Add per-game controller configs for Dolphin, and make the Dolphin folder portable

This will explain how to make two key changes/improvements to your Dolphin emulator, regardless of what front end you utilize. I happen to use and am a big fan of Launchbox (specifically the BigBox portion). I can duplicate the whole Launchbox folder plus all the emulators and ROMs between my PCs. However, some emulators like to place configuration files in your personal Windows directories rather than store them locally in their own, making it more difficult to duplicate between computers. Dolphin is one such application, but this will fix the problem.

Nothing I’m showing below is undocumented on the Dolphin site. It’s simply a little confusing, so hopefully this will help make it easier to implement.

Disclaimer: Below instructions are using the latest version of Dolphin (as of 22 APR 2018 that is 5.0-7062).

How to make your Dolphin install portable:

Note: before this step I recommend you note/document any specific settings you had (graphics specifically). Although I explain how to copy your old settings back to the new folder that will be created inside the Dolphin directory, I found that not all the settings actually copied over.

First, add a blank text file to your Dolphin directory called “portable.txt”. This will force Dolphin to save all the config files to the Dolphin directory under a folder named “User” rather than in the windows user documents directory.

Once you’ve done this and run Dolphin once, you can copy your old files from your Documents directory (My Documents\Dolphin Emulator\*.*) to the dolphin\User directory that was created to make it portable. You may have to recreate some of your settings even after copying them over. I had to re-do my video settings.

For official documentation on this see: https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/guides/controlling-global-user-directory/

How to load per-game controller configurations:

Create and save your per-game controller settings:

1. Under “Controllers – Wii Remote 1 (Configure)” set your configuration for the game.
2. Save the configuration profile by giving it a name (preferably either generic i.e. “Sideways” or “vertical” or related to the specific game) and press “save”
3. Right click on the game in the Dolphin menu list of games and select “Properties”
   1. Note that you must have specified the game directories in Dolphin’s settings for it to find and list the games!
4. In the game properties menu there is a button in the lower left labeled “Edit User Config”. Select that to edit the config for that game.
   1. Note that you must specify your text editor in Dolphin’s settings for it to open the .ini (text based) file for editing.
5. There may already be some pre-set conditions. Just add the control settings at the end, or overwrite anything in [Controls] if already there.
6. The text you add will be [Controls] on one line and the next will be the WiimoteProlfileX (where X= the player # of the controller you are setting) = config file you set in step 2.
   1. The instructions are located at How-to set game ini settings per game.
   2. Do not add the .ini to the end of the config when you type it. Just the name of the config file.
   3. Basically you just paste the following into the ini file you’ve opened for editing:

[Controls]
WiimoteProfile1 = DKCountry

Replace the name after “WiimoteProfile1” (I used DKCountry in the example) with whatever you saved the controller config as in step 2 above.