Dolphin (emulator)

Dolphin was first released on 22 September 2003 by Henrik Rydgård (ector) and F|RES as an experimental GameCube emulator that could boot up and run commercial games. Audio was not yet emulated, and the overall performance quality was very poor. Many games crashed on start-up or barely ran at all; average speed was from 2 to 20 frames per second (FPS). Its name refers to the development code name for the GameCube.

Dolphin was officially discontinued temporarily in December 2004, with the developers releasing version 1.01 as the final version of the emulator. The developers later revived the project in October 2005.

The Dolphin emulator has been well received by the gaming community, with the program's ability to run games at a higher resolution than the GameCube and Wii's native 480p resolution receiving particular praise from the gaming community. PC Gamer editor Wes Fenlon called it "one of the only emulators to make many games better" and praised it for continually "making major, sometimes huge improvements to compatibility and performance". Wololo.net praised the system's high compatibility.

Dolphin has been used by some people as a tool to mitigate certain shortcomings for gamers; in 2012, business owner and father Mike Hoye, who had been playing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker with his daughter and realized that the game referred to the main character as a male individual regardless of the inputted name, changed all of the game's cutscene dialogue text to refer to a girl instead of a boy by editing it through a hex editor, testing out the game's ISO using Dolphin. The emulator's Netplay feature has been described by Ars Technica to be serving as an alternative to the discontinued Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.