Hacking 3DS Emulators

[SkemoKyle]

Heya All.
Recently purchased my R4i Gold card (3DS Compatible) and wanted to know what emulators are available.
So far I have an SNES one (I'm having a few problems with, I'll list these soon)
and I have the lameboy emu.

Snes seems to have a problem, whenever I load up a rom, it freaks out on me, music gets all grainy and I have to reset my console.. not sure what to do there (Any help? D.

But my main reason for this topic is, as I've been searching for days now, Is there, or is there not a Gameboy Advance emulator for the 3DS R4i?
It bugs me that there are SNES, original GB and GBC emus but no GBA?
I tried looking but nothing seems to come up, are there any suggestions? (No I'm not a Nintendo embassador btw, so balls to the whole Virtual Console thing)

any replies would be helpful Thanks guys.

-Skemo

 

[Foxi4]

Heya All.
Recently purchased my R4i Gold card (3DS Compatible) and wanted to know what emulators are available.
So far I have an SNES one (I'm having a few problems with, I'll list these soon)
and I have the lameboy emu.

Snes seems to have a problem, whenever I load up a rom, it freaks out on me, music gets all grainy and I have to reset my console.. not sure what to do there (Any help? D.

But my main reason for this topic is, as I've been searching for days now, Is there, or is there not a Gameboy Advance emulator for the 3DS R4i?
It bugs me that there are SNES, original GB and GBC emus but no GBA?
I tried looking but nothing seems to come up, are there any suggestions? (No I'm not a Nintendo embassador btw, so balls to the whole Virtual Console thing)

any replies would be helpful Thanks guys.

-Skemo

The 3DS (running in DS-Mode) isn't beefy enough to pull off proper SNES/Genesis emulation. NES and lower are your options if you want proper emulation.

 

[SkemoKyle]

Heya All.
Recently purchased my R4i Gold card (3DS Compatible) and wanted to know what emulators are available.
So far I have an SNES one (I'm having a few problems with, I'll list these soon)
and I have the lameboy emu.

Snes seems to have a problem, whenever I load up a rom, it freaks out on me, music gets all grainy and I have to reset my console.. not sure what to do there (Any help? D.

But my main reason for this topic is, as I've been searching for days now, Is there, or is there not a Gameboy Advance emulator for the 3DS R4i?
It bugs me that there are SNES, original GB and GBC emus but no GBA?
I tried looking but nothing seems to come up, are there any suggestions? (No I'm not a Nintendo embassador btw, so balls to the whole Virtual Console thing)

any replies would be helpful Thanks guys.

-Skemo

The 3DS (running in DS-Mode) isn't beefy enough to pull off proper SNES/Genesis emulation. NES and lower are your options if you want proper emulation.

How do you mean beefy? xD
and by lower, do you mean handheld or regular console gaming?

 

[elisherer]

Dude....

1. Your topic's title is misleading (3ds emulators?)
2. You researched enough to buy an r4i 3ds but not if it can run gba games...?
only Supercard DSTWO & CycloDS iEvolution can run GBA becuase of big rom files that needs to be loaded into the ram...
Supercard DSTWO solves it by using its own ram (on the flashcart)
CycloDS iEvolution solves it by using DSi mode which is not widely used for homebrew (but gives more speed and more ram)

 

[Foxi4]

The DS is equipped with a 67Mhz ARM9 core and a 33Mhz ARM7 core, roughly. You can't expect mirracles from such low specs.

That said, I can recommend only emulators that emulate machines like the NES spec-wise or weaker. That'd be the Master System, the Gameboy Colour etc.

This is a good place to start lookin'.

 

[Luigi2012SM64DS]

one thing. the r4i 3ds cannpt use the 3ds power. it runs in ds mode on the 3ds which is why you see borders on the top screen

 

[SkemoKyle]

Right, so my best bet is to ignore the GBA idea, and stick to what the console can actually handle? haha
I apologize for the misleading title by the way, should have worded it better.
and as for the whole research thing, I only originally wanted to play DS roms on the 3DS It's only recently occurred to be about emulation, I've just discovered it and was wondering if there was a GBA one available lol

 

[totalnoob617]

actually no the supercard had a 486 processor in it that runs the gba an snes emulators, it has nothing to do with ram, and there are NO 3ds emulators, only ds based since no cards run in 3ds mode, you should have got a supercard dstwo instead it has its own better snes emulator and a gba emulator there are no other ds gba emuators

 

[Luigi2012SM64DS]

supercard had a 486 processor

 

[notmeanymore]

Right, so my best bet is to ignore the GBA idea, and stick to what the console can actually handle? haha
I apologize for the misleading title by the way, should have worded it better.
and as for the whole research thing, I only originally wanted to play DS roms on the 3DS It's only recently occurred to be about emulation, I've just discovered it and was wondering if there was a GBA one available lol

If you're honestly interested in emulation, do it through your computer. Or your smartphone for that matter.

 

[frogboy]

If you're honestly interested in emulation, do it through your computer. Or your smartphone for that matter.

PSP works quite nicely as well.

