After troubled development in the first years, Dolphin became free and open-source software and subsequently gained support for Wii emulation.

Dolphin was first released on 22 September 2003[30] by Henrik Rydgård (ector) and F|RES as an experimental GameCube emulator that could boot up and run commercial games.

Adjustments to the emulator had allowed users to play select games at full speed for the first time, audio was dramatically improved, and the graphical capabilities were made more consistent aside from minor problems.

[42][9] By the end of November 2010, the developers had fixed most of the sound issues such as crackling, added compatibility with more games, and increased the overall emulation speed and accuracy.

[43] On 25 December 2012, version 3.5 of Dolphin was released, featuring support for emulating the GameCube Broadband Adapter and Microphone accessories.

The developer has cited the Samsung Galaxy S4 as one of the first phones capable of playing games at higher speeds, but even it would have considerable performance limitations.

On 22 September 2013, version 4.0 of Dolphin was released, featuring back-end improvements to OpenGL rendering and OpenAL audio, broader controller support, networking enhancements, and performance tweaks for macOS and Linux builds.

[11] The Dolphin Team stated that it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the 32-bit builds, and that the 32-bit releases simply offered an inferior experience compared to their 64-bit counterparts.

32-bit Android builds suffered from similar issues, but ARMv7 support[54] remained for another year until the AArch64 JIT was ready and devices were available.

[73] Two experimental features, both of which never reached maturity, were removed in May 2017: The Direct3D 12 renderer – which found a suitable replacement in the Vulkan back-end – and the alternative CPU emulator JIT IL.

[74][75] Continuing this year's earlier work on graphics performance-related matters, Dolphin developers implemented a solution for the long-standing problem known as shader compilation stuttering.

The solution that the Ubershaders – in development since 2015[77] – present to the problem was to emulate the Wii's and GameCube's rendering pipeline by way of an interpreter running on the host system's graphics processor itself until a specialized shader has been compiled and can be used for future frames, at a lower cost to performance.

[76] 18 August 2017 marks the culmination of work started in late 2016 when the cross-platform MMORPG Dragon Quest X was added to the list of playable games just two months before support for the online functionality of the Wii version was dropped.

[78] The addition relied on a number of features that had been previously added to the emulator simply for the sake of accuracy, such as support for the Wii Shop Channel.

[83] In April 2019, Dolphin added 3 new features; unification of common video backends, a NetPlay Server browser, and Wii MotionPlus emulation.

[85] Additionally, the article claims that RVZ approaches or excels the file sizes of "scrubbed" WIA and GCZ disk images while remaining lossless.

[86] This new emulation fixed a crash present in Driver: San Francisco and other games that attempt to initiate DS communications.

[86] In May 2021, Dolphin added support for macOS on ARM64, which had been a heavily requested feature following the announcement of the Mac transition to Apple Silicon.

In addition to supporting transfer of data to and from emulated GBA titles, up to four Game Boy Advance instances can be simultaneously active in Dolphin at once, making multiplayer in games that require the GBA such as The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles viable within Dolphin locally and via netplay.

[92] In May 2023, they announced that the Steam release would be indefinitely postponed due to a cease and desist citing the DMCA from Nintendo sent to Valve.

Project treasurer Pierre Bourdon, who was named in the email, stated that the presence of an AES-128 key used to encrypt Wii game discs in the emulator's source code may have allowed Nintendo to take down the Steam release.

YouTuber and video game developer Dimitris Giannakis stated on his Modern Vintage Gamer channel that he found evidence, in 2020, of a user named "Littlemac123" warning about the presence of the keys in the RetroArch Core source code.

[95] On July 20, 2023, the Dolphin developers announced that the planned Steam release for the emulator has been cancelled due to legal objections from Nintendo.

[100] Features of Dolphin include the ability to start games regardless of region, record tool-assisted speedruns,[101][102][103] and the use of cheat codes with Action Replay and Gecko.

Rumble and motion control support was added for DualShock 4s and DolphiniOS now functions properly for users of the Odyssey jailbreak.

[141] A writer from Wololo.net wrote regarding the performance of DolphiniOS: "On my iPad Pro 10.5-inch (A10X), Mario Kart Wii works pretty well and playing through the first two tracks of the Mushroom Cup provided excellent results!

[143] In reaction to the removal of Direct3D 9 support, Dolphin developer Tino created an unofficial fork called Ishiiruka on 18 October 2013.

[152] John Linneman of Eurogamer talks in the October 2016 Metroid Prime episode of their Digital Foundry Retro video series about Ishiiruka.

It's also worth noting that this version of Dolphin helps avoid the shader compilation stutters that plagued the official release of the emulator and it leads to a much more fluid experience.

[153] PrimeHack is a version of Dolphin created by shiiion that has been modified to play Metroid Prime: Trilogy on PC with keyboard and mouse controls.