Running Super Mario Sunshine on Dolphin

In my opinion, GameCube is one of the best consoles ever made. I grew up playing all the classics like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Super Smash Bros. Melee and, of course, Super Mario Sunshine.

In this article I’m going to walk you through how to set up your computer to run Super Mario Sunshine. The emulation and modding community has built some amazing tools and resources to make these games look and play better than ever including: 4K HD, high res textures and 60 FPS!

I will make the assumption that you already own a North American ROM of Super Mario Sunshine. A quick Google search will help you find more information about this.

Though these steps are specific to Super Mario Sunshine, they can easily be applied for hundreds of other titles in the Game Cube and Wii libraries. Just remember to check out the Dolphin Wiki before starting any new games, it’s a great place to discover recommended settings, mods and hacks.

Setup

The first step is to download and install the Dolphin Emulator. It’s currently available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. The Dolphin Project is constantly being improved and, despite the project’s age, updates are still regularly being released. I would recommend downloading either the latest stable release or the latest beta release, as the development releases tend to have more bugs and crashes. As of this writing, I am running beta version 5.0-13178.

Once you have installed the emulator, there are a plethora of settings available. After much trial and error, I have found a good configuration for Super Mario Sunshine that balances performance with appearance. Based on your hardware, you may want to modify some of the settings to improve performance or appearance accordingly.

First, enable game cheats. This setting is found under Configuration > General > Basic Settings > Enable Cheats and is what allows us to use custom 16:9 widescreen and 60 FPS hacks in the game.

Now modify the graphics settings by opening the ‘Graphics’ window. The backend is the engine that handles all of the graphics processing. Some of these run well and some don’t. For Windows, I’d recommend Direct 3D11 and, for Mac, I’d recommend Vulkan. Set your Adapter to your primary graphics card, aspect ratio to ‘Force 16:9’ and enable v-sync.

Increase the internal resolution as much as you can based on your monitor resolution and your computer’s hardware. I typically run Super Mario Sunshine at 1080p as a nice balance but, if you can run at 4K, then go for it! Typically I also disable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in the interest of a more consistent frame rate.

If you’re running a lower end laptop and using a high resolution external display, I recommend lowering your laptop’s output signal to 720p@60Hz or 1080p@60Hz. Outputting a high resolution on older hardware can make the game nearly unplayable. If you’re on Windows, you can find instructions on how to do this here. If you’re on Mac (like me) this is much harder to do and requires using hackey third party tools.

Match the following settings under ‘Hacks’. You can also enable ‘Skip EFB Access from CPU’ but, if you start experiencing issues in your game, you will need to turn it off again. You can find more information about these options here.

Download the high-res texture pack from Henriko Magnifico here, decompress the files and copy the contents into Dolphin’s textures directory.

Then enable ‘Load Custom Textures’ and ‘Prefetch Custom Textures’ under Advanced > Utility.

The last step is to configure your controller. There are many different controllers that are compatible with Dolphin but, personally, I use either an Xbox One or PS4 controller connected via Bluetooth. Unfortunately, I’ve only gotten the rumble feature to work on Windows. If you don’t have a controller for your computer you can also play with your keyboard, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The only tip I have is to switch the C-stick left and right directions in your controller mapping. Nintendo had this weird habit of inverting the directions in all their games…

Feel free to experiment with different settings and tailor the experience to your own hardware and preferences. I found these settings worked best on my 2019 16″ MacBook Pro (2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4, AMD Radeon Pro 5300M).

Hacks

The hack support in Dolphin is great. It allows you to modify your game in nearly unlimited ways. To enable cheats in Dolphin, go to Configuration > General > Basic Settings > Enable Cheats. To add cheats to your game, in the Dolphin interface, right click on the game and go to Properties > Gecko Codes. You can add new Gecko codes and toggle active codes from here.

The following codes are for true 16:9 widescreen and 60 FPS. Add them separately and enable them by checking the adjacent tick-box (The first line is just the name and the remaining lines are the code).

Here is one other code I like to keep enabled. It removes the heat wave effect from distant objects. Personally, I think it makes the game look a bit better, so try it out for yourself.

Issues

Dolphin Emulator isn’t perfect and I found several problems while completing my 100% run of the game. I have outlined the workarounds here. One general piece of advice is to always use the ‘Save and Continue’ option (instead of just ‘Continue’). You’ll be glad you did if your game ever crashes.

Firstly, there is an unfortunate side effect of the 60 FPS hack that makes the blue and red coins in Gelato Beach almost impossible to catch. Unfortunately, for me, I only discovered this after spending an hour trying to get them. For these specific episodes, you can disable the 60 FPS hack or use the Turbo Nozzle to help you out.

There is another game-breaking bug that I discovered on the ‘Scrubbing Sirena Beach’ episode. There is an issue where certain areas of the goop will not clear away when sprayed with water.

I tried many combinations of settings to fix the goop effects, but I wasn’t able to complete this stage legitimately. My solution is to apply the following Gecko code to automatically complete the challenge and move on with the rest of the game.

The last major issue I encountered was in a secret red-coin stage in Delfino Plaza. This stage ran very poorly and eventually crashed the game outright. I’d recommend simply turning off all enhancements and hacks while completing this level, and make sure to save before and after!

3D

The 3D support on Dolphin is incredible, if you can get it working. I’ve found it pretty hit or miss myself. It seems the Vulkan backend is not compatible with the 3D hack and the OpenGL backend runs the game comparatively poorer. On Windows, however, I was able to run the game in 3D using the Direct 3D 11 backend.

There are also some pretty serious issues with ghosting and double-vision in this game. If you’re adventurous enough to try it I’d recommend disabling the heat wave effect described in the previous section.

Conclusion

As a kid, Super Mario Sunshine was one of my favourite games. The combination of all these hacks and mods helps bring the old classic closer to the modern era. Apart from some minor issues, this game is (mostly) completable using Dolphin.

The last trick I have is, if you don’t want to play though the whole game yourself, you can download and use an already completed save file. You can find completed save files here. Just copy and replace your save in Dolphin’s GC save directory.

Cheers!   🍻