Super Mario Galaxy is coming to Steam, sort of (pic: Dolphin)



In news that should keep Nintendo’s lawyers busy for the next few months, GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin is coming to Steam.



Nintendo does not like people messing around with its stuff. No matter how earnest a fan remake or unofficial sequel might be they always get them shut down and they’re more than happy to put pirates in jail, if they seem to be targeting Nintendo software or even just music on YouTube .



They also hate third party emulation but because it’s legal in the US there’s not much they can do about that and, surprisingly, there are already a number of famous emulators on Steam, such as Snes9x and SameBoy – and now Dolphin is about to join them.



Dolphin has been around for years, allowing PC owners to play versions of GameCube and Wii games that can upgraded with higher resolutions and faster frame rates than the original games. Save states for all games are also added, as well as online play for multiplayer titles.



The emulators don’t come with any games and the idea is that you have to own a legal copy of each game you play, although it goes without saying that not everyone is going to stick to that rule.



There’s a good chance this will renew Nintendo’s attempts to get emulators removed from Steam, especially as it’s likely that Dolphin will work on the Steam Deck portable.



However, given the law in the US, and the lack of leverage Nintendo has over Valve, there’s probably not much they can do.



You can find the Steam listing here but while it is free there’s no exact release date other than the first half of this year.







‘Return to an era of gaming before the advent of microtransactions and experience a diverse library of thousands of titles that were released for these consoles over a span of 15+ years,’ says the Steam description.



‘Dolphin Emulator allows these classic games to be reborn into the modern era with support for 4K displays, modern controllers, and much, much more. All of this, fully Open Source and free to download.’



‘Dolphin itself does not provide any of the games. It is just a tool to run legally obtained copies of these games. Once you have dumped copies of your games into a compatible format, you can launch them directly in the emulator.’



Somewhere, someone in Kyoto is tipping over a table.









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