iChris4/dolphinXR v0.5

DolphinVR Redux v0.5 - The Fall Update

on GitHub

DolphinVR Redux v0.5 brings VR game patches, which put your hands and your head into the games themselves, an in-game menu you use without taking the headset off, a large round of Meta Quest performance work, and automatic updates on Windows.

Highlights

• VR game patches. The arm cannon follows your controller in the Metroid Prime games, the gun and sword follow it in Red Steel 1 and 2, Skyward Sword reads your controller's true pose, and Twilight Princess, The Wind Waker, Wii Sports and Shadow the Hedgehog can be played in first person.
• An in-game VR menu. Click the left thumbstick during a game to pause, fast forward, change settings, rebind controls, manage savestates and hunt overrides, all inside the headset.
• Faster on Meta Quest. Super Mario Galaxy went from 42 to 60 fps and Super Mario Sunshine from 49 to 60 fps at native resolution in my tests with "Smart Foveation EFB".
• Automatic updates on Windows. This is the first version that updates itself. See "Installing" below.
• Rebased on the latest Dolphin development builds (October 2026).

VR game patches

VR game patches are small add-ons, made for one game, that read your VR controllers and headset and change the game to match. They ship with DolphinVR Redux and many are on by default for their game. You can turn each one on or off, and change its settings, in:

• PC: the game's Properties > Patches > VR Patches.
• Quest: the game's VR config > VR Patches.
• In the headset: the VR menu's VR Patches section.

The patches available in this release (NTSC-U versions):

• Metroid Prime (GameCube, 1.00 and 1.02): the arm cannon follows your controller (ported from PrimedGun's tracking, by Nobbie), modern controls (strafe with the left thumbstick, turn with the right), change visors with a gesture next to your head, beam quick swap, look at an object to scan it, and wide culling.
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GameCube): arm cannon, modern controls, visor gesture, beam quick swap, no black bars in cutscenes or in morph ball, smooth scan lines, and wide culling.
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Metroid Prime Trilogy (Wii): arm cannon, turn with the right thumbstick, visor gesture, wide culling, and beam quick swap in the Trilogy.
• Red Steel: the gun follows your controller and shoots where it points; wide culling.
• Red Steel 2: fixed rendering, the revolver and the sword follow your controller, with the sword's true pose and true aim; wide culling.
• The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: the game reads your controller's true pose, so the sword follows your hand.
• First-person views: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (GameCube), The Wind Waker, Wii Sports, and Shadow the Hedgehog (also the Reloaded mod). In Shadow, the weapon is held in your controller's hand, and the game runs at your headset's refresh rate.
• Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader: an optional "VR Wide Terrain Culling" patch (Properties > Patches, off by default) that fills the holes in the Death Star surface when you look around.

"Wide culling" makes a game draw what your headset can see, not only what its TV camera saw, so objects no longer pop in and out at the edges of your view.

In-game VR menu

• Click the left thumbstick during a game to open it. The game keeps running behind it, without your VR input.
• Tabs: Main (pause, fast forward), Graphics, Audio, Controls (rebind your controllers, save controller profiles), VR (frame rate and VR settings), Overrides, Savestates and Stats (performance overlay).
• Overrides: hunt shaders, textures, elements and hide codes inside the headset, with a laser pointer to pick what you see.
• Move the panel with the grab bar under it.
• Dolphin's messages now appear in the menu while you are in VR, instead of in an invisible window that could freeze the game.
• Quest: record gameplay video from the menu (left eye, MP4, saved to Movies/DolphinXR).

Meta Quest

• Performance: draw recording on a helper thread, cached GPU descriptor sets, culling of what is behind your head, and reading back the game's frame and its occlusion queries without waiting on the GPU. The read-backs took Super Mario Galaxy from 42 to 60 fps and Super Mario Sunshine from 49 to 60 fps, and Super Mario Sunshine and Metroid Prime 3 now use them by default.
• Smart Foveated EFB: foveated rendering is now applied only to the render passes it actually speeds up, measured per game and remembered.
• Faster pixel format changes in games such as Mario Kart Wii.
• Fixed: missing objects on the Quest's GPU (Melee's shields, the boards and rings of Sonic Riders), green videos in Kirby Air Ride, a freeze while recording the screen, a black screen on the first launch after an update, freezes in Metroid Prime Trilogy, and flickering and distortion in the Trilogy.

Flat screen and passthrough

• With "Launch games in VR" off, games play on a flat screen in the headset. It now uses the game's aspect ratio, can show the game in 3D, and turns passthrough on (on headsets that support it).
• Switch between VR and the flat screen during a game, from the VR menu.
• The Wii System Menu is shown on the flat screen.
• The virtual screen is now placed 2 m away by default.

Motion controls

• The Wii MotionPlus and accelerometer are emulated from your VR controllers' motion the way a real Wii Remote measures it, from controller input read 250 times per second.
• The Wii pointer maps the game's screen 1:1.
• New Wii Remote Motion Tester (Tools menu on PC) to check and record what a game receives.
• Steam Frame controllers are supported (thanks Neville Hiramanek).

Game profiles

• New: Wii Sports Resort, Red Steel, Red Steel 2, Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II (PAL, thanks NMSteeven) and the Wii System Menu.
• Updated: Metroid Prime, Echoes, Corruption and Trilogy (3D HUD, menus, scan visor, cutscenes, the charged shot's warp in each eye), Mario Kart Wii (the minimap on the screen, the crowd's Mii faces, menus), Sonic Adventure 2: Battle (capsule icons stay in 3D), Rogue Leader (menus), Shadow the Hedgehog (bloom and subtitles), Twilight Princess, The Wind Waker, Wii Sports (Mii faces in stereo, Boxing) and Skyward Sword.

For profile makers

• Pick on Screen: click what you see to find its draw, in the PC hunting tools and the hide code editor, or aim at it with the laser pointer in the headset.
• Overrides can require a camera depth, for HUDs drawn in perspective.
• VR Patches pane in the game's Properties, under Patches.
• Agent Server (off by default, local only): a built-in MCP server that lets an AI assistant see the game and help you build overrides and VR patches.

Stability

• Windows: a crash writes a report in User/Logs, and a lost GPU (a driver reset) now stops the game cleanly with a report of what the GPU was doing.
• Gecko codes are reinstalled after every savestate load.
• Many rendering fixes for menus, depth effects and render-to-texture panes.

Installing

• Savestates from v0.4 do not load in v0.5. Make an in-game save before updating, and load it after.
• Windows: unzip DolphinVR-Redux-v0.5-Windows.zip and run Dolphin.exe. Install this version by hand: v0.4 cannot update itself. From now on, DolphinVR Redux checks for a new release when it starts and offers to install it (Settings > General > Auto Update; Help > Check for Updates).
• Meta Quest: install DolphinVR-Redux-v0.5-Quest.apk with SideQuest, or with adb install -r DolphinVR-Redux-v0.5-Quest.apk. It installs over v0.4 and keeps your settings.

Thanks

• Nobbie: PrimedGun's arm cannon tracking, which the Metroid Prime patches are based on.
• Neville Hiramanek: Steam Frame controller support.
• NMSteeven: the Phantasy Star Online profile, Skip Background Fill and moving-scene fixes.
• Greg Myers: Linux build fixes and the Docker build.
• The Dolphin team, for the emulator this is built on.

Full changelog: v0.4...v0.5