Emulator Dolphin can now boot every GameCube game

The GameCube, possibly the greatest console ever made, now has its full library playable via the Dolphin emulator.

You may have heard of Dolphin before - it's been around for years, and has steadily grown to support almost every title in the GameCube (and later, Wii) library.

The vast majority of GameCube titles have been playable on a PC via Dolphin for years. Many of the console's classics - such as Super Mario Sunshine - have been modded by fans to output in higher resolutions or increased frame-rates.

But one game stood in the way of complete compatibility: Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

There's a full and very detailed blog post on the evolution of Dolphin, explaining how it has overcome several significant technical hurdles over the years.

Put simply, while some games just worked, those coded with individual quirks have taken years to get running. In the case of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a "gargantuan" code rewrite was needed to allow the game to define its own memory.

Any change has knock on effects, however, so it's a complicated process.

And, it's worth stating, none of this work has been done officially. Like all emulators, Dolphin is nothing to do with Nintendo - although Nintendo has not found grounds to step in and stop the Dolphin team's work.

Right now, there's no way to buy GameCube software digitally and play on Wii U - although the original Wii offered GameCube backwards compatibility.

Perhaps Nintendo's NX team could learn from Dolphin's own emulation work?