How to play RedCard in widescreen using the Dolphin emulator
RedCard, known as RedCard 2003 in the US, is without question the greatest football beat ‘em up of all time. The game follows most of the laws of football, but allows for heavy tackles and special moves. It was released in 2002 on Nintendo GameCube / Xbox / PlayStation 2 and was developed by Point of View in partnership with Midway in their extreme sports series.
This article is a tutorial to play this classic game in widescreen format using the Dolphin emulator on PC / laptop.
1. Get a copy of the GameCube rom
If you don’t have your original disc you could buy it from eBay, then on a softmodded Wii you can use CleanRip to make a backup of the disc in .iso format.
2. Install the Dolphin emulator and run the game
Dolphin is an emulator for playing GameCube and Wii games on PC/laptop; download and install it from https://dolphin-emu.org. Once installed, open the rom, play it and press FullScr to toggle FullScreen mode.
3. Set up a controller
You may wish to use a controller:
- One option is to use a PS4 controller; DS4Windows is a good open source utility to enable this in Windows.
- Another option is to use an original GameCube controller and for this you will need to obtain the ‘WUP-028’ USB adapter and set it up.
See ‘Options -> Controller Settings’ for additional settings.
You can download a pdf of the original manual from https://vimm.net/manual/GameCube, which includes info on the controls.
4. Modify settings in Dolphin
Assuming that you have a widescreen TV / monitor, the following are the recommended base settings:
- Options -> Graphics Settings -> General -> Aspect Ratio -> ‘Stretch to window’
- Options -> Graphics Settings -> Enhancements -> Internal Resolution -> ‘3x for 1080p’ (or alternatively ‘6x for 4k’ etc)
- Options -> Graphics Settings -> Enhancements -> Widescreen hack (on)
- Options -> Configuration -> Advanced -> Enable Emulated CPU Clock Override (on, 400%)
The standard widescreen hack above works well for the most part, but if you try playing the game at this point you will notice that the players disappear when they are near the edge of the screen. This ‘culling’ happens where players are outside of the 4:3 area on the screen. In order to disable culling follow the extra steps below:
- [Right click on the game] -> Properties -> AR Codes -> Add New Code -> Name: ‘no culling (players)’ -> Code: [copy the code from here (it is the same code for PAL / NTSC versions)]
- Similarly create a new code for ‘no culling (supporters)’
With these codes enabled you should notice that the culling is gone!
5. [optional] Apply additional cheat codes
Additional codes can also be applied in a similar way and turned on and off as required.
Links
These are my best scores for most injuries: https://medium.com/@MadDog1642/how-many-times-is-it-possible-to-injure-the-opposition-in-a-game-of-red-card-3f52ea2d0107.
The no culling codes from Step 4 were identified using the brute force technique shared by Charlton_3393 here; this used an experimental VR fork of the Dolphin project.
This is my YouTube channel which has some examples of RedCard running in widescreen: https://www.youtube.com/@MadDog1642
