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Homebrew What does RAM expansion do for SNEmulDS?

[DSpico] Pico Launcher Enhanced, and PicoDex, a browser tool for the SD card

rasalopa · 2026-08-07T14:17:06+00:00

Hi everyone. I have been working on a few things for the DSpico for the last weeks and I wanted to share them here. Pico Launcher Enhanced is my fork of Pico Launcher. It keeps everything the original does and adds: Favorites (press X) and completed marks (hold X), with filters in the app bar Play time, launch count and last played date per game A recently played panel and a statistics screen (START) Game deletion from the launcher, with confirmation Brightness control for the DS Lite backlight Per folder background music, and night variants for theme backgrounds Game count of the current folder on the top screen, and random launch with SELECT The last release was mostly bug fixes. The worst one: the favorites filter could come up completely empty. Marks were looked up by the game internal code first, so on a renamed rom the top screen found the heart but the browser filter, which only sees file names, could not, and the game just vanished from the list. A user reported it and sent me his gamedata.json, that file is what let me find it. Saving is also atomic now, before that a power loss in the middle could leave you with an empty file and no favorites at all. Install is the same as the original, rename LAUNCHER.nds to _picoboot.nds in the root of your SD card. Your existing gamedata.json carries over. https://github.com/rasalopa/pico-launcher-enhanced PicoDex is a browser tool for the SD card. No install and no backend, you open the card and it manages covers, folder icons and file associations. It also tells you which Pico Loader release your card is running, and warns you when the files in _pico did not all come from the same one, which happens if you update by copying only the files you think changed. And for a retail nds game it shows what the loader will do at boot, if an anti piracy fix matches your exact rom revision, the save type and size, and any game patch. Chromium only sorry (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera). https://rasalopa.github.io/picodex/ The board LEDs, the DSpico board has two status leds that the firmware leaves dark. I made a firmware fork that uses them, blue for SD card activity and red when the firmware cannot start an SD transfer it needs, which are the places where it already freezes with no visible sign. Here it is reading, and then saving: This one needs compiling the firmware yourself, so I also sent it upstream as a pull request with the feature behind a build flag that is off by default. If it gets merged it would be there for everyone without a custom build. https://github.com/LNH-team/dspico-firmware/pull/26 Everything is open source. Thanks to the LNH team for the DSpico and for making all of this possible in the first place. If something is broken or you want something, issues are the fastest way to reach me.

Thread starter john.jingle
Start date Oct 20, 2008
Views 1,897
Replies 3

john.jingle

Well-Known Member

Member

Level 5

Oct 20, 2008

What does it do?

MasterPenguin

Well-Known Member

Member

Level 3

Oct 20, 2008

From what I've heard, boot larger games.

granville

GBAtemp Goat

Member

Level 14

Oct 20, 2008

SnemulDS can boot large games fine. It can stream them into the DS ram. What the expansion does it help it along a bit. I've noticed that without the expansion, Donkey Kong Country has some slight choppiness. Every few seconds, the action will pause for a microsecond and then resume. The expansion removes this problem (but it doesn't help other slowdown in the game).

DanTheManMS

aka Ricochet Otter

Member

Level 6

Oct 20, 2008

Right. Basically, in order for SNEmulDS to run any given part of the game, that portion of the game needs to be in the DS's RAM. The DS only has 4 MB of RAM, so for larger games (3-4 MB), it swaps parts of the game in and out of RAM as needed, sometimes causing slight slowdowns. If you load the entire game to slot-2 RAM, it doesn't have to swap the game all the time.