Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Image: Nintendo

The popular Gamecube and Wii emulator Dolphin just got an update (release 2412) recently that introduced a bunch of amazing new fixes. This included a fix for somewhat of an annoying issue that the development team had been experiencing with Silicon's Knights' Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which would cause the game to hang on boot, instead of loading as normal.

According to the developers' 2412 release blog (as spotted by Android Authority), this was a problem that had first been introduced in release 2409-161, after the team had successfully fixed an "unknown opcode" message plaguing titles like Metroid Prime, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, and Resident Evil Zero, and was the result of triggering a problematic race condition that would never be an issue on real hardware but presented cycle timing problems for the emulator to overcome.

As the Dolphin developers detailed in the new blog, this problem proved to be a particular "thorn" in their side over the space of a couple of months, as the emulator was now technically running the game much more closely to how it originally would have on the real console, but, in the process, was now having to deal with a bunch of additional obstacles that hadn't been previously been a problem before.

In response, the team argued that they could have potentially continued experimenting with the emulator's cycle delay to find a solution to act as a fix, fulfilling the specific conditions that would stop the emulator from hanging at boot. However, they instead opted for a more efficient approach: delivering a game-specific patch to change a troublesome function to make it play nicer with the Dolphin itself.

This fix has now been automatically enabled in the latest release for all regional variants of the game, and can also be viewed on the game properties page under the "Patches" tab.

Obviously, this is a massively oversimplified explanation of the issue. So If you want the full details on this fix, you should check out the developer's blog here.

[source dolphin-emu.org, via androidauthority.com]