Installation
Download Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dolphinemu.dolphinemu (enroll in the Beta build, available on the store page)
The Beta build is required as it’s the most up to date version of Dolphin and matches the same Development version on their website.
Open Dolphin, and allow permissions. You can also allow usage reporting if you’d like.
Click Add Games on the bottom right and navigate to your GameCube ROM directory. For obvious legal reasons, I can’t point you towards where ROMS are, but a good start would be Reddit and the ROMS subreddit.
Let it scan your GameCube games, it’ll take some time if you have a large library.
Head to the Settings cog at the top right, Config, General and we want to enable Save States.
Head back and this time go to Graphics. The default backend is OpenGL, feel free to swap between OpenGL and Vulkan for better performance, each game will be different.
Enable Compile Shaders Before Starting.
Scroll down and head to Enhancements. You can change the internal resolution here if your device has enough power to support upscaling.
If you head to Statistics, you can turn on Framerate monitoring and more.
Head back now, and this time go to GameCube Input and you can go ahead and map the controls for a GameCube controller.
Jump into any game from the main screen and if you use Android’s back button, or the back button on your device (if it has one), it’ll open the Dolphin in-game menu.
You can Load State, Save State and more.
Head to Overlay Controls, Toggle Controls and Toggle All to remove the on-screen controls.
Per-app Settings
If you’d like to do per game settings, so have settings only apply to a single game, on the games screen, push and hold on a game and select Edit Game Settings.
Advanced
Continuing with my series of making emulators awesome on Android, we started with PlayStation 2 emulation which I showed how to get 60FPS, HD Textures, Widescreen Patches, Ultrawide Patches and even Cheats, then we moved onto Nintendo Switch emulation where I showed you how to set it all up, and get mods and cheats working.
Now we’re here with GameCube and Wii emulation with Dolphin, and we’re going to be looking at HD Texture Packs, Widescreen and Cheats. I’ll be using the Dolphin Development build for this video, which you can get from the Google Play Store by joining the Beta on the page. My device of choice for this video is the AYN Odin 2 as well.
Like before, I wouldn’t call this a beginner’s tutorial by any stretch of the imagination, and you’ll need to have some familiarity with Android, Dolphin and computers, but I’ll do my best to make this easy for you. I’ll leave links in the description to everything as well.
Keep in mind, any of these things could break your game and your save. I take no responsibility for your game or saves breaking, you’ve been warned.
HD Texture Packs
First up is HD texture packs, which you can find a whole bunch on the Dolphin emulation forums. There’s a huge list of games, and each thread is different with different instructions.
Let’s use Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door as the guinea pig for this video. Go ahead and download the texture pack from the link in the first post, you can see it there labeled DDS Resource Pack (Recommended). Extract that zip file somewhere and we’ll come back to it.
Special Note: For DDS Texture Packs, they may not work. It’s very much device and processor dependent. Adreno devices should work with DDS without problem (AYN Odin 2). Most other non-Snapdragon devices will likely not work (Retroid Pocket 4/4 Pro). You can try PNG packs instead, but they use more RAM, loads slower and isn’t a performant.
On your Android device, inside of Dolphin, Head to Settings, Config, User Data and Export User Data. You can just export it to your internal storage, Downloads folder. Because Dolphin’s data is hidden behind Android’s locked storage section, we have to do it this way as we can’t go and edit files ourselves because of permissions.
Connect your device to your PC using a USB cable, and just select File Transfer on your device. You’ll want to make sure the screen is on during file transfer, or you’ll lose connection, so set your screen timeout on your device to 30 minutes or never while we do this.
Transfer the dolphin-emu.zip file that we exported from Dolphin, which is in your Downloads folder if you followed what I said, and move it over to your PC, you can just put it anywhere. Then, extract that zip file and we’ll come back to it.
On your device, in Dolphin, push and hold on the game and select Details. Check the Game ID and it should say G8ME01, at least for Paper Mario right now.
Open the texture pack unzipped folder, inside textures, and make sure the Game ID matches. In this case, it says G8M and that’s perfect, that’s all we need to match. So we know the texture pack we downloaded and the game we have are compatible.
