I’ve been decompiling for the past (almost) two years, and it’s fun to see the bugs, compiler quirks, programmer superstitions, things that coincidentally work because of compiler behavior not because of correctness, as well as the things modern tooling would have caught that 30-year old versions of GCC hadn’t gotten around to yet.

There were even things I thought I had to manually optimize in the early 2000s that the GCC optimizer was already taking care of in the mid-90s.

Heh. Today I found thanks to the 9front people that some GB games used carts' sram as 'swap'.

games/gb didn't save the sram in the emulator save files, so upon restoring the snapshot and saving in the cartridge memory you got a mismatch. It got fixed really fast, the emulators are really simple plan9 C compared to anything else.

Right? I started reading them before I became a programmer. I think they helped me learn how to think about the inner workings of programs

What stands out to me is that they explain not just what changed, but why it was hard in the first place

It's got to be a major struggle maintaining motivation in the face of aggressive and ungrateful users. It's bad enough when they're giving you money, it must be much worse when they're not.

I was going to say that I'm glad it sounds like trifoce support is in mainline now.

Because some time ago I had multiple incompatible branches of Dolphin to support the games I played.

I'm not sure it was a half baked triforce fork but it was definitely not as polished as the main branch

JMC is the goat, I had the pleasure of reporting melee netplay bugs with him and he is just so Inquisitive and interested in everything.

> Triforce games can support two types of cards for saving: Magnetic Cards (magcards) and Integrated Circuit (IC) cards. Magcards are cheaper, fragile, and can only survive so many writes before failing. They have the added bonus of having a printable side, where the game can print a player's achievements and more. IC cards are more like old credit cards with a thicker plastic. They weren't printable, but were much sturdier.

Source with photos: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2026/02/16/rise-of-the-triforce...

It's referring to memory cards. This is the Triforce feature, almost every game on it uses cards for savegames. The arcades you're thinking of almost certainly had a version of Mario Kart Arcade GP - you may just not have played it.

It exists in US arcades. It's a similar concept as an AIME card which you use to authenticate when playing maimai, chunithm, dance dance revolution, dance around, beat mania, etc. Triforce IC cards store data instead of just being for authentication.

They don't: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-donations?pid=...

There was a thread on it a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040524

Though I don't know if you can count it as a "buried lede" if the first paragraph of the article is dedicated to it, with a big clickable banner, haha!

I imagine some of the original devs would be surprised anyone is still digging into their work at this level of detail 20+ years later

If they're still working for the same employer (quite possible with Nintendo), they may still be under NDA.

In all my years of emulation, I've never come across a malicious ROM for a major console.

Dolphin runs its own VM. Obviously anything is possible, but developing some kind of breakout-ROM which would infect the host machine is just way more engineering than I could imagine ever being worth it. The vector is just too complex, and the target (nerds downloading retro games) just isn't worth the squeeze.

Archive.org actually hosts a good chunk of the major Gamecube ROMs. Good luck!

There's tons of options, no-intro, redump, tosec, mame are all doing DAT files with file checksums.

That said, ROMs are basically never a malware vector as they have to exploit an issue in the emulators themselves and historically that hasn't really been seen. Typically malware related to roms happens with files included in the zip archives or by sites offering "downloaders" with embedded malware.

I've had pretty good success with CleanRip https://wiibrew.org/wiki/CleanRip#Wii_DAT_download for acquiring ROM files. With it, I was able to backup my entire personal collection with minimal fuss, and can now enjoy that collection in HD with Dolphin's various enhancements.

For verification you generally want the Redump database, which has checksums for most disc-based console releases. Unfortunately they seem to be offline at the moment, or I'd share a canonical link. Look around for that.

Now there's an interesting challenge. A ROM that does a VM breakout and runs a command on the host.