Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 are all designed for 64-bit.ĭedicated 32-bit processors are very outdated and cannot run Dolphin at playable speeds ¶ The unintended side effect to that drop is that Dolphin no longer supported any operating systems that were primarily 32-bit. The aging operating system's days were numbered simply by that, and once the move was made to C++11, there was no going back. The only reason for dropping XP support is because the latest Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler doesn't support Windows XP. With a little under 10% of our users still using the OS, Windows XP was a significant share of our users, but at the same time the team made a decision not to let any particular OS hold us back. Windows XP has been unsupported for months ¶ĭolphin has already dropped Windows XP support. But the past few months have seen a reoccurring theme: 32-bit builds break, and many of the developers question its worth. From the insane to the mundane, hundreds of ideas will come and go every year as for how to make things better. The Dolphin Emulator team is constantly searching for ways to improve the development pipeline. Despite that, we still find ourselves at a crossroads just a few months later. Well over one third of our Windows downloads for Dolphin 4.0 were the 32-bit variant a huge share of our userbase.
