Nintendo GameCube Emulator Dolphin Is Heading to Steam

The popular Nintendo GameCube emulator, Dolphin, is soon going to become available to download on Valve's Steam marketplace. As the years have continued onward, emulation has become one of the most frequent and useful ways to revisit games from legacy PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo platforms. And while most emulators often have to be downloaded from lesser-known sites, Dolphin is about to finally land on one of the biggest PC platforms around. 

Announced this week, Dolphin is planned to release on Steam at an undetermined date in Q2 2023 (April-June). This version of Dolphin will arrive in the form of Early Access as the developers behind Dolphin would like to "solicit feedback on what features Steam users would be interested in before we proceed with a full release." Early access is planned to end before 2023 comes to a close, though, so a full release should be right around the corner. 

"Dolphin Emulator is your one-way ticket to nostalgia if you're looking to relive classics from the big N's cube-shaped and motion controlled consoles," says the official description of Dolphin on its Steam page. "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. 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."

It's worth noting that even though Dolphin will be coming to Steam soon enough, the emulator itself won't natively come with roms of popular GameCube games. Dolphin alone is only "tool to run legally obtained copies" of games that stem from GameCube and Nintendo Wii. As such, even if you do pick up Dolphin for yourself on Steam, you'll have to find another way to get ahold of the specific roms that you'll then want to emulate. 

How do you feel about seeing Dolphin finally come to such a major platform like Steam? Do you intend to download this emulator for yourself once it does launch? Let me know either down in the comments or reach out to me on Twitter at @MooreMan12. 

[H/T Nintendo Life]