If you own the entire GameCube library on disc, now it’s completely legal for you to own that entire library digitally. The Dolphin Emulator team has announced that now every GameCube game ever released works on the emulator.
For years, Dolphin has been the go-to emulator for playing your GameCube and Wii games on PC. Its list of compatible games was expansive, as was its feature set, which allowed for modifications and increased visuals. But one game had eluded the Dolphin development team for years: Star Wars: The Clone Wars on GameCube.
According to a recent blog post, this had to do with the game’s complex way of using the PowerPC Memory Managing Unit. It made the game absolutely unplayable on Dolphin.
The problem arose from how the game worked with the Memory Management Unit (MMU) and RAM. The MMU is essentially virtual memory that talks to the RAM. If the game were to directly talk to the GameCube’s limited 24MBs of RAM, it would quickly crash. The game would instead need to talk to the MMU, and then the MMU would talk to the RAM when necessary. This prevented the RAM from being overloaded.
So, what made Star Wars: The Clone Wars so complex? It uses the GameCube’s ability to map memory and switches it on the fly as the game requires. This would crash the emulator. The blog post goes into far more detail, and is very technical.
The team had to go in and rewrite the BAT (Block Address Translation) code to make it work. This means that now the team highly recommends beefy gaming computers that can deal with the processing load. Games that use this different manner of addressing memory can run 8-15 percent slower.
Now that every GameCube game can be emulated, it should work as a great archiving tool. Emulators in general have been a godsend to the gaming community as older systems that are becoming more scarce are still available to play on PC.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.