Wayland Works For Nintendo Gamecube Emulator

The Dolphin emulator for the Nintendo GameCube has been ported to function as a Wayland client. Dolphin now works as a Wayland client and it also supports threaded EGL/GLSL. This is also quite likely the first game-related software that works either under X11 or Wayland/Weston using the same application binary.

This Nintendo GameCube emulator running atop Wayland was ported by Scott Moreau, the same developer responsible for Wayland work on zoom/transition, Weston output configuration, and other top contributions to Wayland. Porting "Dolphin" to run on Wayland took about one week.

With his port, the same Dolphin emulator binary will work between running on an X.Org Server and Wayland's Weston that can be selected at run-time. With this GameCube emulator relying upon threaded OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) support, a few issues were hit along the way but now it's in a working state.

Moreau writes, "This is quite possibly the first real world application to run as a threaded wayland-egl client. It is also possibly the first standalone client to support X and Wayland platforms simultaneously."

Right now this Dolphin port uses an environment variable for determining run-time platform selection between X and Wayland. Key functionality like video, audio, keyboard, and joystick are all working under Wayland. However, broken right now within the Wayland port is mouse input as well as resizing the window.

More information on this work-in-progress port can be found on the wayland-devel list.

Embedded below is a demo of the Dolphin Nintendo GameCube emulator on Wayland.