Homebrew Emulation Introducing Nintellivision - an Emulator for the DS/DSi

wavemotion

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V 3.7e works perfect with DSTwo + NDSi XL. I can't believe how good is this emulator. Thank you so much for your effort. I will test 3.8 this afternoon.
You're quite welcome! And thanks for the feedback - as a developer, feedback is the most precious thing. And pizza. Feedback and pizza.
 

wavemotion

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Sorry to hear... I don't have an ACECARDi to test with. I test with various R4 cards that I have plus various DSi/SD card combos with TWL++ or Unlaunch.

Do you know what was the first version that started to fail?

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wavemotion

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New release: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS

V4.0 : 22-Apr-2023 by wavemotion-dave
  • Small optimizations across the board - utilizing every bit of the NDS instruction cache to squeeze out another frame or two of performance.
Just a cleanup release - no new features but I'm using just about all of the internal fast memory now to help get a bit more speed for the older DS units. Just about all the games will run full speed on the DS-Lite/Phat with a few holdouts in the voice enabled games (though they should still be plenty playable).
 

Nikandros

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I'm a little late to the game here. Please forgive me if I missed something, but I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I'm using a 3ds xl with twilight, but when I try to load a game it says "missing magic byte" or some such message. Is there a tutorial about exactly what to put where? I' a total beginner here.
 

wavemotion

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I'm a little late to the game here. Please forgive me if I missed something, but I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I'm using a 3ds xl with twilight, but when I try to load a game it says "missing magic byte" or some such message. Is there a tutorial about exactly what to put where? I' a total beginner here.

That's just a bad ROM. A valid Intellivision rom starts with a few specific bytes.

Search for the "no-intro" intellivision ROMs and you'll be okay.
 

wavemotion

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V4.1 : 04-Jul-2023 by wavemotion-dave

  • Added the ability to map any DS key to the DISC UP and DISC DOWN which makes platform games like Rick Dynamite much more enjoyable.
  • Force load of JLP/ECS/IVoice will now save out to configuration for the game so you don't have to do that more than once.
  • Games of 16K or less without a specific .cfg or database entry will load at 5000h which is very likely where it wants to load.
  • Numerous homebrews and hacks added to the internal database.

I'm almost convinced that Nintellivision will play any Intellivision game you throw at it :)
 
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wavemotion

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New version at: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS

V4.3 : 24-Sep-2023 by wavemotion-dave
  • Improved 8-bit RAM support to provide a full 8K of 8-bit RAM (the ECS 2K of 8-bit RAM comes from this pool).
  • Added parsing of the .ROM enable/access table so that we properly allow for writable memory segments (allows the 'lilBro' games to work).
  • Added opening jingle.
  • Other minor cleanups and tweaks as time permitted.
 

wavemotion

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New release: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS

V4.4 : 30-Oct-2023 by wavemotion-dave
  • Major overhaul of configuration to provide for better future enhancements. Your old configurations will be wiped in favor of the new defaults.
  • Major cleanup of overlay support - gone are the built-in overlays except for the normal Intellivision controller graphic and the mini-ECS keyboard. All other overlays are stored externally and a library of more than 40 custom overlays for personal use are provided.
  • Simplified use of custom overlays - if the .ovl file exists (with the same base name as the .ROM or .BIN file), it will automatically be loaded and used (you no longer need to specify that the overlay is 'Custom').
  • Other minor cleanups and tweaks as time permitted.

Starting with v4.4, I'm releasing custom overlays for personal use. Many of these overlays were done by various users over the years. I think there are more than 40 custom overlays included in the extras.zip included in the distribution. The new section of the readme is as follows:

Overlays :

Nintellivision contains a default standard overlay that mimics a real Intellivision controller along with some of the most common menu items. Each game can also have a custom overlay which is user-defined. A large number of custom overlays are provided in Extras.zip in the overlay-library folder. You must name the .ovl file the same as the base filename of the ROM (e.g. if you have Astrosmash.int or Astrosmash.rom, you must name the overlay Astrosmash.ovl and in Configuration for that game you set the overlay to 'Custom'). By default, overlay files (.ovl) go into the same directory as the game ROMs but you can override this in Global Configuration.

Standard Overlay
Custom Overlay
Custom Overlay
 

wavemotion

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Happy New Year!

Version 4.5 is released: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS

V4.5 : 01-Jan-2024 by wavemotion-dave
  • Added new Screenshot handling (press and hold the L+R shoulder buttons for ~1 second to take a .bmp snapshot written to the SD card)
  • Added new meta key mapping to un-throttle (Speedup) the emulator. Useful for games where your character is resting and you want the emulator to run the frames as fast as it can.
  • Minor cleanup on the internal database for the latest and greatest homebrew games.
  • Lots of new and improved overlays in the extras.zip pack.
 

Simone68

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Good morning everyone.
I bought the rom of "The Sorrow of Gadhlan'Thur" for intellivision but I can't get it to work on the NINTV-DS emulator.
It gives me a "max readable mem overlap" error.
Is there any setting I need to set?
Thank you
 
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wavemotion

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I bought the rom of "The Sorrow of Gadhlan'Thur" for intellivision but I can't get it to work on the NINTV-DS emulator.
It gives me a "max readable mem overlap" error.
I also bought that game - and it does run fine under Nintellivision but you must be running on a DSi (or later) with Twilight Menu or Unlaunch to obtain the 2X CPU and 4X RAM memory. If you are running on a DS-Lite/Phat or are running from an R4 card (or similar) you will be running in DS-compatibility mode and will not have access to the more complex bank-switching schemes needed for newer homebrews.

You can find out if you are in DS (4MB) or DSi (16MB) mode by going into the main menu and clicking "Game/Emulator Info"

1705065952529.png
 
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wavemotion

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Thanks wavemotion for the quick and comprehensive response
So your post did get me to spend a half-day looking at trying to rework the memory manager to see if I could get more pages of ROM into memory for the DS-Lite/Phat. I did manage to make progress... and can now load more than half of the newest homebrews on the older DS hardware but the main problem is that to compensate for the reduced memory, it takes a little more CPU power to process and these new games don't quite run 60FPS (actually, A Tale of Dragons and Swords does but the others are all mid-50s currently).

This is my DS-Lite running an R4 card and Sorrow:

1705177704097.png
 

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