Nintendo DS Emulation NEWS

Emulators for Nintendo DS

Name NesterDS

Author Rich

Website http://www.telefragged.com/thefatal/index.php?content=inc_si_ds.htm

Description NES emulator for the DS

Screenshots

Download

Here v0.2 6th July 2005

Here v0.1 27/06/2005

Information

This is a DS port of Nester. As you might've guessed. There are a ton of issues, and
it still bothers me that I'm storing the NES ROM over in ewram. I need to look into
that gbfs stuff apparently. There is no sound (the APU stuff is hooked up and runs
fine on the DS, it just needs the DS to actually do something with the output), but
the games I've tried run ok speed-wise. There is some "scanline"-type rendering
optimizaton in place because that's all still very slow and I haven't taken
advantage of any DS-specific hardware features to speed it up.

For compiling the actual code, I'm using DevKitARM R13, and there are some issues with
the way the default ds_arm9 linker script shoves things into memory. For whatever
reason, the default handling of non-static global variables is pretty wacked, and
if you have more than 16k or so I've found that everything goes to hell (silent
data collision, I'm guessing) and stuff just stops working, and some of the standard
C runtime functions stop working. Just general bad things. So I had to manually change
the linker script to move my .data into ewram and that seemed to solve everything.
If you want to compile this yourself, be sure to change the batch files and makefile
to use your own paths. Mine are all hardcoded because I'm a terrible person. Also,
the code itself is all very messy, and torn apart. It's based on an old GBA port of
Nester I made, and I ported it to the DS over a single weekend (so it hasn't had the
tender loving care it deserves).

To use the thing, you can use the crappy primitive ROM insertion tool included in the
archive to put in the NES ROM of your choice. Currently only one ROM at a time is
supported. If I ever stop being lazy and load ROM files from image ROM like I should
be doing, that will be changing.

Currently there aren't any emulators that really do a good job of running this. Out
of them all IDeaS seems to do the best job. It probably goes without saying, but I
have tested everything on actual DS hardware (using the wifime method) and it all
works happily.

So that's that, enjoy.