NitroSwan - A WonderSwan emulator for NDS

[CrashMidnick]

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

Makaimura is full speed on DSi ! I love you

 

[plasturion]

Mr Driller and Ganso Jajamaru-kun work even faster on DS Lite. However games like puyo puyo, card captor sakura are working same slow. I wonder why. I also tried to run Dicing Knight but it shows only some screen with testing SRAM. The log is: "Test SRAM #0...OK, TEST SRAM #1,#2,#3 NG!" I'm not using bios, maybe that's why. Anyway thanks for update. Time to move on DSi i guess.

 

[CrashMidnick]

So I tested briefly all the romset (B&W and colour). I always saw improvements compared to the old release in terms of speed.

All games booted correctly except the following titles (black screen after bios, was the same with previous release) :

Bakusou dekatora densetsu
Beat mania
With you mitsumete Itai

Boots but white screen after selecting a game :
shagai pocket

Boots but no sound in game :
Turntablist - DJ battle

On DSi, I would says that around 40% of games are running at 60fps, 50% between 50/55 FPS and 10% below 50FPS. Really good for a 2nd release !

On DS fat and lite : This is half the speed above (average).

We can say that we have got a working WonderSwan emulator on the DSi and O3DS Thanks Flubba !

 

[placebo_yue]

Edit: tested on O3DS

Digimon Anode & Catode: considerable speedup in general, walking around is still slightly slow i think, and the graphics glitch a little, the in-battle map movement doesn't quite yet feel fullspeed but it's good, the battle cutscenes are much faster now. Overall the game is super playable.

Digimon Vpet game: considerable speedup, possibly full speed. Very minor glitches present in previous version remain, but the game is 100% playable with awesome speed on every screen

Digimon Tamers Battle Spirit 1.5: great speed, but serious flickering glitches on the in-battle HUD cover the whole screen. If that's fixed i believe the game is running nearly perfect

Final Fantasy: pretty sure the game is running 100% fullspeed. The dialogbox not covering crates and NPCs still happens, but it's not too bad. I assume after all this testing that graphical glitches weren't dealt with, only speed issues, right?

Final Fantasy 2: same speed as FF1, no graphical glitches noticed

Pocket Fighters: playable speed, small graphical glitches.

other stuff i noticed: the disable sprites/foreground/background options don't seem to do anything, not does the "B&W pallette". Also when changing anything on the settings menu, the app often crashes, not always but often and i haven't noticed a pattern to it yet.

 

[CrashMidnick]

Edit: tested on O3DS

Digimon Anode & Catode: considerable speedup in general, walking around is still slightly slow i think, and the graphics glitch a little, the in-battle map movement doesn't quite yet feel fullspeed but it's good, the battle cutscenes are much faster now. Overall the game is super playable.

Digimon Vpet game: considerable speedup, possibly full speed. Very minor glitches present in previous version remain, but the game is 100% playable with awesome speed on every screen

Digimon Tamers Battle Spirit 1.5: great speed, but serious flickering glitches on the in-battle HUD cover the whole screen. If that's fixed i believe the game is running nearly perfect

Final Fantasy: pretty sure the game is running 100% fullspeed. The dialogbox not covering crates and NPCs still happens, but it's not too bad. I assume after all this testing that graphical glitches weren't dealt with, only speed issues, right?

Final Fantasy 2: same speed as FF1, no graphical glitches noticed

Pocket Fighters: playable speed, small graphical glitches.

other stuff i noticed: the disable sprites/foreground/background options don't seem to do anything, not does the "B&W pallette". Also when changing anything on the settings menu, the app often crashes, not always but often and i haven't noticed a pattern to it yet.

Yes I think re-writing the code into asm was his main goal to improve the speed. Problems such as missing text box, glitches and other few issues are still there but this emu is already in a very usable state

 

[FluBBa]

Yes I've only been converting the cpu core to arm asm. My only concern is that I break something, but only changing the cpu core means it's easy to find what is broken if that happens.
Edit: -"Boots but white screen after selecting a game : Shanghai Pocket"
Thanks! This is what I wanted to see, this is now fixed for the next release.

