Stella-DS Improved

StellaDS 1.1g released. https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/StellaDS

Added support for all Paddle Games. You can use the left/right D-Pad (not very satisfying) or the touch screen area below the cart slot (somewhat more satisfying but still not quite like holding real paddles). I found hitting the A/B button for the paddle button was tricky so you can alternatively press either shoulder button which should satisfy lefties and righties.

New ROM table map added so that games are positioned perfectly on screen (I've only manually set about 50 of the most popular games... I'll do the rest soon-ish). A handful of games will now auto-switch into Flicker Free mode such as Stellar Track, Asteroids and Yars Revenge which really need that mode... but you can manually switch in/out of flicker free mode as you like (again, FF mode is CPU intensive so you will lose a bit of speed on some games). A few other fixes - like auto-patching the Haunted House ROM to fix the programmer bug (one byte change) and so that game is now playable. Using the shoulder buttons to bump the screen up/down one pixel is now done during the VBLANK so that the screen doesn't flash.

 

Just for fun, I enabled the lower CPU speed of DS mode (67Mhz vs 133Mhz) and the results were not impressive. Almost no game I tried ran at full speed - you might be able to play Adventure or Sky Diver with a bit of slowdown but almost nothing else will run right. StellaDS really is more like StellaDSi - it needs the extra CPU speed to be of any real playability.

Fortunately, you can get a nice Japanese DSi for about $35 shipped on eBay these days... get UNLAUNCH and TWI++ installed and it's 95% english and ready to play!

 

Honestly, I've no idea how to do that. From my hour of Google-ing it seems this build should work on flashcarts as well as on SD cards but I tried to load it on my R4i clone card (those $10 jobs) and it didn't work (error -4). I don't see anything obvious in the build that I would change to make it work for flashcarts.

If anyone more knowledgeable has a clue for me to follow, I'm all ears!

 

Oh wow - you're famous!
Thanks - I'll give that a try.

I've added support for the Driving Controller which provides access to like 3 games... sadly it was underutilized.

Still tweaking paddle games... some games use Paddle 0 and some use Paddle 1 and that needs some sorting out.

I'm adding new icons on the main screen to bring up full-screen paddle and keypad touch screens.

 

Thanks for the encouragement, MarioKartFan!

I'm really excited about the full-screen Paddle and Keypad emulation. Toggling in/out seems really clean so far. I should have a release ready tomorrow.

 

Okay, it's released. StellaDS 1.1h is here: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/StellaDS

Full paddle and keypad emulation via on-screen icons. Preliminary driving controller support (yay Indy 500!). Even games that use the OTHER paddle (like Demons to Diamonds) should now work fine. Need to tweak the sensitivity on the paddles on a per-game basis but generally it should all work now.

I also tried to get Supercharger games working but it's going to be a struggle due to the age at which the Stella emulator was ported to the DS (before Stella version 2). And DPC+ games (for new homebrews like Space Rocks which is amazing!) will never work - those carts have an ARM co-processor running at about same speed as the original DS CPU. We can barely keep up with 6502, TIA and RIOT emulation to make most Atari games work... the co-processor will not happen on this hardware.

But there is still so much classic goodness to enjoy!

 

Okay, thanks to Robz suggestion, I was able to put nds-hb-menu on my flashcart (was just a matter of copying the folder and then placing BOOT.NDS in the root of the SD card). Booted into the normal R4i clone menu and then launched BOOT.NDS and then StellaDS.NDS

The results were spectacularly bad. The games are emulated and you can clearly see/hear them running but the graphics are a mess. I suspect this is because of some of the DMA tricks I did for the build - it requires that the CPU be able to finish processing the memory copy into VRAM before it comes back around to re-writing that memory. The DSi with it's twice-fast CPU can do it... the DS-LITE and earlier cannot. I'm sure someone more clever than I am (not hard!) can find a way to make it fast and work on older hardware - but given how stunningly cheap a DSi is these days (US$40) it's really a powerhouse of classic gaming and worth seeking out.

It's probably time for a re-branding of StellaDS to StellaDSi with new readme and splash screen...

 

Okay, I went back to the pre-DMA hack I put in to give a speed performance boost for DSi consoles... and it does work but the framerate on most games is sub-par.

But if you want to play around, it will have some speed improvement over the original StellaDS and it will have the difficulty switches working as well as support for games like Raiders of the Lost Ark. But I don't hold out much hope of making it much faster on the older hardware...

https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/StellaDS

The "new" file you're looking for is called StellaDS-Lite.NDS and is not going to have the paddle/keypad/driver controller emulation working as the new build for DSi will.

Edit: You can play Adventure, Demon Attack and Pheonix at fairly close to full speed... give or take. But many other games are coming up short on the original hardware.

 

After a brief experiment, it's definitely the VRAM to VRAM copy that is causing problems on the DS-LITE (and DS-PHAT). I think it will be easy to check if I'm running in the slower CPU speed of a DS-LITE and older and then just use the old slower memory operations to make it work. At least it will be backwards compatible - though (again), only a small subset of games will run correctly (fortunately, great games like Adventure, Demon Attack, Missile Command, Phoenix, and Space Treat will work reasonably well enough).

 

Okay, uploaded 1.1i here: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/StellaDS

This build will check whether we are in DSi mode and if not, will slow down the DMA copy so that it works again on older DS-LITE (and, presumably, DS-PHAT) hardware. I have a DS-LITE but not older...

I'm also re-branding. I don't know if I'm allowed to do it on moral grounds - but there are all kinds of versions floating around out there... 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and some 1.0s are newer than 1.2s

So I'm going to bump up to revision 2.0 soon and call this "PHEONIX EDITION" because, well, I'm over 100 hours tweaking this thing and that's my compensation

 

Version 1.1j released: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/StellaDS

Added info button to show how keys are mapped.

Squeezed a few more CPU cycles out of the frame drawing... but it's like trying to get water from a stone at this point.

I did notice that I haven't heard the strange audio glitches (present in the baseline emulator I started with) since I put in the VRAM to VRAM DMA copy. Hopefully that was the issue!

Getting close to a 2.0 Release.