Yep, we really did it. Finally, after 20 days of string freeze and almost 3 months of feature freeze (totally worth it), we're officially declaring Dolphin "it must new" 3.0 as released!

So, what's actually new in this release?

• Tons of bug fixes: This totally deserves to be a major point for this release. There's been roughly 2500 commits between 2.0 and this release, so there are REALLY too many changes to mention. All kinds of stuff from strange UI behavior, crashes, graphical glitches and other sorts of problems were fixed. For example, many games which didn't boot at all in Dolphin are working fine now.
  
• Improvements to the user interface: The configuration dialogs were restructured in a more sensible manner to ease emulator usage for new users. The video config dialog received a complete overhaul and features a description panel for each option now.
  
• Various feature additions: This release also features support for the Wiimote speaker, EFB format change emulation, a gfx debugger, audio dumping, and many other stuff
  
• Low level DSP emulation: Thanks to numerous fixes to the LLE emulator engine, audio emulation in Dolphin is close to perfect now (provided that one has the necessary DSP dumps of course)
  
• New API support: Added a D3D11 video backend and an XAudio2 audio backend
  
• Removal of the plugin interface: The 2.0 release already had seen the introduction of plugin rewrites; the new plugins have been brought to feature parity and replaced them so well, that we decided to merge all plugins the Core. Further improvements are better suited as additions in the current infrastructure since this architecture allows for a much better integration with the other parts of Dolphin.
  
• Translation support: Recently we introduced supporting for translating Dolphin into any language. However, due to a lack of well-done translations it was decided to only ship a set of eight translations (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Greek, Hungarian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish) with Dolphin 3.0.
  
• Performance/Accuracy: There have been some performance optimizations (especially in the texture decoder), but generally speaking performance decreased in favor of more accurate hardware emulation.
  
• Building Dolphin: The Windows build uses MSVC 2010 now, Linux users should use the new CMake build system. OS X people still compile Dolphin via SCons.

As (something like) the release manager for 3.0, I'm proud of this release. It's a lot more polished compared to 2.0 (especially the user interface) and should suffer from much fewer bugs. However, we of course still have a lot room for improvement, and for sure will further work on getting closer to perfect Gamecube/Wii/Triforce emulation.

To bring things to a close, thanks again to everyone who helped at making this release possible and to everybody who anticipated this release!


btw: To anyone who was wondering, binary packages should soon be uploaded to our homepage. For now, this is a source only release, which can be checked out from the 3.0 tag of our project page at Google Code.
For now, these two binary packages can be used until we have some official binaries.