Android NDS4DROID Free open-source emulator for Android

[Shuji1987]

I was really amazed by what this emulator has already done and will continue to do so in the future, that's why I decided to post it here to share the love cause they deserve it! This emulator runs most games between .10 and .50 speed (where 1 being normal speed), sometimes even shoot higher than that and also come with a considerable amount of options.

Now why is this special? Because it's the first GOOD emulator for NDS on Android. Other emulators die out fast and as a result don't run much faster then .01 speed with massive loading times and loads of crashes. Not to mention to small library of games they run.

This emulator managed to run all games I threw at it (Zelda Phantom Hour Glass, Pokemon Diamond, Dragonball Z Supersonic Warriors 2, NSMB, Digimon World Dawn and Chronotrigger) without any lockups or freezes so far. It supports sound as well as mic emulation. Also OpenGLES and Software rendering are supported.

Now I'm running this on my Samsung Galaxy S3 with a leaked Jellybean, so it can potentially run better at a stable OS. But despite me running a leaked version, I´m not having any issues at all.

Also I've only tested roms so I have no idea how homebrew would do on this emulator. Might be faster, maybe slower or not even supported. Don't know how that works but I'd say go ahead. This emulator will give you the biggest chance of running it on your phone.

Anyways, this project looks really promising to me and maybe a few of you are interested in supporting this as well. =)

Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opendoorstudios.ds4droid

I'm not sure what the specs needed are for this emulator, but I would think it would be atleast a 1Ghz duocore phone (mid-range and up). Don't be surprised if it doesn't run on your low-end phone or is very slow.

Thoughts? =D

 

[Ben_j]

Will try this at home tonight, but if it only runs at half speed, it's not really worth it :/

 

[The Catboy]

Old news is old
You are better off buying a flashcard instead.

 

[Shuji1987]

Will try this at home tonight, but if it only runs at half speed, it's not really worth it :/

It's supposed to get better over time. In the meanwhile it's worth the wait as it progresses in great steps at this point over time.

Also, sorry if this seems unnecessary or old, I just believed that they deserved some credit as it is the best NDS emulator on a mobile device. Surely it can interest a people or two.

 

[LWares87]

Shouldn't this be in the Mobile section of the forum? :/

Edit: sorry, I didn't realise the thread got moved whilst I was posting a reply. Lol

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Yep, this is pretty old. We've had a couple topics on it.

NDS Emulation seems pretty doable considering how powerful tablets are nowadays. The only issue now is the development of the emulator itself. Still needs quite a bit of optimizing before it will be fully playable on devices.

 

[Just Another Gamer]

I found this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qingping&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5xaW5ncGluZyJd

Its not exactly able to play games really since I tried to load up Devil Survivor and it didn't really do anything but if anything I found this to be better than NDS4Droid although not by much.

 

[Shuji1987]

Yep, this is pretty old. We've had a couple topics on it.

NDS Emulation seems pretty doable considering how powerful tablets are nowadays. The only issue now is the development of the emulator itself. Still needs quite a bit of optimizing before it will be fully playable on devices.

It was my understanding that to emulate something properly you would have atleast needed 5 times more power (not sure in what field though). Let's make a comparison between my SGS3 and the NDS:

CPU: dual CPU 67Mhz and 33 Mhz versus 1.4Ghz quadcore (roughly 56 times more powerful)
GPU: Output 120k Polygons per sec versus 44M per sec (roughly 366 times more)
RAM: 4MB versus 1GB (256 times more)

So following that, it seems that most modern mid and high-end phones and tablets have more than the needed capability to emulate the NDS properly. But as of today it hasn't been done yet. I really wonder what is holding the development back.

@[member='Just Another Gamer'], I see no point in supporting a closed source emulator, one which even costs money actually and in return gives you nothing. Devil Survivor booted up fine on NDS4DROID. I ran the game between 25% and 45% speed but due to lack of interest in the game and inability to skip the opening scene I didn't got any further than that.

But anyway, my point being I think opensource is the way to go. Making it free allows for a bigger userbase and is great for testing purposes. I wouldn't mind paying for it when it runs most games at 90% for example.

 

[Rydian]

Well, one of the problems there is that mhz/ghz is not a rating of speed and therefore cannot be used to compare different processor architectures.

Even within the realm of PCs...

Older Processors.
The "Intel Pentium 4" 2.26ghz processor scores 282.

Newer Processors.
The "Intel Core 2 Duo P7350" 2.00ghz processor scores 1,401.

So there's a process with "less ghz" that's actually 6-7 times as powerful as the one with "more ghz".

 

[Shuji1987]

Well that makes sense.

