Homebrew MOD DS GAMES INTO NATIVE 3DS GAMES???

Davey159

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I wondered if a Native DS game could run natively on the 3DS with mods with source code. Since they both are made with C or C++ and bot are made for dual screens, would it be possible. And if it was, how? I am wondering because I would like GTA Chinatown Wars on the DS running at a higher res on it.

Thanks to anyone who answers
 

Jayro

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I always wondered why this was never done... like modding TWL_FIRM to stay in 3DS mode with the higher clocks and extra resolution. Maybe even squeeze out some extra performance out of DS/i homebrew on the 3DS.
 

markpeng0315

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it might possible, but texure was still poor limited to nds cardage rom spaces.
some people sccessfully pack .nds into cia and i did not know the method
but it could normally run. and it could pack gba rom as well.
it might use a simulator or using 3ds-built in-ds simulator
so my answer is this could be a way to run ds games on native 3ds. but you may do whole new texure and uncoding nds and coding 3ds.
pertty hard isn't it? but wish you sccuess.
 

FAST6191

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"limited to nds cardage rom spaces"
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#dscartridgeheader
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#dscartridgeprotocol
32 bit address space available, though individual file formats might go lower and some games will try to cram whole files into memory which can make things tricky. That is also ignoring some kind of tweak you might do on this emulator/hypervisor type deal to make sector addressing or bankswitching or some kind of virtual extension. This would bring it in line with some of the largest 3ds releases from what I can see.


Anyway I don't know the 3ds hardware and firmware/bios/hypervisor/OS setups well enough to know how feasible it would be to make use of or adapt something running in the background on the 3ds.
I would first look for the limitations that might prevent it -- the link above is great for DS hardware, you would need it all working on the DS (though might be able to skip wifi, even if I imagine you want this so as to be able to do wifi games without needing WEP, and not all games will need 3d hardware even if most of the later ones will). For instance the reason the GBA is so hard to emulate on the DS is because the DS slot is actually a fair bit slower than the GBA one and thus you would need to compensate for that.

Being made from C/C++ means fairly little in this. That is good for dynamic recompilation emulators, means some measure of decompiler can happen (rather than being limited to disassembly), possibly means you can infer some info if the devs did not strip all useful function names out and has implications for cheat making as far as memory allocation. For the purposes of (expanded capabilities) hypervisor style running then it can be written in java, assembly, or brainfuck... it matters not a lot.
 

FAST6191

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If you have source code then yeah many doors open to you. However source code mostly amounts to princess maker, a few random included files and whatever dropped in that gigaleak. Maybe in the future when decompilation gets a bit better we might see some more.

I am more here to say though that on textures and models then sure hitting subsurf is a tempting thing in this but watching the high res DS emulation stuff ( https://gbatemp.net/threads/hi-resolution-ds-emulation.364549/ for an older example) then many things do pretty well. The 2d side of things though will almost certainly need reworking or giant borders.
 

Davey159

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It sounds great, I just need to find some open source DS games, and recompile them for the 3DS... But even though I have a bit of experience with C Sharp and C ++, I really don't think I can do this alone. If anybody is up to help me on this project, It would be great!
 

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