Dolphin emulator update gives you GameCube achievements and a reset button for no-fuss fixes

Retro game lovers have long wished to earn GameCube achievements on their playthroughs when playing on an Android flagship. The dream finally came true when the Dolphin emulator, famous for GameCube emulation, finally added GameCube support through RetroAchievements. However, this initial release was for the dev builds. Almost a month later, RetroAchievements are now available on Dolphin emulator’s stable release channel.

With Dolphin release 2512, the core RetroAchievements support has finally landed on the stable Android version. Users can log in and unlock achievements in a long list of supported GameCube games. The release notes mention that some menus are incomplete, so users are advised to have the RetroAchievements website open in the background. Note that this initial version does not have feature parity with the desktop experience; however, it’s sufficient to get started.

RetroAchievements, which started back in 2012, is a community-led project that adds achievements to emulated retro games. It currently supports over 750 GameCube games.

Beyond RetroAchievement support, Dolphin release 2512 also brings a very handy “Reset All Settings” button, present in the Advanced settings menu. So if you’ve made a bunch of changes and now suddenly find none of your games work, then this will make it trivial to start from scratch again, without resorting to deleting any files or clearing app data.

There are additional changes to Dolphin, but they have not been implemented for the Android release yet. For instance, this release brings two new throttling modes: Rush Frame Presentation and Smooth Frame Presentation. The former reduces latency by minimizing input lag, while the latter enhances visual smoothness by introducing a slight delay as a buffer against stuttering. Currently, the options are disabled by default; however, they are available in Configuration > Advanced for users to experiment with, depending on the needs of their game and setup.

This release also brings an SDL Gamepad Stock Profile, which would be immensely useful in automatically mapping modern controllers to act like a GameCube controller. However, Android users will have to wait for these features to become available.