The Nintendo GameCube and Wii emulator, Dolphin, has been very active this month. Just two weeks ago, the Dolphin team announced that its development had become so robust that it was completely abandoning the concept of “stable” builds and moving to a rolling release cycle, moving the emulator out of the “5.0” build era that began in 2016. Today, a long-requested feature has been added: integration with RetroAchievements, a community-driven project that adds Xbox and Steam-style achievements to thousands of older games.

“The RetroAchievements set essentially amounts to a list of tasks and goals beyond simply beating the game,” writes Dolphin blog author JMC4789. The integration currently supports more than 100 games from the GameCube library.

“The server is on fire, but everything is fine. Grandma will be here soon to fix it. The hype is real,” the Retrochievements account tweeted less than 10 minutes after the launch. Update: RetroAchievements' servers are back online.

Dolphin's blog has at least a partial list of supported popular Gamecube games:

“You can collect achievements passively just by playing the game, and every set is guaranteed to have progression achievements that follow the main story and goals of the game. Each set is guaranteed to have progression achievements that follow the main storyline and goals of the game,” explains JMC4789. When you win a game, your RetroAchievements account is marked as having won the game. On the other hand, you can also be more active in your search for achievements. You can always go to the game page on retroachievements.org, or you can access it from the Progress tab of Dolphin's Achievements menu. There you can see which achievements you have, which ones you are missing, and how to get them. This can be a great way to find new challenges in a game you have played many times.

RetroAchievements supports two separate modes for earning trophies, keeping in mind that emulators allow players to hack games and use save states: softcore mode and hardcore mode are. Turning on hardcore mode disables some of the emulator's features, allowing for a “more console faithful experience.”

In recent years, many emulators have added support for RetroAchievements, including the PlayStation 1 emulator DuckStatation and the PSP emulator PPSSPP. Most widely used through RetroArch, a popular front-end that bundles many emulators, RetroAchievements has some amazingly cool features that allow you to do more than beat bosses and earn honor. For example, some game integrations track speedrunning records, while others support “rich presence,” tracking your progress and actions in a game. If you follow your friends on RetroAchievements.org, you can see what they are doing in-game, for example You can see in near real time what level they are at in Super Mario Bros, whether they are little Mario or powering up in Fire Flower.

Dolphin's RetroAchievements support is currently limited to the GameCube. Also, the latest development build is required to enable this feature. To enable this feature, please enable RetroAchievements.org integration from the Dolphin Tools menu and enter your username and password.

For more information, please see this Dolphin blog.