In the dolphin-emu zip folder we extracted, head to Load, Textures, and you want to copy the G8M folder from the texture pack to here. Just copy and paste.
Now we have to recompress all of this back into a zip file. The easy way is to select all the folders, right click and choose send to compressed zip. However, that didn’t work.
So I had to use 7-zip from 7-zip.org, which everyone should have installed by now anyway, and select all the folders, right click, 7-zip, add to archive and choose zip then start. Make sure the name of the zip is dolphin-emu.zip.
Now transfer that new dolphin-emu.zip file over to your device, and you can just put it in the Downloads folder again. You’re fine to overwrite the original dolphin-emu.zip that was there if it still is. You can disconnect from your PC now.
Open Dolphin, head to Settings, Config, User Data and Import User Data. Select the new dolphin-emu.zip that we just moved over.
Now head to Settings, Graphics Settings, Advanced and make sure Load Graphics Mods, Load Custom Textures and Prefetch Custom Textures are all enabled.
You’ll also need to be using Vulkan, as DDS Resource Packs only work on Dolphin. Push and hold on a game, Edit Game Settings, Graphics, and change Video Backend to Vulkan.
Open the game and you’ll see that it says custom textures loading in the top left, which is how you know it worked. Well, besides telling by the visual differences.
Widescreen
There’s two ways to do widescreen hacks in Dolphin. There’s the bad way and the good way. The bad way is enabling Widescreen Hacks in the Graphics Settings in Dolphin, as it even tells you that it’ll break graphics and UI’s of games. So we don’t want to do that.
The good way is using AR and Gecko codes to do that work for us since they do not have those issues, and thankfully it’s not that difficult to do.
Head to the Dolphin Wiki page (https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Nintendo_GameCube) and find the game that you want to add widescreen to. In this example, I’m going to use The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I don’t believe every game has a widescreen code, so just keep that in mind.
In Dolphin, make sure that you have Cheats enabled and that’s in Settings > Config > General > Enable Cheats.
Push and hold on a game then select Edit Cheats, and you should see a whole bunch of cheats already there.
Scroll down to Add New Gecko Codes. Now you want to add the Gecko code from the wiki, but it’s very long and you may want to visit the wiki page on your device’s browser and copy and paste it from there. That would be how I would do it.
Add the code to Dolphin, and you can name the code whatever you want, but I figure Widescreen 16:9 is a good thing to remember. The screen kept closing on me, but don’t worry, click Add New Gecko Codes if it does and it should come right back with your information still there.
Now here comes the fun part. You might be lucky and you can click Save and off you go, it all works. For me, it never did, and I had to actually edit the code because I kept getting an Error on Line 1 error.
First thing you need to do is add a dollar sign to the front of the first line and then you have to fix all the lines. To fix them, go to the end of each line, push delete and then enter. There seems to be some included space at the end of each line that Dolphin doesn’t line, so go through each line, one by one, delete and enter to fix it all.
You should be able to click Save after that and it’s done.
Now, make sure the cheat is enabled, and then boot up the game and you’re set. The first time I did this I enabled the cheat, and then booted up the game, but it turned out the cheat wasn’t enabled. So I had to go back and re-enable. Just a heads up in case you run into that as well. Either way, if it’s actually enabled, the game is using 16:9 perfectly and it’s widescreen, this is awesome.
One note. Pay attention to the instructions on the Wiki page, in this case it wants you to make sure widescreen hacks are disabled for this specific game, so you can do that via the per game settings or I would personally suggest doing it globally and having it always disabled, but other codes might need other things that you need to do, so it’s always good to remember you can do per-game settings by pushing and holding on a game and selecting Edit Game Settings.
Cheats
Cheats are extremely easy and you already saw them in the section before, the emulator has them built in!
Head to a game, push and hold on it and click Edit Cheats. Make sure you’ve enabled Cheats already like I showed in the Widescreen section.
There you go, they’re all there.
Now if you want more, you can scroll down to Download Gecko Codes and select that to download a whole bunch more.
Between both of those, you should have all the cheats and codes you could ever want.
That’s going to be it for this, the ultimate, best, most fantastic guide to making GameCube and Wii awesome on your Android device.
