Hacking What simple thing could lead to DS emulation?

[Deleted User]

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[Blue]

It would take too much time and effort which no one would want to go through simply because of the fact, flashcards are cheap.

 

[Ryccardo]

The "problem" is having to essentially develop a clone of Devolution

It would take too much time and effort which no one would want to go through simply because of the fact, flashcards are cheap.

And alternative entrypoints were found and released despite Cubic Ninja being available for cheap, if you know where to look

It's not (only) about the money, it's a matter of pushing the system's capabilities!

 

[evandixon]

DS games are programmed to read from the cartridge, not the SD. We can launch them (this is the idea behind the R4 Slot 1 Launcher), but we need a cartridge inserted to do anything else.

IIRC, the GBA "emulator" emulates the GBA cartridge, then actually runs the game on the cartridge. I don't know if something similar could be made for DS games, but if it could, Nintendo would probably have to do it.

 

[Ryccardo]

IIRC, the GBA "emulator" emulates the GBA cartridge, then actually runs the game on the cartridge. I don't know if something similar could be made for DS games, but if it could, Nintendo would probably have to do it.

Yes, they run from RAM (and the agbsave partition is mapped to memory); not all DS games would fit, even though they only need 4 MB of memory!

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Most GBA games also had no mapper, both ROM and save were directly wired into the bus!

 

[Deleted User]

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[The Real Jdbye]

Ok, first off, this thread is not meant to be a thread for nagging people, trolls, or cruelty. This is not for us to go backward- but to go forward. This is not just a simple "no". If you have something bad to say- don't say it at all. This thread is meant for the knowledge of loading DS game SOMEHOW- it doesn't matter HOW we load them- but to be able to load them without Flashcarts.

Do not say no and just leave. Do not say no because Flashcarts are cheap. Say no or yes and EXPLAIN. Explain the technical implimations. We already know that when booting from a DS game, it reads from the slot- so it's probably a hardware problem.

BUT the 3DS has native DS emulation so we wouldn't need to actually recreate DS emulation-

We could:

1. Maybe we WOULD have to reprogram TWL_Firm to load games from the SD card. It would be easily possible since we've reprogrammed Arm9Loader to essentially load from the SD and we've reprogrammed homemenu to have region free.

2. Boot into TWL_Firm with a CIA app that's hooked onto NAND and load games from that- we would only have to program the app to give directions or some sort of commands while the TWL_Firm is running (we've reprogrammed a CFW to give directions to homemenu and system settings with the Rei character in the top screen)

So what are your thoughts? Remember- this is not a yes or no situation. If you haven't read the rules in the intro- I'd read them now.

It's not as easy as you think. The sad truth is, anyone in the scene who is skilled enough to patch TWL_FIRM to load games/saves from SD is against piracy. CFW has hardly progressed at all because the CFW devs are not skilled enough to figure out things on their own without help.

 

[haipro2001]

Vc injection....

 

[Deleted User]

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[dubbz82]

The best viable stab at this we might have would be on n3ds via an emulator, although I dunnno if even the n3ds has enough power to push a ds emulator properly. As for your two suggestions in the initial post, they're not really viable (or at least not really viable in the relatively near future) as others have said, for the moment if you want DS games, buy a flash cart, because ds loading from the ds mode might very well be months, if not years off yet (unless someone works out vc injection).

 

[Apache Thunder]

Right now the closest you'll get is creating "shortcut" applications that launch a game from an R4 which is very doable. I recently confirmed DLDI capable NTR mode homebrew can access storage on original R4 cards. So you could create a launcher that sends a command to a rom manager on the R4 (one that has argv support maybe. Perhaps some special version of Moonshell or something. Not sure if WoodR4 supports this) to start a specific game.

Not even sure the current rom managers for R4 support this. In that case, have fun programming a new rom manager from scratch. While you're at it, you might as well make one for DSi Enhanced games and even allow DSi Enhanced mode to work for such games which is theoretically possible. Say goobye to the rare and expensive iEvolution. It's theoretically possible for an R4 to use DSi Enhanced mode. You just need to program a rom manager that supports it.

hbmenu could be a good starting point for this. I have confirmed if you convert it to CIA compatible SRL that boots in DSi Hybrid mode instead of DSi Exclusive mode, give it R4 DLDI, and install it. It can access and launch things off the R4 (in DSi Enhanced mode!).

The original rom managers for the R4 don't work properly in DSi Enhanced mode however. Currently hbmenu isn't setup to launch commerical roms....For obvious reasons. The creators of it weren't interested in that. But if you got the programming knowhow, it wouldn't be difficult for you to repurpose it for that. Just don't expect the devs behind hbmenu to help, because they sure as hell won't be happy that you would ba**stardize it for retail rom loading.

 

[guisadop]

Nintendont 3ds when?

Also, nintendont took quite some time to appear on the Wii scene (in fact, I believe it was only released after the Wii was discontinued)

 

[Swiftloke]

Here's the problem at present: DS games run on bare metal, like the Wii. There's no kernel overseeing everything the game does, so the games program read/write access directly to the cartridge. The developers of DS games never accounted for DS games being run from an external source, so they never wrote code to accommodate for it. Perhaps we could have a modified TWL-FIRM with a kernel set up to redirect cart access requests to the SD card, but that's far, far more complicated than it sounds (and too much to write out on my phone ). But, like The Real Jdbye said, no one skilled enough to write one is going to. Don't ask me.

 

[RocketRobz]

ARM11 is not used much in TWL_FIRM, mostly for screen scaling and adjusting touch positions, so theoretically the ARM11 can redirect cartridge reads/writes to SD Card.

 

[artur3004]

ARM11 is not used much in TWL_FIRM, mostly for screen scaling and adjusting touch positions, so theoretically the ARM11 can redirect cartridge reads/writes to SD Card.

As I know, ARM11 has no direct SD access, only arm9 does

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Could someone like Apache Thunder and some others figure it out?

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I wish it were that simple

Maybe eventually, but this is much more complex than anything done previously with CFW. The most complicated thing with CFW right now is emuNAND, the rest are just simple memory patches. Not counting NTR-CFW, which is pretty complex. cell9 could probably accomplish this, but he is anti-piracy.

 

[hellionz]

Buy a nds flashcards pls. ...is ridiculous waste sceners energy and time on something already achieved with flashcards.

Greetings

 

[Deleted User]

Deleted

 

[CeeDee]

@The Real Jdbye summed it up better than I could - anyone with the knowledge to do such a thing refuses to, because piracy.

I would say it's possible but won't be done until we get better knowledge of how TWL_FIRM works.

 

[NekoMichi]

I'm not a developer, so this could be total nonsense/impossible, but here's my idea:

Take a genuine DSiWare app and somehow inject the launcher from a DS flash cart into it so that when you launch the DSiWare it loads the flash cart menu instead. Then, modify that flash cart's launcher to read information from the 3DS on-board SD card as if it were the mSD inside the flash cart. That way, you could have a "simulated" DS flash cart running on the 3DS without having actual flash cart hardware.

Of course, I don't know how these things work and this could be impossible.