Emulator

It's both supported and not supported, so this really fits in my humble opinion!

I don't see how that position makes any sense. How can an OS be both supported and not supported? What does the Dolphin team define "support" as?

I was making a joke. It comes down to the whole "It should work" but "No one actively maintains it."

It was working as of 4.0, which is why the google code lists it as supported, I guess.

Basically, it was working, and probably should still work, but no one has checked in forever.

Think of it like quantum mechanics, if that helps. :P

Oh, I thought you were serious about that. Your new explanation makes more sense and is about what I was expecting. I think FreeBSD should be removed from the FAQ in that case, at least for when 5.0 comes out.

I would rather someone just test it and find out, personally.

Personally I think it would be best to define what an OS being officially supported actually means to the project and go from there.

If I were to make a list of criteria it would be something like this:

• builds for that OS are available to download from dolphin-emu.org
• developers will accept bugs from Dolphin running in that OS and will work to fix them
• support is offered for running Dolphin in that OS in the forums
• site and wiki guides for different operating systems include the OS

And going by that criteria I would say that FreeBSD shouldn't be listed as officially supported.

The traditional criteria is "It can be built and it can work". There aren't many that fit that qualifications, so I think we don't need anything more complicated.

The issue with FreeBSD is that it isn't being maintained. One could make an argument that only operating systems with maintained compatibility with Dolphin should be included. I would have no problems with that.

A big list of complex stuff? Completely unnecessary!

Well my main concerns are that

1. FreeBSD support doesn't appear to be maintained aside from maybe briefly testing it out once a stable release it set to come out (as you mentioned) which isn't true of pretty much every other supported OS

2. the Dolphin FAQ and GitHub readme seem to contradict each other and I think that really should be fixed

FreeBSD doesn't even build on master at the moment. I filed a PR to get it building again (https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/2590) but it doesn't actually run games (at least in the JIT) at the moment; it gives an error, as mentioned in the PR.

It's safe to say that FreeBSD isn't supported at the moment.

Well, FreeBSD is fixed now! Maybe it should be added to the github wiki?

Well to fix the issue the readme needs to be updated but adding a FreeBSD page to the wiki sounds like a good idea too (I suppose "Building for FreeBSD").

Did the changeset get merged into stable? I'm sure the FreeBSD ports people would appreciate if it were, otherwise I can email the maintainers with the patch once 5.0 comes out, I guess.

This is something I think that should be figured out for the 5.0 release. Personally I would use the same wording from the GitHub page for the FAQ "not officially supported but might work". That way we can let users know it may work but testing/compatibility etc. may not be up to par and that official builds are not provided.

With 5.0 now out can this please be addressed? IMO the best approach here is to just copy the GitHub page in the FAQ and say "Unix-like systems other than Linux are not officially supported but might work."

Also there are some other issues here that should probably be cleaned up at the same time:

• Windows Vista is no longer officially supported as of 5.0 (https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2016/06/24/dolphin-50-release/) so why is it still listed here? At the very least it should say something like Vista is not officially supported but might still work. Otherwise this info is misleading.

• There were users complaining before that Dolphin was experiencing issues on OS X Mavericks? Was this determined to be a real issue or not? If Dolphin does in fact have issues running on Mavericks we should probably think about bumping that up to a version that works properly (10.10 or 10.11).

• It is probably worth noting that the Android version is not the same as the desktop version of Dolphin and is still in alpha. The FAQ doesn't make any distinction here and makes it seem like it works the same as any other version.

• Adding x64 as recommended is redundant as Dolphin no longer has 32-bit support. In fact this should probably be stated here as it is not clear in the FAQ that 32-bit support was dropped.

To be honest I think the whole https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#what-operating-systems-are-supported paragraph should probably be rewritten at this point.

Vista is confirmed to work still in 5.0

JMC4789 wrote:

Vista is confirmed to work still in 5.0

It was listed as being not officially supported in the 5.0 release announcement. The FAQ makes no indication of this. Also (unless this info is wrong) Vista users are required to have various updates installed for Dolphin to work correctly which is also not indicated anywhere.

I've updated the FAQ part now.

Vista technically works but there are so few Vista users it's not worth supporting or maintaining. When it breaks, it breaks.

JMC4789 wrote:

I've updated the FAQ part now.

Thanks. I made some edits if you want to take a look at them:

"Dolphin is a cross-platform emulator that runs on Windows (7 and up are officially supported but Vista may work), Linux, and OS X (Yosemite and up). For its ease of use and additional graphics backend options, Windows is recommended. Other Unix-like systems (such as FreeBSD) may work but are not officially supported. Operating systems are required to be 64-bit to run Dolphin.

As well, Dolphin runs on Android 5.0 and up on 64-bit Android devices. The Android version of Dolphin is in alpha and should not be expected to work as well as the PC counterpart."

• "Cross-platform" is generally hyphenated I believe.
• Noted that Vista may work but is not officially supported. I think this is better wording especially for if/when Vista support ends up breaking and no one notices.
• "Mac OS X" is Apple's old branding so changed to "OS X". This should probably be changed again down the line when Sierra comes out but that can be dealt with then.
• Removed the 7 specific info in the next sentence as only 7 and up are officially supported.
• Added missing period.

Also this issue can now be marked as fixed. Thanks for updating the FAQ.