It's sad too, since the Wii is a console that makes it extraordinarily simple to dump your own game discs and use the emulator in a completely legal fashion.
In case you haven't heard of it, Valve sells the Steam Deck: a handheld gaming console with Steam as its primary UI. Under the hood, it's a low-power AMD x86 system running Linux (specifically, Valve's SteamOS distro). So having Dolphin on Steam would be the optimal way to make Dolphin available to Steam Deck users, just like having Dolphin available on the Google Play Store is the optimal way to make Dolphin available to Android users even though side-loading is an option.
That used to be true, but today, ROM sites are very easily discoverable on Google. People also sell ROMs on hard drives and SD cards on Amazon, many of them qualifying for Prime delivery.
I'm pretty sure it hasn't been true at any point in the past 25 years. ROM sites have always been easy to find, even pre-Google.
I now it is legally, but morally I don't think people are doing something wrong here.
Should it be? No.
Anyone interested in emulating a Wii or GameCube for legitimate reasons will easily find Dolphin and can install it on their Steam Deck.
Anyone?
Really, anyone?
rubs forehead
It's easier to have it on Steam. When I was 15, 25 even, maybe I'm so excited and hellbent on getting an emulator that I actively figure out the 10 step process to sideload. As a casual, it's much nicer when it's one step.
Steam Deck isn't locked down. From Steam itself, you just "exit to desktop", and bam you're met with a KDE desktop. Running Linux. You can do whatever you want. Including installing emulators and games that aren't distributed on Steam. It only takes one step: "flatpak install dolphin-emu"
So what? If Nintendo fails to provide a way to buy the games on that device its on them. We really don't need to make excuses for corporations generating unneccesary E-waste due to their greed.
Convenience is important.
Which means a bit of hacking, which means you should already be capable enough to install emudeck on your steam deck. Which is vastly superior to any single emulator on steam itself.
Yet.
>Where can I download game ISOs/ROMs ?¶
>Short answer: You don't. Buy games and dump them with a Wii.
>Long answer: Downloading commercial games is illegal and thus strongly frowned upon by the Dolphin developers.
[1] https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#couldnt-dolphin-use-more-m...
Ps this is not a moral judgement, I would use it myself except I don't like Nintendo's style of games. I owned a Wii and bought some games but I was really bored. I modded it and downloaded everything I could get and not a single game could capture my attention. I missed good fpses, it was all party games and kiddyish/cartoonish stuff like Zelda and Mario. So I've never looked at Nintendo since. Perhaps these days their offers would be more interesting to me but I haven't checked.
This was in the early days of the Wii though, when it was still a big hype. So all the games I tried were launch titles or very soon after. I thought the motion controller thing was not very well worked out and more of a gimmick. I was expecting it to be more exact like with VR controllers these days.
When it was on its own website and hosted on its own servers, with mostly word of mouth (online) spreading it, Nintendo were probably not too happy, but accepting that it was legal.
But when Valve, who are sort of competing with Nintendo, host it and promote, that's another matter. Especially when many people do play games using it that they have not legally obtained.
- Steam Remote Play: Seamlessly playing your Wii games from your TV.
- Steam Workshop: Authoring, distribution, and management of modifications to the emulator.
- Steam Input: A powerful abstraction layer dealing with different controllers and the mapping of their inputs. Sharing and downloading input maps from the community is directly integrated.
- Steam cloud save: Share configuration and save data between computers.
- Steam's multiplayer API could potentially have made it much easier to use Dolphin for multiplayer games.
Most of these things can be achieved without Steam but they're less convenient, more difficult for non-technical users, and yet another thing to manage, update, and keep track of.
It really is one of the main reasons to do a Steam release. Seamlessly playing your savegames and save states on desktop PC over to Steam Deck and back again made RetroArch one of the killer Deck apps IMO.