Temporary disable real-time protection and test. If the error disappears, add Dolphin’s entire folder to your antivirus exclusion list.

Navigate to Dolphin’s user directory (by default: Documents\Dolphin Emulator\ on Windows, ~/.dolphin-emu/ on Linux/macOS). Inside, locate the Wii folder.

The Dolphin folder may be set to "Read-Only," or the user may lack administrative rights to modify files in that directory.

On the screen, the main menu didn't show "Start Game" or "Options." Instead, the 3D model of Ecco the dolphin was swimming, but not in the ocean. The texture mapping had glitched. The water was a static, grainy grey—like the carpet of Elias's own room.

On the third dive, an old engineer named Maris volunteered to ride Dolphin's diagnostic thread. She had once been a poet before she learned to speak in kernel panics and checksums. In the control room, with warm coffee turning cold in her hands, she scrolled through the probe's last transmissions. Among the binary waves, she found odd packets: patterns that didn't match sensors. They were rhythmic, almost musical — a sequence that repeated like whale song, but compressed, encoded inside routine telemetry.