Dolphin Wii emulator

A buddy and I tried to get the Dolphin Wii emulator working on my Windows XP VM.  I wanted to see what the games would look like in HD.  I had a USB Bluetooth adapter plugged in.  Mating my Wiimotes to the Windows PC was really easy.  Most of the set up was really easy.  Getting a game to run was a bit of a journey.

I popped in my New Super Mario Brothers disc and tried to run it.  Everything started to freeze.  It got to the point that the host Linux operating system started to have i/o errors.  I had to reboot the computer.  The computer wouldn't come back up.  It wouldn't start!  I couldn't get into the bios.  At this point, I thought I had a hardware failure.  I decided to take the Wii game out of the DVD drive.  That is when I noticed the blinking light on the DVD drive.  I hit the eject button and the disk ejected.  The computer started to boot.  The joys of DRM.

After getting passed the DRM problem, I was able to start Mario Kart Wii.  I had the resolution and quality set to the lowest settings. The menu's rendered between 57 and 60 fps.  When trying to start the game, the game rendered at 2 fps.  It was obvious that my current setup is not powerful enough.  I may end up upgrading to a 64bit Windows 7 install.  I may have to upgrade my AMD Radeon HD6570 to something with more horsepower.  I might invest in an HD7870, but I haven't decided yet.