Dolphin Emulator

CDs of the emulator.

Dolphin Emulator (official) isn't really an Emulator, it actually just interprets GC app source code as Windows/Mac (old Mac OS) apps. Nintendo's boxes were nowhere near powerful enough to run a real GC emulator, neither were most dev PCs of the time (if any). This is a common Nintendo (probably a common industry) practice; the same thing exists for Wii and Switch. (and probably Wii U; oddly enough, the DS got a real emulator). As such, you can't run retail games on Dolphin Emulator, or anything on it without its source code; the emulator was probably used in earlier development of the GC hardware, when final devkits still weren't quite ready. The original 1.0 version came out in late 1999, the very first time anything GC-related came out to devs, and "emulated" a very early version of the GC API. The version we have is the last one, which came out around GC launch and is the first (and only) version to emulate the final hardware/API (and even then many things aren't supported by it).

The 1.0 emulator is a treasure because the version we have is *2.8*, which as I said is also the first finalized version; 1.0 would be a very early version of the API. It's been sold on eBay, so it's in the hands of some collector, but nobody knows who and God knows if they've dumped it let alone are willing to release the dump. The 2.8 emulator is everywhere and not rare. Any older version is.