Dolphin started out as a GameCube emulator in 2003. In 2008, experimental Wii support was added. And now, in 2026, Dolphin enters the realm of arcade emulation with support for the Sega, Namco, and Nintendo arcade effort, the Triforce, finally arriving. Want to learn more about the Triforce? Check out our deep dive into the Triforce and how it ended up back in Dolphin! Emulating a new system and library of games for the first time in 18 years is big news, and we'll dive into some details and updates on that later in the report. However, there are two other major additions that would have been flagship changes on their own in any other report. Optimizations to Dolphin's MMU emulation have brought major performance uplifts to games that rely on custom page table mappings. In fact, on powerful hardware, all Full MMU games can run full speed, including the legendary Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike. On the other side of things is a targeted fix that took an inordinate amount of effort. An epic tale that spanned years of frustration. In the end, the incredible efforts of the Mario Strikers Charged community combined with several CPU emulation experts finally cracked the case of a minor physics bug that would normally be impossible to see or test. All that and more awaits in this release's jam-packed notable changes!

The GameCube is a memory starved machine - its paltry 24MiB of RAM is tiny compared to its capabilities and storage media, which limited what developers could do with the machine. However, there is an additional 16MiB of RAM connected to the DSP, known as Audio RAM (ARAM). On a memory starved machine, an extra 66% of memory is extremely tempting.

There’s a problem, though - the GameCube’s CPU does not have direct access to ARAM. All the GameCube’s CPU can do with ARAM is tell the DSP to use Direct Memory Access (DMA) to copy data from a range of main memory to ARAM, or vice versa. This is normally used for various DSP functions, such as loading audio samples.