Homebrew WIP melonDS for Switch

[Cencil]

This is seriously impressive, Pokemon Diamond is very playable. a bit more tweaking and it would be full speed!

Playable maybe with a shit load of patience

 

[Hydr8gon]

Hi,
I find that so far the emulator is progressing well and thanks Hydr8gon for all his work.
I have a small suggestion if it is possible, i would liked that there is a language choice settings for multilingual games like Animal Crossing.

Try turning off direct boot in the settings. You should be able to load into the DS system menu on game boot and change the language from there.

 

[Deleted User]

Is there a ds emulator on switch with fast forward and magnification filter, like desmume?

Probably not. As mentioned earlier in the thread, there seems to be a lack of ARM64 JIT compilers available for the Switch atm. As such, many emulators have to run via interpreters, which are much slower, and, in some cases, require overclocking to get good performance. We have yet to get many of these games running at normal speed, much less 2x or 3x normal speed.

 

[nero99]

Playable maybe with a shit load of patience

I’ve been playing Pokémon platinum just fine. Not full speed, but not super slow either. That cpu oc option really makes a difference

 

[Arisotura]

any plans for threaded audio?

Audio is already running on a separate thread. Disabling audio has absolutely no impact on speed, so no more optimization needed there

Technical side note there: audio mixing (emulation of the DS audio hardware) happens inside the emu loop, in sync with the rest of the hardware. Putting that on a separate thread would be a bad idea, as it can capture audio output and write it back to RAM.

Not worth doing so anyway, audio emulation is hardly a bottleneck. The critical parts are CPU and 3D.


Anyway, a little roadmap for near-future releases, atleast on the 'regular' version. Hydr8gon would likely follow suit and update their port real soon.

Version 0.7.1 will feature a bunch of timing fixes. Opportunity for things that were shitting themselves to finally run correctly. Not much else-- I want this to be a testing release, so if there are any regressions from the timing changes, we can fix them quickly.

And then... timing fixes are cool but they mean squat as far as speed is concerned. Or maybe not? The GX timing fixes have already shown to make some things run better somehow, so we'll see how things go once the general timings are fixed.

I want to try things regarding online multiplayer for 0.7.2, to make it more user-friendly. That being said, I don't know how well wifi works on the Switch, if it works at all.

I also want to try connecting melonDS to an actual DS someday, no idea if it's possible at all but it sounds hella cool. Even moreso if we could make it work from a Switch. But it needs more access than your typical socket API (needs RF-monitor mode). I don't know how much control we can get on the Switch.

Dunno what else. I also want to use a database to detect savetypes, the current autodetect code is a total fucking trainwreck. Anybody know a good database for this?

0.8 will be the hardware renderer/upscaling release, but that'll take a while.

 

[catlover007]

Not worth doing so anyway, audio emulation is hardly a bottleneck. The critical parts are CPU and 3D.

I recently did some benchmarking on the Switch and in CPU lighter games the 2D PPUs take together approximately the same time to process as the CPU.

 

[Csmrcc]

I guess wifi, with moded dns or with some stealth mode thing can run the multiplayer on the emulator

 

[Hydr8gon]

Anyway, a little roadmap for near-future releases, atleast on the 'regular' version. Hydr8gon would likely follow suit and update their port real soon.

I've been keeping my fork up to date, so a Switch release is always based off of whatever is the newest at the time of release. I did notice some slight speed improvements from the timing in the last release, but it kinda got overshadowed by the overclocking. I do hope to update soon though, with the new UI. I just need to fix the lag problem. Don't have much time to work on it right now though.

I also want to try connecting melonDS to an actual DS someday, no idea if it's possible at all but it sounds hella cool. Even moreso if we could make it work from a Switch. But it needs more access than your typical socket API (needs RF-monitor mode). I don't know how much control we can get on the Switch.

Wireless stuff might be possible on the Switch, I haven't looked into it yet though. All the related functions in the Platform file are empty for now. I figured it wasn't worth investigating until we reach full speed in most games anyways. Also, uh, I'll have to learn how all that crap works.

 

[RedHunter]

Doesn't work for me, says can't find those 3 bios files but they're there in the switch/melonds folder

 

[Hydr8gon]

Doesn't work for me, says can't find those 3 bios files but they're there in the switch/melonds folder

Make sure they're named right. They need to be "bios7.bin", bios9.bin", and "firmware.bin".

 

[RedHunter]

Make sure they're named right. They need to be "bios7.bin", bios9.bin", and "firmware.bin".

You're right I'm stupid didn't notice the extension were different thanks.
You should also add a feature that automatically change the game language because some games like Solatorobo change the language based only on the nds system language itself.
Also it is possibile to use R4/Cyclods saves? Maybe converting them using https://shunyweb.info but to which format?

 

[Hydr8gon]

You're right I'm stupid didn't notice the extension were different thanks.
You should also add a feature that automatically change the game language because some games like Solatorobo change the language based only on the nds system language itself.
Also it is possibile to use R4/Cyclods saves? Maybe converting them using https://shunyweb.info but to which format?

melonDS uses RAW save format.

 

[Hydr8gon]

Next release will be a big one, hopefully I can get the issues sorted out and ready to release within a week or so. I'm right in the middle of exams so no promises!

 

[mustafag32g]

fullspeed??

 

[Arisotura]

squatting your channel to let you know that melonDS 0.7.1 is out, and it's fasterer and accuraterer

so if Hydr8gon decides to use this as a core for their next release, should be pretty good

this version has downsides tho, there are a few things that are shitting themselves from the timing renovation, so pls report bugs to us

 

[Csmrcc]

Next release will be a big one, hopefully I can get the issues sorted out and ready to release within a week or so. I'm right in the middle of exams so no promises!
View attachment 151732 View attachment 151731

Good luck with the exams!

 

[HoTsHoTz79]

Been following this project since day 1, so much progress in a few months...

Keep up the good work @Hydr8gon & @StapleButter

 

[DollyWhipDoll]

Does this thing require FW 5.0 and up or something?

I have all the files names as bios7.bin, bios9.bin, and firmware.bin. Inside the switch folder, I created a melonds folder and put them in there, but it still tells me it can't find the files.

 

[arianadark]

Does this thing require FW 5.0 and up or something?

I have all the files names as bios7.bin, bios9.bin, and firmware.bin. Inside the switch folder, I created a melonds folder and put them in there, but it still tells me it can't find the files.

screen shot your switch folder

 

[Hydr8gon]

Does this thing require FW 5.0 and up or something?

I have all the files names as bios7.bin, bios9.bin, and firmware.bin. Inside the switch folder, I created a melonds folder and put them in there, but it still tells me it can't find the files.

It should work on all firmwares. Honestly every time someone's had trouble getting the emulator to find their firmware it was a naming issue. Alternatively, it also checks for the files in the directory that the .nro is in, so if your .nro is just in the switch directory and not in the melonds directory, you can try putting them there. Other than that, I don't know.