Homebrew Why no virtual memory?

[Tom]

Why no virtual memory?,for those of you that don't know Virtual memory or VM creates more ram for a device by creating a swapfile on the hdd.I realize it does shorten the life of the flash memory but still, never ending purposes for homebrew.The dsl and ds have only 4mb of ram and the dsi has 16mb, 100mb could make a real difference.

 

[tomrev]

ฺBecause it doesn't work. Virtual Memory need a background service to handling that need processing and memory usage.

 

[FAST6191]

Some homebrew programs take advantage of GBA flash carts (and I guess some of the enhanced DS cards do the same thing). Moonshell I believe did have a cache file on the disk for just this purpose but in general the combined throughput of the DS flash carts and microSD is not enough to warrant the effort and far more gains can be had doing conventional file grabs to stick in ram.

 

[Rydian]

It lacks an MMU, so like Fast said support for alternative stuff has to be specifically built into a program.