Dolphin Emulator

CDs of the emulator.

Not to be confused with the open-source emulator Dolphin

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.

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 2.8 version of the emulator is the only one which is publicly available; as it was released a year before the GameCube's launch, it can be assumed that 1.0 (the oldest known version) is from very early in the GameCubes development lifecycle. This is supported by the emulator being the first OSGetConsoleType platform by ID. The 1.0 emulator was found on an online auction listing and has sold to an unknown collector. It has not resurfaced since.

The auction images mention a piece of software known as "Dave", although no further details are known as only a small piece of the paper is visible in the image.