Dolphin uses DirectInput on Windows, so basically anything works. If you're in the market for a PC gamepad, it's hard to go wrong with a 360 controller.
Man I love these guys. They strive for accurate emulation first and foremost, but they still care about giving the emulator the power to enhance games in such amazing ways. They really have their priorities straight.
I have one of the high-end i7 rMBPs with an Nvidia 750M chip inside. In Boot Camp, I get 60fps the vast majority of the time playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid Prime Trilogy with mostly default settings — albeit at 1.0-1.5x internal resolution. Can't complain! Love having all the best Wii games on the go, original jaggies and everything.
Yeah, this is mainly because Apple's OpenGL drivers are terrible. They're eternally behind the GPU vendor drivers in OpenGL version/feature availability and have worse performance. I'm crossing my fingers that in a few years the clean slate of glNext will give Apple a chance to fix this, but not counting on it...
Hilariously, most of my multiplatform games run better through Parallels (pointing to my BootCamp drive) than in OSX native. How that works I have no idea. (Dolphin is demanding enough to require BootCamp for 60fps, though.)
The hack seems like it was possible because the engine was designed to run at arbitrary framerates, and the romhacker (ehw?) found framerate and vsync-related functions in the demo version of the game, which actually has debug symbols baked in!
