Starting today the feature-packed Dolphin Emulator drops Windows 7 support. For those unaware, the open-source Nintendo and Wii Emulator has been supporting the Windows 7 OS for almost a decade now.
In an official blog post, Dolphin Emulator has stated that Microsoft has discarded Windows 7. This caused a lot of problems for the developers. The developers were not able to bring the new and useful features of Dolphin to Windows 7 users.
Furthermore, almost all of the developers were using computers running on Windows 10 and Windows 11. Consequently, they were not able to test the latest versions of Dolphin Emulator on Windows 7 before making it available to the public.
Another problem developers had to battle was Direct3D11 support which affected LogicOps Emulation, and BSOD issues when using USB Passthrough.
Dolphin stated that,
“With the merging of Qt6 support on the Windows buildbot in 5.0-16393, Dolphin has dropped Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. Our minimum spec for Windows is now Windows 10. The currently released beta build is the last beta that will have support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1,”
Lastly, in a survey conducted by Dolphin, they found that only 0.29% of the emulator users were on Windows 7. So not many users are affected by the removal of support.
In a nutshell, all of the aforementioned reasons forced Dolphin to remove support for Windows 7.