Changes

The first-party '''Dolphin Emulator''' is a program which was included with the GameCube SDK to assist developers in debugging their GameCube applications. The "emulator" is not actually an emulator; rather, it 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).  

The first-party '''Dolphin Emulator''' is a program which was included with the GameCube SDK to assist developers in debugging their GameCube applications. The "emulator" is not actually an emulator; rather, it 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.  

This is a common Nintendo (probably a common industry) practice; the same thing exists for Wii in the form of the [[Revolution Emulator]], and the Switch as part of the [[NintendoSDK]]. The DS also received an official emulator in the form of [[Ensata]], although it was a real emulator rather than a code layer. Due to its design, you can't run retail games or any other applications on Dolphin Emulator unless you are able to rebuild them from source. The emulator was probably used for software development during the earlier stages of the GameCube's development cycle, as evidenced by SDK header file histories and the first release of the emulator being in 1999.

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 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).