Dolphin Android is a port of the popular Dolphin GameCube / Wii Emulator to Android devices.
Essentially Dolphin is an open source emulator that allows GameCube and Wii games to be played on devices other than the respective consoles. At the moment Dolphin is capable of full speed emulation of almost all Wii / GameCube games on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Dolphin for Android however is still an early alpha and will not emulate any commercial games at present, it is however capable of emulating a few GameCube and Wii tech demos on your Android device.
So although you will probably not be playing Mario Kart Double Dash, Super Smash Brothers or your other favourite GameCube / Wii games with Dolphin Android any time soon its quite possible you will be able to one day.
The developer states the Dolphin Android port is in pre-alpha status, so to expect slow speeds, graphical glitches and a myriad of problems with it.
To use Dolphin Android your Android device must:
- Support OpenGL ES 2 (99.8% of the Android Market)
- Have at least 1gb of ram
With lower end Android devices approaching 1gb of ram as standard and dual core processors been pretty much standard in Android devices now we could all be enjoying our favorite Wii / GameCube games on our Android devices with Dolphin Android in a couple of years time.
Dolphin is licensed under the GNU GPL v2 licence and the full source code is available to download through the public git repository at: https://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/
If you fancy having a mess about with Dolphin Android, download the Dolphin Emulator for Android Pre-Alpha from Google Play.
I have personally had a mess about with Dolphin Android, however couldnt even get any of the tech demos to work on my Galaxy Nexus. Depsite that i think Dolphin Android will be a project to keep an eye on. When GameCube / Wii Emulation is finally possible on Android many classic games will be playable on the go!
