Nds-bootstrap is an essential homebrew for those wanting to play their Nintendo DS games natively on a 3DS, using just an SD card. And as of a new update, it's only gotten better; a few months ago, @RocketRobz managed to get DSiWare titles running on original "phat" DS and DS Lite units, though compatibility was limited, and saving wasn't supported. Now, over 100 DSiWare games work on older DS models, with the ability to save your game data.

What's new?​

• DSiWare playability on DS Phat/Lite is finally out of it's proof-of-concept stage, as you can now save your data, along with 100 titles now supported (plus a few more, if you're using a DS Debug console)!
  • A custom .sav format is used for flashcard DSiWare save files (featuring a "save exist" flag and save size at the end of the file).
  • Shantae: Risky's Revenge can now get past the first two battles using an existing save file!
  • Scroll down to see which titles are now supported to play on DS Phat/Lite.

Some of the games that you can try out include Mr. Driller: Drill Till You Drop, Model Academy, Orion's Odyssey, and many more. WarioWare: Touched! DL version also works, though the audio does not work, because it takes up too much RAM. If you happen to have a debug DS unit, four extra games will work on it: Dragon Quest Wars, Make Up & Style, Metal Torrent, and Plants vs. Zombies.

Source
GBAtemp Project Thread

 

[sombrerosonic]

Holy shit.. My only guess on making the games work better would be to redirect RAM reads/writes of the upper bits of ram (I.E. the extra mbs of ram the DSi usually has) to the gamecart/its SD card, or a GBA Expansion Pak if that works, in some way similar to the way EmuNAND works. (obvs it'd work different on the inside, I just don't know what else to compare it to)

a ram disk could also work.... as a thought

 

[jeffyTheHomebrewer]

a ram disk could also work.... as a thought

Yeah, that's kinda what I meant I think.. idk I just woke up like 20 mins ago man. Something something windows readyboost type bullshit

 

[RocketRobz]

Yeah, that's kinda what I meant I think.. idk I just woke up like 20 mins ago man. Something something windows readyboost type bullshit

The RAM disk/page file idea simply isn't possible. Reading data from the SD works differently than reading data from something like RAM.
The Expansion Pak idea is possible, though it depends on the game, and how easy or hard it is to implement support for it.

 

[sombrerosonic]

Yeah, that's kinda what I meant I think.. idk I just woke up like 20 mins ago man. Something something windows readyboost type bullshit

Threw the GBA idea out the window after what rocket said, DS-2 or the ramdisk would work best in my opinion

 

[JaNDeRPeiCH]

Great news, to the op of this great homebrew i have a crazy noob question?

Do you know the emulation games cps1 and cps2 from the psp console? you load your game zipped and before the game starts they use a type of cache...the good question can be used this type of method (cache loading) to any system like ps1,sega cd or dsi ware emulation on the nintendo 3ds portable? im not a coder or programmer but only want to know if its posibble to use this weird method.

 

[RocketRobz]

Great news, to the op of this great homebrew i have a crazy noob question?

Do you know the emulation games cps1 and cps2 from the psp console? you load your game zipped and before the game starts they use a type of cache...the good question can be used this type of method (cache loading) to any system like ps1,sega cd or dsi ware emulation on the nintendo 3ds portable? im not a coder or programmer but only want to know if its posibble to use this weird method.

Some emulators pre-load ISOs to RAM in order to load faster. For nds-bootstrap (which btw, is not an emulator), when playing DS games (not DSiWare), data gets stored to a cache when reading data, so that reading the same data is faster until reboot. For DS games up to 8MB (DSi) or 24MB (3DS), the game is fully pre-loaded for faster reads.

 

[JaNDeRPeiCH]

Some emulators pre-load ISOs to RAM in order to load faster. For nds-bootstrap (which btw, is not an emulator), when playing DS games (not DSiWare), data gets stored to a cache when reading data, so that reading the same data is faster until reboot. For DS games up to 8MB (DSi) or 24MB (3DS), the game is fully pre-loaded for faster reads.

Last time i used retroarch it was a pain in the ass to use ps1 games even with psx rearmed emulator,because crashed a lot a not many games are compatible. I dont know the actual state of retroarch but your homebrew its top-notch quality.Its rare to see a glitch,error or crashing with the latest update of twilight menu++.Sure when you start to code it,it was not perfect but you dont give up...you go forward bring good homebrew. Thank you for the community 3ds we will aprecciate your efforts.

 

[stanleyopar2000]

Damn now if only we could get Golden Sun Dark Dawn working

 

[untok]

Acecard theme is that bug fixed niw

 

[RocketRobz]

Acecard theme is that bug fixed niw

Nope, it's still not fixed.

 

[untok]

Thx its living community still

 

[N10A]

I'm just wondering if there's some kind of weird specific incompatibility with flipnote since that's the first dsiware title that comes to my mind.
I guess you could take this as a passive agressive way of asking for flipnote compat pls

 

[RocketRobz]

I'm just wondering if there's some kind of weird specific incompatibility with flipnote since that's the first dsiware title that comes to my mind.
I guess you could take this as a passive agressive way of asking for flipnote compat pls

Flipnote wouldn't work, because it seems to use the DSi WRAM, as well as possibly going above the 4MB RAM limit.
There's also the possibility of the save file containing more than one file.

 

[N10A]

Flipnote wouldn't work, because it seems to use the DSi WRAM, as well as possibly going above the 4MB RAM limit.
There's also the possibility of the save file containing more than one file.

That sucks, but thanks for the info.

 

[smf]

The RAM disk/page file idea simply isn't possible. Reading data from the SD works differently than reading data from something like RAM.

A page file would work if you have an MMU that allows you to use an area of normal ram to be mapped to the relevant addresses and generate exceptions if you access an area of ram that isn't currently mapped. When you get an exception then you evict a page to sd and load a new page in. Whether that is possible on the DS is one thing, whether someone will bother to code it is another then finally it could be so slow to be unusable.

 

[seseiSeki]

I haven't been following nds-bootstrap development for a while. Nice to see its still getting improvements.
Does someone know if Metroid Prime Hunters got fixed while I wasn't looking?
Last time I checked, the loading times were really long and would break multiplayer.

 

[Gekkodox]

I haven't been following nds-bootstrap development for a while. Nice to see its still getting improvements.
Does someone know if Metroid Prime Hunters got fixed while I wasn't looking?
Last time I checked, the loading times were really long and would break multiplayer.

I played it last month and it worked well. Dunno about the multiplayer.

 

[Aerocool]

I still remember when everyone said it won’t ever be possible to play DS romz from SD card. I even remember the first prototypes and now we have THIS. Fantastic work @RocketRobz , you are an absolute legend.

 

[MikaDubbz]

I don't suppose there is any way to apply this to the official DS emulator used for DS VC games on the Wii U? Would be cool to see DSi content running on the Wii U if possible.

 

[RocketRobz]

I don't suppose there is any way to apply this to the official DS emulator used for DS VC games on the Wii U? Would be cool to see DSi content running on the Wii U if possible.

I agree!
I guess it depends on if Wii U VC is able to run DSi-Enhanced games (in DS mode, ofc). If it does, then I'd be able to post the patches I've made for testing on NO$GBA (but no save support though), provided they do work on Wii U VC, but I don't have a hacked Wii U console to test.