Dolphin Emulator Updates With Cheat, Graphic And Achievement Support
Dolphin is one of the better known emulators when it comes to running older Nintendo games, and it’s just released a new update. Release 2503 comes with quality of life tweaks and support for additional emulator tools.
Dolphin was first released in 2003 as a GameCube and Wii emulator, and went open source in 2008 (meaning anyone can work on the code). Since then, it’s sought to update regularly with plenty of tweaks roughly every few months. This latest release didn’t include any major planned updates, but it is still substantial.
“Think of the March 2025 release as an iterative improvement that focuses on user experience and stacking many small iterative improvements instead of swinging for every homerun,” the development team said in a blog post on the official site.
“Additionally, there are a plethora of small, but tangible, changes that are the hallmark of an Open Source project. The desktop versions of Dolphin also saw a lot of improvements to input configuration and a few extra upgrades that might make people who want to track their time spent in games very happy.”
New Tricks For Old Games
Arguably the biggest news is the inclusion of cheats in relation to RetroAchievements. For gamers not in the know, RetroAchivements have, as the name suggests, been adding achievements to older games since 2012. It also runs leaderboards, and can be downloaded as a free add-on to many emulators, including Dolphin.
In this case, however, cheats refers to anything that fundamentally alters the original game code. Most people will know about using them to get extra lives, or skip a level, and so on, but in terms of older games (and emulators that run them) cheats also allow gamers to do things like change the aspect ratio, ignore bugs, and even tweak in-game lighting.
Dolphin and RetroAchievements came to an understanding that allows Dolphin users to implement these kinds of cheats for hardcore players who like to hit the leaderboards, as they add quality of life improvements rather than allow an upper-hand in actual gameplay.
Other Tweaks
Release 2503 also adds improved input mapping and graphic settings, so games can be further customized to play in a way that better suits modern gamers. One other major update that a lot of users asked for is for Dolphin to track game time.
When the GameCube came out, the idea of a console tracking game time simply wasn’t a thing. The Wii did it, but only on a daily basis, not overall or sequential. Now, Dolphin users can see just how long they’ve been hammering away at The Wind Walker or zooming through Green Hills as Sonic.
Dolphin is available for free download on a variety of platforms, including PC and Android.