 

[DanTheManMS]

Going back to the SNES issue, that's rather odd and I haven't heard of it before. Which emulator are you using, and which version? How are the files set up on your card?

For NES you've got NES DS (use the "nesDS(EX)" version rather than the original), and for Genesis you have jEnesisDS.

 

[Shadow#1]

Dude....

1. Your topic's title is misleading (3ds emulators?)
2. You researched enough to buy an r4i 3ds but not if it can run gba games...?
only Supercard DSTWO & CycloDS iEvolution can run GBA becuase of big rom files that needs to be loaded into the ram...
Supercard DSTWO solves it by using its own ram (on the flashcart)
CycloDS iEvolution solves it by using DSi mode which is not widely used for homebrew (but gives more speed and more ram)

no the CycloDS iEvolution can not play GBA it does not have a extra stand alone CPU and RAM the one that does is the iplayer

 

[CollosalPokemon]

Dude....

1. Your topic's title is misleading (3ds emulators?)
2. You researched enough to buy an r4i 3ds but not if it can run gba games...?
only Supercard DSTWO & CycloDS iEvolution can run GBA becuase of big rom files that needs to be loaded into the ram...
Supercard DSTWO solves it by using its own ram (on the flashcart)
CycloDS iEvolution solves it by using DSi mode which is not widely used for homebrew (but gives more speed and more ram)

no the CycloDS iEvolution can not play GBA it does not have a extra stand alone CPU and RAM the one that does is the iplayer

yes the CycloDS iEvolution can play GBA it has more CPU and RAM than most DS carts because it runs in DSi mode so it gets additional privileges including more CPU and RAM than in DS mode but the emulator is just a proof of concept for now but it does work

 

[Chaosruler]

Nintendo DS\i is not a system designed for emulation in first place, if you bought the DS\i you should've known that you target NDS and GBA and maybe some old\retro consoles such as NES, GBC, GameGear and so on, the PSP is more designed for emulation with much more processing power, but the processing power is not the only limit with emulation, the DS has a small amount of RAM while the PSP has 64MB of PSRAM (model 2000, the first model has half of the amount of chips of those memory, meaning smaller amount by half), it's much more easier to write an emulator with such vast amount of RAM and CPU power especially since PSP's VPU and SPU is so similar to the PS2's and the PS2 is already an opened bitch

if you are still into 3DS emulators, you shouldn't relay on DS mode, like elisherer pointed out only 5 cards are capable of emulating GBA games and SNES games propely (there is an SNES emulator for DS, but it's not emulating propely), which is iPlayer, Supercard DSTwo, which uses the same software, EX4 DSi, CycloDS iEvolution (which uses DSimode enabled mode to emulate the GBA games on the DSi RAM, which is faster then any memory-on-cart RAM on slot-1 you will ever find, however it's 16MB of RAM, there are 32MB of GBA games which won't fit it, meaning support is limited by HARDWARE) and iSmart MM, also if you have a DS Lite\Phat you can use an extended RAM to support emulation of SNES games and GBA games with EZ Flash 3-in-1, it has 16MB of PSRAM(fast, needs electrcity, small amount) and 32MB of NOR FLASH (bigger, doesn't require electrcity, slow) and 512KB of SRAM (save ram, an eRAM designed for saves) which can store the ROMs of GBA games as well to make emulation nearly perfect by using Nintendo's own built in virtual console, also with rumble support

last but not least if you are so much into emulation, you can purchase an Open-pandora console which uses an open source linux\debian disto if I am not mistaken which you can put and code any emulator you'd like, however I don't think you will be able to emulate systems such as PS2 or Xbox (not even the original), however because the ARM is v9 on the open pandora I think you will be able to emulate the PSP with it, but not perfectly, if any bet on average fps it'd be below 30

and to all the people whining about DS CPU power, it's small, but technicilly it's enough to emulate quite a vast of good systems, the problem is the GPU of the DS, let's say that I think the DS can emulate the N64's CPU and SPU quite well because of arch similarties, but it lacks the 3D engine that the N64 has, which is the problem

 

[elisherer]

I wonder if the 3ds could run the wii's emulator; dolphin ... that would be funny...

 

[Chaosruler]

I wonder if the 3ds could run the wii's emulator; dolphin ... that would be funny...

similar to the chance of PSP running the PS2 emulator, pcsx2, both of those systems are near the same specs but their arch is entirely different, so if a perfect emulator could be written it'd might be able to emulate (not at playable speeds) the system, but what's the point?

 

[Luigi2012SM64DS]

I wonder if the 3ds could run the wii's emulator; dolphin ... that would be funny...

 

[elisherer]

I wonder if the 3ds could run the wii's emulator; dolphin ... that would be funny...

similar to the chance of PSP running the PS2 emulator, pcsx2, both of those systems are near the same specs but their arch is entirely different, so if a perfect emulator could be written it'd might be able to emulate (not at playable speeds) the system, but what's the point?

The point is obviously play the wii games on the go...I'm not saying every game is suitable but some might..but that's crazy talk for now..

 

[Chaosruler]

Maybe it'd be possible to patch the games to be unprecise emulated but fast/high frameskip emulated in playable fps