NitroSwan - A WonderSwan emulator for NDS

[FluBBa]

So after 2 months of coding I finally have something to show.
At least some of the games are playable but a DSi is recommended for better speed and more games can be loaded.
Both SRAM and EEPROM is emulated and support for loading and saving of them.
Boot ROM support but should not be needed to play games.
Support for SLOT-2 RAM expansions for larger games.
Pretty ok sound emulation.

Graphics can be a little glitchy depending on the game, see readme file.
Speed should be fixable to a high degree as well ok for most games, I will be taking small steps so I can fix regressions if I break any games during optimizations.
No save states yet.
No mapping for vertical controls yet.

https://github.com/FluBBaOfWard/NitroSwan/releases/tag/v0.6.4

 

[Cris1997XX]

This is amazing! The WonderSwan (Color) has a suprisingly good library of games, language barrier aside. Thanks for all of your work

 

[placebo_yue]

I legit been entering to gbatemp regularly just for this. Thanks!
Can't wait for updates on the savestates and such, for now i'll give this version a try

edit;digimon anode-cathode won't go past the boot screen. The tamagotchi-like digimon game works great, and some other digimon game had some minor graphical glitches but also seemed to work nicely. I'm in awe at the speed. Thanks again

 

[Cris1997XX]

Alright. I've tried all my games on this emulator. They all run pretty slowly (And the audio can hurt lmao). Mr Driller seems to be running the fastest, and it's playable

 

[FluBBa]

digimon anode-cathode won't go past the boot screen.

Are you using a bootrom? For me it gets through the whole intro.

 

[placebo_yue]

Are you using a bootrom? For me it gets through the whole intro.

indeed, it works using a bios bootrom thing. Took me a little while to find one. My bad.
Save states crashed the emulator but i suppose that's expected for now, right? regular in-game saving seems to work fine
edit: Oh, i couldn't make the B&W settings work, how do you do that? i wouldn't mind a tint for the black and white games if there's the option, like GBA did for GB games back in the day

 

[Deleted member 323844]

Thank you FluBBa. It's really impressive, yet I have seen very few playable games. Mr. Driller could be, indeed, the most playable.

If anyone is wondering how it performs. I have done a little showcase, using a DS Lite + DS-TV-OUT.

 

[Cris1997XX]

Shouldn't B&W games be the ones running faster? I assume the addition of color makes things a bit more complicated,

 

[FluBBa]

As usual the graphics emulation takes something like 5% per frame, the rest is CPU emulation.

 

[placebo_yue]

I've tried a bunch of games, they mostly run pretty decently (on O3DS)

Digimon Tamers Battle whatever 1.5 - runs slightly slow to be enjoyable, but it's playable. Super glitchy graphics tho, flickering. That makes it unplayable.
Digimon anode & catode (and others from that series) - Mostly fine, very few graphical glitches that don't impact on gameplay, and playable speed
Digimon V-pet - Few graphical glitches that don't affect gameplay at all. Slightly slower than full speed but very playable
Final Fantasy 1 (english translation, if that matters) - almost fullspeed. Dialogboxes don't cover some elements like NPCs and crates. I played it for like an hour, no issues.
Final Fantasy 2 - almost fullspeed too, didn't play much to notice other issues
chocobo dungeon - first tutorial-ish part ran a bit slow, probably playable tho. After tutorial the only visible thing is the status bar (HP and such) on the top, the rest looks all black (perhaps there's some issue with transparency or masks?)

 

[Cris1997XX]

Are the WS bios(es) required for anything?

 

[CrashMidnick]

This is awesome !! Thanks Flubba for this Xmas present !

 

[plasturion]

Nice, really great and quite fast emulation at this level, in compare to exsisting one (dualSwan)... and i guess it's promising to be much more optimized for ds lite. Incredible work. Thanks!

 

[daRealist]

Just tried Mr. Driller and Wonder Stadium on my DSi. A few glitches but otherwise running pretty well. It's exciting to see a new emulator for the DSi and WS has a nice game library too!

 

[FluBBa]

I've converted a couple of opcodes to asm and it seems it gives a bit of speed boost, but the majority of speed will come when all opcodes are converted and I can use registers for at least the program counter and cycles counter.
Hopefully this will be done before I end my vacation in the middle of January.

 

[FluBBa]

It seems I'm running out of time to rewrite everything in asm, so far it has gained quite a bit of speed.
Is anyone interested in a new version before I'm completely done?
It would also be nice if people can test to see if I have screwed up any games since the last release.

 

[CrashMidnick]

It seems I'm running out of time to rewrite everything in asm, so far it has gained quite a bit of speed.
Is anyone interested in a new version before I'm completely done?
It would also be nice if people can test to see if I have screwed up any games since the last release.

Thanks Flubba. Yes it could be great to have a release to check the improvements. I can test the romset.

 

[Cris1997XX]

It seems I'm running out of time to rewrite everything in asm, so far it has gained quite a bit of speed.
Is anyone interested in a new version before I'm completely done?
It would also be nice if people can test to see if I have screwed up any games since the last release.

It'd be great to have a new version, even just for quality assurance

 

[placebo_yue]

I can test the games i mentioned before on O3DS, for sure. If it helps at all, i'll do it

 

[FluBBa]

Here it is, just tested it on DSi and it looks like more games run at 60fps.
https://github.com/FluBBaOfWard/NitroSwan/releases/tag/v0.1.3