Dolphin Emulator Can Now Add HDR to Wii and GameCube Games

howtogeek.com:

It's hard to get emulators completely right with intrincate hardware designs and protections. The first version of Dolphin was released in 2003, but even after 21 years of development, there are still improvements to be made. Dolphin has now published a new progress report outlining all the new features and changes from the past few months, and there's a lot to talk about.

Dolphin has just released its latest progress report, which highlights all the changes that have happened throughout February, March, and April. As a reminder, all of these updates have already been rolled out to Dolphin users, so if you haven't updated your emulator for the past few months, you'll find a lot of improvements here. Many of the changes are under-the-hood adjustments that most people might not notice, and some are even only relevant for developers. Still, they should result in a more stable and faster emulation experience for everyone.

One of the highlights of this report is a critical security fix addressing a memory safety bug that could have been potentially exploited. A malicious actor could craft a specially crafted game save or exploit a game's functionality to trick Dolphin into performing unsafe memory operations. This could allow them to inject their own code or manipulate existing memory to gain unauthorized control. It doesn't look like this issue was being exploited in the wild, but it's good to see it patched nonetheless.

There are also a few visual improvements. Errant black pixels around windowed displays have been banished, and an issue causing blurring in some games at 1x native resolution is resolved, resulting in a sharper and cleaner image. Dolphin also introduces full support for custom aspect ratios, complete with aspect ratio corrections—fantastic news if you happen to have an ultra-wide monitor and you wanted to take full advantage of it.

The emulator can now output to HDR displays on Windows, macOS, and select Linux systems as well. You're getting