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After several years, DS Wifi emulation is back.

@StapleButter, a French developer well-known for homebrew SNES emulators blargSNES (o3DS, N3DS) and lolSNES (NDS) is developing since a few months a new DS emulator called melonDS. The open-source emulator, which originally started as a forum joke about the lack of proper Wi-Fi emulation in DeSmuME, has made a lot of progress, with the goal of being as accurate as possible. melonDS, now on its 0.3 release, is now capable of emulating most retail games, although it requires a pretty powerful CPU to work at full speed. Here are some screenshots of the 0.3 release:

melonDS3_1.png
melonDS3_2.png
melonDS3_3.png

​
One of the goals of melonDS was also accurate wifi emulation. Indeed, in the past, StapleButter's work on wifi in DeSmuME has been sabotaged by the lead dev zeromus, for various 'reasons'. Wifi emulation in DeSmuME has been since left out and the DeSmuME main page states that "Wifi is not supported and will never be emulated". A few days ago, in a pretty short tweet, StapleButter showed a screenshot of a communication between two emulated DSes in the well-known DS messaging app PictoChat. After a few years, Wi-Fi emulation is back again!

get.php
For now, despite the feature being still highly experimental, the feature has been reported working with local VS mode play in New Super Mario Bros. and even Pokémon trading.

Links:
 
Last edited by StarTrekVoyager,
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Gamer4647

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For the record, what was sabotaged was the online mode, local wifi was never touched by anyone.

Although that, along with knowing that my work would basically be limited to third party builds they call shady, didn't help motivation.

Why does that group of developers call itself "DeSmuME team"? Team doesn't mean "I will go and silently break what that guy made behind his back". Team doesn't mean "yeah good job working on that but now we'll pretend it doesn't exist". You don't want a feature implemented in your project? Fine, but make it clear. A simple "please stop working on wifi because X and Y" would have avoided that fiasco entirely. The reasons for not wanting WFC were understandable, but the way it was carried out was gross.


I kind of feel bad for going on about this given how long ago it happened tbh. But now, people know the whole thing, instead of just hearing simplifications like "zeromus killed it all and he's a bad guy".
 
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StarTrekVoyager said:
Local Wi-Fi? Don't dream. This is likely to be impossible, as it would require almost perfect timing etc. But it should be possible in the future through online (altwfc) whenever StapleButter implements Online (which is going to be quite hard :P)
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actually it has been implemented before as a test but it requires a special wireless chip to work and is extremely painful to setup.
 
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Sliter said:
so there are actually the pictochat rom somewhere? õ3o
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Preinstalled on every DSi, of course (and available as nds/cia on your favorite optical disc image sites)
Or part of the DS/Lite firmware (the former has been converted to nds by Olimar/Loopy and is available from archived copies of the FlashMe website)
Plus there's a Japanese "game" "kanji sonomama rakubiki ..." that's basically Pictochat combined with a Japanese-English dictionary, a calculator, alarm clock, ...
 
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Very nice work and research. Hope this project grows much bigger.
Now I just tried pokemon pearl - pearl trading/battling with two instances on windows. The good news is they detect each other as in a person in the trade room, or a name in the battle but you can go any further than this. It will always say that there was some problem and after repeated tries they usually crash. Either way its really great progress.
 
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I'm really impressed by this @StapleButter !
I tried Pictochat and NSMB but, despite being able to see each other, the connection would be lost after some seconds. Either way, it's already something. Keep up with the work and don't be lazy uhhu lol (jk)
 
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Just finished reading up about the Wi-Fi commotion behind this. It's a shame such talent was thrown out the window in a fit of irrational paranoia that the spooky Nintendo ninjas would get ya.

That's why I've decided to donate towards this project. I hope it succeeds in becoming as polished as it can get. The more power to you, @StapleButter.
 
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StarTrekVoyager said:
Local Wi-Fi? Don't dream. This is likely to be impossible, as it would require almost perfect timing etc.
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Things in emulation we've called impossible:
Emulation
GBC emulation
GBA emulation
DS emulation
3DS emulation
Proper zfreeze emulation
Xbox emulation
Wii emulation
PS1 emulation
N64 emulation
PS2 emulation
See where this is going?
 
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StarTrekVoyager said:
Local Wi-Fi? Don't dream. This is likely to be impossible, as it would require almost perfect timing etc.
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Old inspirational meme is old, but right.

In all seriousness though, if there's anything I've learned from my stay here at GBATemp, it's that feats we've previously thought to be impossible have become possible in time. (DS emulation on 3DS and then later native loading is one such example. GBA emulation on the DS was also thought to have been impossible at one point. Sure, they're not exactly pretty but they've been shown to be possible.)
 
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