolphin – the venerable old Nintendo Game Cube Emulator and Wii emulator that was one of the first emulators that really made people sit up and notice that you could play older systems on your PC.

Somehow it has been some eight years since we got Dolphin Emulator 5, and while it has had some 22,000 commits to the project in that time, the iterative updates have never actually led to a new version. That is until now.

Now we are getting, not Dolphin 6 (even though it is really) but what the devs are referring to as simply Dolphin Emulator.

In a blog post they said: “Eight years have passed since that great release, and we have seen the dividends of that effort time and time again. Dolphin has seen constant updates, with new features and enhancements coming side by side with bug fixes and stability improvements. Users are now able to upgrade without fear, knowing that even in the unlikely event of a bug it will be fixed within hours. And of the thousands of titles that Dolphin can run, the number that do not function can now be counted on one hand!

All of this was achieved without a new release. In fact, Dolphin has been in the 5.0 era longer than any other, and with almost twenty-two thousand commits over the past eight years, the 5.0 era now makes up over half of Dolphin’s entire commit history! But users haven’t forgotten our past releases. They have been waiting for years, patiently anticipating when our next release may arrive.

That wait ends today.”

With this news version numbering is gone as Dolphin moves now to a date-based numbering system.

They have also made “a commitment to continuous releases from now on. The long drought of Dolphin releases is no more and will never happen again!”

Today sees the first new release Dolphin 2407 – with the numbers obviously referring to the year and month of release.

So if you are a previous user of Dolphim go and get your update now, and if you are new and want to dip into emulation, check out the link above.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in old hardware, did you see our story yesterday about the Gulf War Gameboy?

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