Dolphin – a popular emulator which allows you to play Wii and GameCube titles – has just seen a significant overhaul in its version numbering system (thanks, How To Geek).
Dolphin 5.0 – which is eight years old – is no more. In its place, we have Dolphin 2407. What do those numbers mean? Well, it's July 2024 – so we think you can probably work out the rest.
It's worth noting that this rather simple approach could become more complex; for example, letters will be applied when a hotfix is issued, so 2407 will become 2407a – and there's also a numerical suffix added to updates which have 'commits' pushed to them, so 2407 would become 2407-10 if there were 10 commits, for example.
So, it's arguably a less 'clean' way of seeing which version of Dolphin you're running, but it will overcome the issue of a single version appearing to be unchanged for eight years – as was the case with Dolphin 5.0 (it wasn't unchanged, of course, but the beta builds that have been issued since then were never counted as full releases).
While this numbering change is big news, the actual update itself isn't – in fact, it doesn't contain any fixes, updates or new features and is purely intended to establish the new update naming convention for the emulator.
The other news is that Dolphin's logo has changed. MayImilae, the designer, has apparently opted for a "softer" image to reflect the "maturity" of the emulator:
Dolphin's 2013 logo was designed at the start of a transition. Dolphin was leaving its buggy past behind and committing to doing it right, even if it meant ripping out tons of working code. So gone was the silly peace sign mario, and in its place I made a sharp, edgy, serious, on-trend logo to symbolize Dolphin's new future as a serious emulator. And yea, that's carried us through all this way! However, Dolphin is more mature now. It's stable, confident and comfortable in its place. So for the refresh, I wanted to return to the original design and make it timeless, but also more fun, more colorful, and make it a little gentler and thicker. And finally address all the things that were bugging me for ten years.
You can install this shiny new release from the Dolphin downloads page.
[source howtogeek.com]
Comments 6
Well, that was a waste of my time. Lol
What if there was a hotfix AND 7 commits in the same month? What then? I must know!
I don’t know what a commit is (I know what a comet is), nor a hotfix, and I’ve never used this emulator, but still, I must know how the version number convention works in this situation!
Anyone else read up to the word "gets" then have a mild panic attack as their brain filled in the words "shut down"?
No one? Just me then?
There's the "release early, release often" mantra in software development, which means it's better to have shorter release cycles and have features and fixes flowing to users frequently, which would provide earlier feedback and help catch issues faster.
Complementing this, timed releases help to achieve that: you release what you have done so far, and prevent the temptation of holding back a release until you have "enough work to justify it" or "something new" to show off.
Many open source projects follow similar version schemas based on the date of release, one recent example is LibreOffice who changed from incremental numbers to year.month earlier this year, jumping from version 7 to 24.
@GravyThief commit is a GitHub thing which records changes in a project's source code, kinda like a snapshot.
I don’t really care for using this emulator. I notice so many bugs and glitches still that aren’t present when playing native.
Tap here to load 6 comments
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...