Wii and GameCube games can look better than ever thanks to Dolphin emulator upgrades

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Classics like Super Mario Galaxy 2 are getting graphics mods

Super Mario Galaxy 2
(Image credit: Dolphin/Nintendo)

A new update for the popular emulator Dolphin has arrived, introducing a graphics mod infrastructure that will make improving the graphics of Wii and GameCube games much easier.

The graphics mod feature is the work of a single developer known as iwubcode, and it effectively introduces a way for modders to make graphical changes while a game's images are being rendered. You can get a breakdown of the technical details over in the latest Dolphin progress report blog, but in short, this means that it's going to be much easier to make classic Wii and GameCube games look better.

As an example, the Dolphin devs point to Super Mario Galaxy 2, which has bloom effects that glitch out when the game is rendered at higher resolutions than its original, native image quality. Graphics mods can either remove the faulty bloom effect or replace it with one that's been remade for higher resolutions.

But the devs promise much more robust effects are in store, too. "This is just a taste of what Graphics Mods can do, and we can promise that there is more coming in the future. This is a massive undertaking being powered by a single person, so for now things are very barebones on purpose. It was a necessary evil to scale things back so that the system itself could be reviewed and merged."

It's probably time to revisit some of the best GameCube games out here.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.