Homebrew Why is NDS emulation sssoooo ssslloooowwww?

Tattorack

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I can emulate NDS games at near perfection on my low end phone. Yes, with sound.
I emulated NDS games on my old old Mac OS 10.4.11 a very very VERY long time ago. In fact, I used No$GBA back then. It ran fine. Perfectly fine.
My 2015 gaming laptop, with an i5-6xxx 2.5GHz processor, 8GB of DDR 4 RAM and a GTX 950m can run almost any emulator with perfection. Cemu only gets the occasional minor stutter and slow down but overall everything is playable. PS2, NGC and Wii titles can run perfectly smooth, upscaled AND with graphic improving mods.

NDS games run like shit.
No, seriously, I tried No$GBA and it ran so slow it was like the sound was trying to saw my eardrums in half. DeSmuMe runs like the game has been dipped in thick syrup, with everything (including the sound) going in slow motion.
I've tried all sorts of methods and none of them work where I can run the game at a playable speed and also have it look nice (I mean, just try running NDS resolution at full screen. Gods the horror! Oh, and even that runs slow).
So what's the big deal?
Why is it so hard to emulate the NDS?
 

Chary

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I can only assume you're trying to run the game with filters or something? Upscaled? I only encounter issues with DS emulation due to bad optimization, not slowdowns.
 
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Tattorack

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I can only assume you're trying to run the game with filters or something? Upscaled? I only encounter issues with DS emulation due to bad optimization, not slowdowns.
Not at first. No$GBA runs slow and sounds like crap without changing any settings, not that it has many setting to actually change...
DeSmuMe runs like syrup from the get-go. I can speed it up somewhat using the Dynamic Recompiler, but it's still really slow.
 

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