Homebrew Is SnemulDS dead?

[Magil]

No word in months from the emulator's creator...Did he just decide to stop working on it? Or is he just a slow updater?

It's a shame if he stopped, because I thought it was a great emulator(for the DS, anyway).

 

[EN!GMA]

I'm curious about this as well.

 

[WB3000]

I thought that once too, but then he released the 0.6 alpha. I wouldn't declare the project dead yet, it's just slowly being updated.

 

[OrcMonkey©]

really i thinks its dead

 

[granville]

According to DanTheMan on the Pocket Heaven forums. Archeid once said that he would eventually quit if he got burned out on it. He may just surprise us with an out-of-the-blue release, but it's also a valid possibility that he has finished working on SnemulDS.

The upside that I see is the acceleration of new or better DS emulators. JenesisDS, ApprenticeMinus, and Lameboy have given new light to old system favorites. The biggest new deal is NeoDS, a NeoGeo emulator for DS. It plays many of the games at complete/near full speed and only in the preliminary release! I cite this particular emulator due to the incredible power on the NeoGeo. It's one of the fastest/most advanced systems currently emulated on DS (the main processor alone is clocked at 16MHZ without the other specs housed in the NeoGeo). The NeoGeo also had some of the most advanced graphical abilities for it's time. It's also interesting that NeoDS can load the large roms (some going well above 50MB), an impressive feat considering the problems homebrew devs often have with the DS' limited 4MB memory.

My point with this wall of text? Emulators on DS have gotten much more advanced and widespread than they were in the past. It's become much more interesting and widespread to write emulators for complex systems. Even if SnemulDS is retired, the enormous popularity and demand for the Super NES pretty much ensures that an eventual release of a newer, better Super NES DS emulator is on the way.

 

[OrcMonkey©]

snemulds rocks the emu house!

 

[Costello]

I still use the good old SnemulDS 0.5, haven't tried the 0.6.
I hope we'll see more releases in the future!

 

[Shidori]

Well, it seems that Super Nes is a complicated system to emulate on the DS, the main system (without special chips) can run fullspeed but the layer priority is a pain to reproduce and was an issue with all emus so far, i'm not a programmer but i doubt that this system will be enjoyable one day from what i've heard (by enjoyable i mean playing a game without messing with the options for every single game)

I waited for more advanced version of SnemulDS to see if emulation can be improved with time, but now we'll never know! Well, we have jEnesisDS, ApprenticeMinusDS, NeoDS, Lameboy and some others still in development and great (NesDS is great too but not updated anymore) and i believe systems like PCEngine and Neo Geo Pocket will be emulated too in the future

 

[m-p{3}]

Well, it seems that Super Nes is a complicated system to emulate on the DS, the main system (without special chips) can run fullspeed but the layer priority is a pain to reproduce and was an issue with all emus so far, i'm not a programmer but i doubt that this system will be enjoyable one day from what i've heard (by enjoyable i mean playing a game without messing with the options for every single game)

I waited for more advanced version of SnemulDS to see if emulation can be improved with time, but now we'll never know! Well, we have jEnesisDS, ApprenticeMinusDS, NeoDS, Lameboy and some others still in development and great (NesDS is great too but not updated anymore) and i believe systems like PCEngine and Neo Geo Pocket will be emulated too in the future

Regarding nesDS, I made a donation to the author and he said he was currently busy with his real-life at the moment (school, etc), but he was going to get back at nesDS when he'll be more available this summer.

 

[DanTheManMS]

and i believe systems like PCEngine and Neo Geo Pocket will be emulated too in the future

PCE Advance emulates it fairly well on the GBA, and Flubba is also currently working on a NGP emulator for the GBA that runs very slowly but could theoretically be ported to the DS if someone invested the time to do so.

 

[KendoKhan]

is there any way that snes9 or zsnes could be ported to the ds like it has on other systems.
now that there is a neo geo emu out (that is one powerful system to be running on the ds) and
getting better by the release you'd think that a better running snes emu wouldn't be far behind that should be running all non chiped roms at least.

 

[Narin]

is there any way that snes9 or zsnes could be ported to the ds like it has on other systems.
now that there is a neo geo emu out (that is one powerful system to be running on the ds) and
getting better by the release you'd think that a better running snes emu wouldn't be far behind that should be running all non chiped roms at least.

Not possible due to the memory and processor requirements for those two programs. Its possible for the Wii and such because the Wii has a decent processor and memory while the Nintendo only has 4 megs of ram and a Arm7 processor. Hence emulators on the Nintendo DS have to be build from scratch to use as little resources as possible.

 

[airpirate545]

can someone tell mewhich games play perfectly in snemulds 0.6 because i cood not find a compatibility list specifically for this versionn

 

[m-p{3}]

is there any way that snes9 or zsnes could be ported to the ds like it has on other systems.
now that there is a neo geo emu out (that is one powerful system to be running on the ds) and
getting better by the release you'd think that a better running snes emu wouldn't be far behind that should be running all non chiped roms at least.

Not possible due to the memory and processor requirements for those two programs. Its possible for the Wii and such because the Wii has a decent processor and memory while the Nintendo only has 4 megs of ram and a Arm7 processor. Hence emulators on the Nintendo DS have to be build from scratch to use as little resources as possible.

Also note that zsnes was mostly programmed in x86 assembly code, which cannot be ported to another architecture like the ARM platform.

 

[DanTheManMS]

A port of SNES9X wouldn't be out of the question, but it would be slow as heck and not playable.

 

[kitetsu]

So is it possible to write a SNES emulator for the DS that sacrifices sound in exchange for near-perfect visuals?

 

[dawn.wan]

i don't think sound has nothing to do with with the graphics. as we've all played with the BG ordering it's probably an isuue w/ the DS video modes..

 

[DanTheManMS]

It's not really that bad of an idea in theory. If a well-optimized software emulator was available, using both the ARM9 and ARM7 in parallel, you might be able to get semi-playable framerates when using both speedhacks and frameskip. Currently, the SNES emulators use hardware emulation which greatly speeds up the screen rendering in exchange for graphical issues. I highly doubt it would be possible to get full speed without frameskip, but it could still be playable.

Of course, the question then remains, who is going to actually create this emulator? That's the major showstopper at the moment.

 

[Narin]

It's not really that bad of an idea in theory. If a well-optimized software emulator was available, using both the ARM9 and ARM7 in parallel, you might be able to get semi-playable framerates when using both speedhacks and frameskip. Currently, the SNES emulators use hardware emulation which greatly speeds up the screen rendering in exchange for graphical issues. I highly doubt it would be possible to get full speed without frameskip, but it could still be playable.

Of course, the question then remains, who is going to actually create this emulator? That's the major showstopper at the moment.

Your limited when working with the Arm processors sadly so what your asking would be rather difficult to pull off. You can read more about it here.
http://www.double.co.nz/nintendo_ds/nds_develop1.html

 

[DanTheManMS]

I never said it would be easy. Just possible. I'm well aware that the DS's processors are limited, but I do know that with some tricks you can get them to work in parallell. Currently the 33 MHz ARM7 is used for audio emulation. With that freed up, you could get some processing work done on it, though of course there would be overhead due to making sure the two processors sync up with each other.

I know at one point Archeide was looking into making a version of SNEmulDS using a software renderer, though I don't know how far he got with that before giving up.