GPNDS Released (Genesis Emulator for Nintendo DS)

January 30th, 2006, 20:15 Posted By: wraggster



bananaboy has released a port of the Megadrive/Genesis emulator, Genesis Plus for the Nintendo DS, heres what the coder posted:

<blockquote>Hi folks,

I've ported Charles MacDonald's Genesis Plus emulator to the DS! It currently runs very slowly (about 1 frame per second) and doesn't make use of any specialised DS hardware apart from the palette and the hardware scaling.

It's available here:
http://www.humbug.net/gpnds.zip

It renders the MD screen to a 512x256 extended rotation bitmap in mode 3 and uses hardware scaling to scale it to fit the DS screen.

Source is included (in fact, there is only source, no binary). It uses devkitpro. I also created a VS.NET 2003 project file (which just runs make). gpnds can be compiled to use a statically linked in GBFS filesystem, or a single statically linked in rom image (converted using bin2s). No roms are included in this archive! Sound is untested/unimplemented (and #ifdefed out by default).

This is just a sort of first pass release. I'm not sure if I've got the energy to port this to use the actual DS hardware (which would result in huge speed increases) so I'm putting it out there in case anyone is interested in toying with it. As it stands, it's really not playable, so this is really just a demonstration, I guess.

Here is a quick how-to from the readme.txt:

1. Copy a smd or bin file to the root directory of gpnds.

2. If it's an smd file, run:
grom\grom -bin filename.smd
to convert it to a raw image.

3. Run:
swap filename.bin rom.bin
to swap the byte order of the bin file (there was code in the original
genesis plus to do this at load time, however, I wanted to remove as
many static arrays as possible).

4. Run:
bin2s rom.bin > gp/rom.s
to create the data file.

5. Run:
make

5. Make sure the entire thing isn't over 4Mb! Copy the .ds.gba file to
your flash card (or use whatever method you are familiar with for running
homebrew).

Keys are:

NDS d-pad maps to megadrive d-pad
NDS x, b, a map to megadrive a, b, c
NDS start maps to megadrive start
NDS select resets the emulator </blockquote>

Download Here --> http://nintendo-ds.dcemu.co.uk/genesisplusnds.shtml

There are 8 comments - Join In and Discuss Here