One of the most prominent and beloved PC emulation simulators has just reached a major breakthrough in the video game industry. The Dolphin emulator will officially be released through Steam, the market’s largest online digital retailer, later this year sometime during the second quarter. The announcement was made by the developers of the emulator themselves, detailing the launch on the page, which is now live and can be wishlisted. They also expressed their excitement on being featured within the Steam platform, “We’re pleased to finally tell the world of our experiment. This has been the product of many months of work, and we look forward to getting it into users’ hands soon!”
According to the developers, and the Steam page, Dolphin will be released as a free download and will also come via the Early Access program. The official release has no concrete date as of this writing, but as we already mentioned, it will launch sometime during the second quarter of 2023. Once it does fully release, the developers will unveil more information about how to access the software and utilize the titles associated with it. Speaking of which, it’s important to note that the emulator itself does not come with any games loaded, which is emphasized by the developers in their post, “It is just a tool to run legally obtained copies of these games. Once you have dumped copies of your games into a compatible format, you can launch them directly in the emulator.”
According to the Steam page, Dolphin supports modern controllers, up to 4k resolution, quick saves, networked multiplayer with certain titles, and in some circumstances, hacking and graphical updates. The software is intended to be fully open-sourced, which leads the way for those who specialized in mods to have all sorts of fun and change things up in whichever game they chose. The Dolphin emulator has been around almost as long as the original console it was made after, the Gamecube. initially launching in 2003 for PCs, the software did not run terribly well and consistently crashed when trying to play any title. When this type of thing occurred in 2003, the developer would just pack it up and move on. However, Dolphin continued to improve and more players began to flock to it. Once it was fully revived in 2007 as an open source and gained support for Wii titles, the developers never looked back.
Today, Dolphin is one of the most stable and supported emulators on the PC gaming market, which is extremely useful for those who do not want to try playing a GameCube or a Wii on a 4k television. It’ll be a very exciting time for PC players when Dolphin is eventually released through Steam, and with it running on the Steam Deck, it will only make the download an absolute must. The Dolphin emulator will officially release on Steam sometime in the second quarter of 2023.