Homebrew 154 Million NDS Consoles Out There

[wavemotion]

According to Wikipedia and numerous other sources, there were 154 Million Nintendo DS units sold (not 2DS or 3DS which are not included in those numbers).

Of those, about 45 Million were the DSi and DSi XL/LL which means almost 110 Million were the older DS-LITE and DS-PHAT.

Which bums me out as the emulators I've been working on (StellaDS, A5200DS, A7800DS and XEGS-DS) just don't run at full speed on the older hardware beyond some of the more simple games.

I mean... it's close. I can get most games running about 80-85% of full speed. But that makes the games barely playable on the older hardware. I really would love to get the speed closer to 95% or higher for most games - but I'm really up against a wall with the optimizations that can be done.

While it's easy for me to say "go get a good DSi - they are $50", it sucks that 3 out of 4 DS consoles just won't provide the best emulation experience.

I ran NesDS on the DS and it's rather good ... but does slow down in spots so even that technical marvel is not perfect. The SMS emulator fares a little better - and Flubba (the original author) deserves credit for doing what feels impossible to me given the 8-bit technical specs he had to make work.

Are you not sure what the point of this post is? Yeah, me too

Just random musings...

 

[FAST6191]

No GBA, limitations on DS flash carts, not much to speak of in the way of a better screen, nothing really to speak of in the way of exclusive or "better on the DSi" content, homebrew scene largely already dead at the time (android and ios being the culprits) and mightily annoying at that point as well (I know more recently some relatively easy hacks appeared but when it was "have a game since pulled from sale" or "have team cyclops piece of meh"... not surprised the DSi was a flop and barely any out there.

 

[wavemotion]

Well... not sure I'd call 45 million a "flop". The venerable GBA which is 3rd all-time on the handheld sales list is only 80 million. And the 3DS weighs in at 75 million (and still selling... though slowly).

But your points are all valid.

 

[Coto]

View attachment 245704

According to Wikipedia and numerous other sources, there were 154 Million Nintendo DS units sold (not 2DS or 3DS which are not included in those numbers).

Of those, about 45 Million were the DSi and DSi XL/LL which means almost 110 Million were the older DS-LITE and DS-PHAT.

Which bums me out as the emulators I've been working on (StellaDS, A5200DS, A7800DS and XEGS-DS) just don't run at full speed on the older hardware beyond some of the more simple games.

I mean... it's close. I can get most games running about 80-85% of full speed. But that makes the games barely playable on the older hardware. I really would love to get the speed closer to 95% or higher for most games - but I'm really up against a wall with the optimizations that can be done.

While it's easy for me to say "go get a good DSi - they are $50", it sucks that 3 out of 4 DS consoles just won't provide the best emulation experience.

I ran NesDS on the DS and it's rather good ... but does slow down in spots so even that technical marvel is not perfect. The SMS emulator fares a little better - and Flubba (the original author) deserves credit for doing what feels impossible to me given the 8-bit technical specs he had to make work.

Are you not sure what the point of this post is? Yeah, me too

Just random musings...

Technical Marvel? There are plenty of them for DS.

https://bitbucket.org/Coto88/SnemulDS/get/30811e1407c24c14eb9ec573bb58201a1d248152.zip

Still no SuperFX support. But games run rather nice.
Grab and copy /release folder (arm9dldi) contents in SD root card. Games are running fairly good.
And that's old DS.

Same for gbaemu4ds and GBARunner2, both are completely different (on the next level) homebrew.

 

[wavemotion]

Technical Marvel? There are plenty of them for DS.

https://bitbucket.org/Coto88/SnemulDS/get/30811e1407c24c14eb9ec573bb58201a1d248152.zip

Still no SuperFX support. But games run rather nice.
Grab and copy /release folder (arm9dldi) contents in SD root card. Games are running fairly good.
And that's old DS.