But at that point, the processor used for NDS games was the 67Mhz one, which is based on ARMv7 architecture (the 33Mhz one was used for GBA and on OS level). The quadcore found in the Galaxy S3 is also based on that AFAIK. With the NDS released in 2004 and the Galaxy S3 this year surely the architecture has evolved a lot more (in the same regard as the CPU's you listed). Also the Galaxy S3 has 4 cores instead of using a single core like the NDS.

So still the point remains that current technology SHOULD be able to emulate it properly. I may not have the right numbers in my calculation, but it should be possible right? Also notice how upcoming ARM CPU's are getting closer and closer in terms of power to x86/x64 CPU's.

Personally I'm really hoping that the Samsung Galaxy S4/Note 3 will implement the Exynos duo-core Cortex A15 2Ghz CPU they have lying around together with a MALI-T628 GPU. Seriously that would be heaven! Especially seeing how the new MALI GPU supports Direct X11 lol.

But anyways, that's for the future. In regards to the current gen, I have no doubts that the technology should be able to emulate a NDS properly.

 

[Just Another Gamer]

@[member='Just Another Gamer'], I see no point in supporting a closed source emulator, one which even costs money actually and in return gives you nothing. Devil Survivor booted up fine on NDS4DROID. I ran the game between 25% and 45% speed but due to lack of interest in the game and inability to skip the opening scene I didn't got any further than that.

But anyway, my point being I think opensource is the way to go. Making it free allows for a bigger userbase and is great for testing purposes. I wouldn't mind paying for it when it runs most games at 90% for example.

Support what you want but thing is there is only what 2 DS emulators for Android so far so its better to have variety that just 1.

Open source is fine and I got nothing against it but I'm seriously not going to pay for it in the same regard I haven't bought DSoid once.

 

[Rydian]

Well that makes sense.

But at that point, the processor used for NDS games was the 67Mhz one, which is based on ARMv7 architecture (the 33Mhz one was used for GBA and on OS level). The quadcore found in the Galaxy S3 is also based on that AFAIK. With the NDS released in 2004 and the Galaxy S3 this year surely the architecture has evolved a lot more (in the same regard as the CPU's you listed). Also the Galaxy S3 has 4 cores instead of using a single core like the NDS.

So still the point remains that current technology SHOULD be able to emulate it properly. I may not have the right numbers in my calculation, but it should be possible right? Also notice how upcoming ARM CPU's are getting closer and closer in terms of power to x86/x64 CPU's.

Personally I'm really hoping that the Samsung Galaxy S4/Note 3 will implement the Exynos duo-core Cortex A15 2Ghz CPU they have lying around together with a MALI-T628 GPU. Seriously that would be heaven! Especially seeing how the new MALI GPU supports Direct X11 lol.

But anyways, that's for the future. In regards to the current gen, I have no doubts that the technology should be able to emulate a NDS properly.

ARM processors included in tablets and phones are still miles below what a modern home computer can do.

If it was simply a problem of the main processor speed, the 360 and PS3 would have been emulated running retail games years ago.

Emulation of a game system is a hell of a lot more involved than that. You have to emulate ALL of the chips at the same time, AND emulate how they interconnect. Systems with chips that talk to each other in realtime are notoriously more difficult to emulate that ones that don't rely on that stuff.

Then you get into issues like various GPU tricks game systems pull that are difficult to pull off in an emulator. Turn on the framebuffer copy option in Project64 and watch your framerate drop from the huge amount of emulation power needed to emulate that one specific effect. Play Dolphin and notice the vast difference in speed in Super Mario Sunshine's hub map levels when using various types of EFB copies and texture modification types.

Back when everything ran off of one processor and FM synthesis emulation was simpler, but modern game systems are no Gameboy Color.

 

[pokefloote]

Took ten minutes from booting up to walking around town in Animal Crossing WW. >
Pokemon Platinum ran pretty well for the intro scene (prior to the "press start" screen) but then white screened.

Not worth it yet but since it's open-sourced it will be more active than previous emulators, yes?

I was running it on a 1.7GHz dual core HP Touchpad.

 

[Mario92]

It actually worked nicely even if it was just ~15FPS with Note. I'm not sure how touch based games (zelda, ghost trick, trauma center) would work on phones without stulys/s-pen/whatever pencil thingy.

But it's more of an tech demo as it is now. It would be nice to have full speed emulator but I wouldn't get my hopes up with it.

 

[Zerousen]

It is pretty old, but it's starting to actually get updated.

Note to the people wondering about pokemon, the developer says that Pokemon is... a special case, when it comes to emulation, so it might take a while to get it running at full speed.

 

[Rydian]

The developer's having issues with the AP, which is kind of odd since Desmume's the base.

 

[mucus2]

Is there a listing of what games work?

 

[Deleted member 318366]

The guy currently developing nds4droid jeffrey quesnelle said he was going to use a dynarec input in the emu but its been months since he last updated it and qingping has updated his nds emu more frequently this month.