 

[RocketRobz]

Rockman.EXE runs a bit faster, but still not full speed.

 

[Cris1997XX]

Just out of curiosity, what's with the green border around Wonder Swan Color games?

 

[RocketRobz]

Just out of curiosity, what's with the green border around Wonder Swan Color games?

Pretty sure the color varies between games and areas within the games. It's not green on my side.

 

[FluBBa]

Completed the rewrite of the cpu core in ARM asm.
Not much else is changed. I'm still looking into Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu, it uses Halt which is not correctly emulated, lots of things with the interrupts are not correct.
https://github.com/FluBBaOfWard/NitroSwan/releases/tag/v0.2.0

 

[The Real Jdbye]

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.
Basic sound emulation though no sample support yet.

Graphics can be a little glitchy depending on the game but this should be possible to fix.
Speed should be fixable to a high degree as well, 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/v0.2.0

Oh wow, it's FluBBa! Love your work man. This release sure came out of nowhere. With your emulator dev experience this could indeed turn out to be something very impressive.
The Wonderswan was a cool system, shame most of the games are Japanese only.

 

[placebo_yue]

Outstanding improvement in speed! i won't even bother talking about specific games, they all are running MUCH better, and the difference is abysmal compared to the other wonderswan emulator we had on 3DS. Great work mr. Flubba, you have my most sincere thanks and admiration

 

[Cris1997XX]

Most of them still run...well, decently. The only one at full speed might as well be Mr Driller

 

[FluBBa]

Finally a new release. This has taken a lot of work but I still have a couple of ideas left of what to optimize.
All (?) games should now at least start and run close to 60fps on DSi.
* Added banked SRAM emulation.
* Fixed zip decompression buffer size.
* Optimized cycle counting.
* Optimized Program Counter.
* Optimized memory access.
* Optimized opcodes.

https://github.com/FluBBaOfWard/NitroSwan/releases/tag/v0.3.0

 

[CrashMidnick]

Really nice. Thanks for this release

 

[RocketRobz]

Finally a new release. This has taken a lot of work but I still have a couple of ideas left of what to optimize.
All (?) games should now at least start and run close to 60fps on DSi.
* Added banked SRAM emulation.
* Fixed zip decompression buffer size.
* Optimized cycle counting.
* Optimized Program Counter.
* Optimized memory access.
* Optimized opcodes.

https://github.com/FluBBaOfWard/NitroSwan/releases/tag/v0.3.0

For whatever reason, even though the emulator displays as 60FPS, the MegaMan games still feel like 50FPS, which is weird, since there doesn't seem to be lagging.
Music uploads on YouTube play like 60FPS, compared to the emulator. Am I missing something, or is the result from the emulator how they normally play?

 

[FluBBa]

For whatever reason, even though the emulator displays as 60FPS, the MegaMan games still feel like 50FPS, which is weird, since there doesn't seem to be lagging.
Music uploads on YouTube play like 60FPS, compared to the emulator. Am I missing something, or is the result from the emulator how they normally play?

Yeah, the reason I was explicit in saying it runs 60FPS instead of full frame rate is that the WonderSwan is actually 75FPS...
You can tweak the DS line position during blank to raise or lower the screen update but I'm not sure if it's possible to go up to 75Hz. Right now it is a long way down on my todo list.

 

[placebo_yue]

Right now it is a long way down on my todo list.

what's on that list? anything we can test?

 

[SLiV3R]

This is fantastic. FluBBa! I will test this weekend

This should be very Nice pixel perfect on the ds. 1:1.

Dicing Knight seems like a cool game. Some Roguelike elements!

 

[FluBBa]

New release! This version should be much faster than before, also fixed a lot of graphical glitches.
You can now press the top left buttons by using "L" plus d-pad.

*Added RTC emulation.
*Added a border to emu screen.
*Better mapping of input.
*Optimized graphic redraw.
*Optimized PC/IP handling in cpu core.

https://github.com/FluBBaOfWard/NitroSwan/releases/tag/v0.3.5