I couldn't get that loaded on my R4i on my normal DS-LITE so I tried it on my DSi with TWL++ and it runs pretty well - about 125% with some graphical artifacts (the paralex scrolling gets a little messy at times). I couldn't force my DSi into DS mode at the 67MHz. Even when I set that in TWL++ the game ran at 125% (I assume there has to be some performance hit cutting the CPU in half).

But if it really does run at the same 125% max speed on DS-LITE and DSi... then IMPRESSED!

 

[CrashMidnick]

DStwo was another option for everybody, unfortunately most of hombrews did not take advantage of it. I am pretty sure that 50/60fps would have been possible on most 8/16 bit devices (SNES/GBA emulators needed at least 1 frame skipping). It remains the only way to play DOS 386 and some CPS1/2 on DS/O3DS today (really nice to play alone in the dark on a DS lite ).

AFAIK, no neogeo, no Amiga, no atari ST, no Genesis/Megadrive and many others were developped for it.

 

[FAST6191]

DStwo was another option for everybody, unfortunately most of hombrews did not take advantage of it. I am pretty sure that 50/60fps would have been possible on most 8/16 bit devices (SNES/GBA emulators needed at least 1 frame skipping). It remains the only way to play DOS 386 and some CPS1/2 on DS/O3DS today (really nice to play alone in the dark on a DS lite ).

AFAIK, no neogeo, no Amiga, no atari ST, no Genesis/Megadrive and many others were developped for it.

If you want to get technical the game/emulator focused Linux build (Dingux) that the ISMM and then the DSTwo got had many of such things
https://gbatemp.net/threads/ismart-mm-linux-beta-1-2.301359/

Mind you megadrive/genesis was generally a sorted issue on base DS hardware, more the resolution differences that caused problems.

 

[CrashMidnick]

If you want to get technical the game/emulator focused Linux build (Dingux) that the ISMM and then the DSTwo got had many of such things
https://gbatemp.net/threads/ismart-mm-linux-beta-1-2.301359/

Mind you megadrive/genesis was generally a sorted issue on base DS hardware, more the resolution differences that caused problems.

Never heard about ISMM before. Do you mean that this is the same thing like this ? : https://gbatemp.net/threads/dstwo-linux-beta1-0-release.339028/

I tried to set it up last week but I cannot find the files required (mainly for genesis emulation).

About jEnesisDS, let's say that it is better than nothing but I do no use it TBH, having half of a screen is a no go for me.

 

[FAST6191]

Never heard about ISMM before. Do you mean that this is the same thing like this ? : https://gbatemp.net/threads/dstwo-linux-beta1-0-release.339028/

I tried to set it up last week but I cannot find the files required (mainly for genesis emulation).

About jEnesisDS, let's say that it is better than nothing but I do no use it TBH, having half of a screen is a no go for me.

Supercard made the iplayer (a no ROMs media player flash cart) and the DSTwo. The ISMM was then an iplayer but they gave the DStwo source code to a flash cart vendor to port and release that as the ismart mm, however they tied their hands as far as homebrew went so other than the onboard GBA emulator and video player the only thing it really got was a port of dingux, which was a game/emulator focused build of Linux aimed at the Dingoo family of portable computery/handheld game devices (though as is used the same CPU then they thought why not). Collectively that makes the iplayer, dstwo and ismm the "enhanced" flash carts of the DS -- a few others might have gone there (the DSX for all the silliness did feature a fancy FPGA that could have been twisted to something, and some others like the EZ5i offloaded a bunch of calculations involved with SD writing to the card itself to boost speed there).
Anyway said port was then in turn ported to the DSTwo (nearly the same device so...) after the ismm was shuttered (flash cart vendor had a heart attack and held all the keys to the kingdom as it were) and that is what you reference in the link.

Afraid I don't have the DSTwo files for it though. I will say though if you do get it running make sure to shut down properly (as in use the internal menu) rather than using the power button else be prepared to format your SD card to sort out corruption.

 

[CrashMidnick]

Thanks for this detailed explanation.

About Linux, I did not know about SD card corruption, so I will not try it on my main SD Thanks for the info.