Dolphin is already handling syncing and real world timing itself anyway, so Idle Skipping is an easy and safe performance boost. This way, the idle loop finishes faster with the majority of waste cycles skipped. But even Dolphin eventually came to support upscaling Wii games to higher resolutions and increasing their framerate.
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Whenever the game starts idling, Dolphin detects the idle loop and casually nudges the cycle counter a bit so the emulated CPU thinks more time has passed than actually has, and keeps nudging until the loop is complete. The original Skyward Sword launched on the Wii in 2011, and players figured out how to run the game on PC using the emulator Dolphin. I've never played it though, but I'm playing through Skyward Sword right now on Dolphin, it would be crazy to try and map the controls to an Xbox controller. Every one of those cycles is going to cost an order of magnitude more cycles for Dolphin to emulate, yet they are literally doing nothing! So, we skip them. Or try play Twilight Princess if you haven't, It was a Gamecube port so I don't think it relies on much waggling and cursor action. While this is all normal, emulating this really sucks for Dolphin. Until a set time (measured by the cycle counter) has expired or an interrupt arrives, the CPU will dutifully burn cycles doing nothing. In the Lanayru Mine, speak with Golo the Goron.
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This isn't a game where we can sneak shake onto a button and savor the experience, Dolphin needed to be able to create complex motions and report the correct data in order for a game like this to be playable. At the beginning of the quest, go to Lanayru Desert to retrieve the song of the Thunder Dragon.
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It's indelibly tied to MotionPlus technology. So if a CPU is waiting for something brief, such as for a frame to finish rendering and scanout, the CPU will idle loop, spinning in place doing nothing but keeping itself alive and ready. And this brings out one of the problems to emulating Skyward Sword. Stopping a CPU is an involved process, and it takes a long time for it to wake up.