Nintendo DS emulation

Nintendo DS emulation is the act of emulating the Nintendo DS on non-native hardware.

History

"NDS emu" was released before the Nintendo DS itself in November 2004. The purported emulator was packaged with a demo file, as no commercial games had been made available. When commercial games were released, NDS emu was unable to emulate them. "Dualis" was released on March 5, 2005. It could not run commercial games, but could run homebrew games. "NO$GBA" was released with Nintendo DS support on January 22, 2006. An update of the emulator released on August 4, 2006, was stated by the creators to be the first emulator supporting commercial Nintendo DS games.

Emulators

DeSmuME

The original DeSmuME is written in C++ for Linux, Mac OS and Windows. It has also been ported to other systems such as the PlayStation Portable. It can play homebrew and commercial ROMs.

The original emulator was in French, but had user translations to other languages. It supported many homebrew Nintendo DS demos and some Wireless Multiboot demos. YopYop stopped development on DeSmuME due to a change of laws regarding emulation in France. However, the source code has been released and other programmers have continued developing DeSmuME.

The latest version of DeSmuME (v0.7.3) was released on August 12, 2007 and has a solid performance, being one of the most competitive emulators for the Nintendo DS available. Version 0.7 allowed, for example, the game Megaman ZX to become playable, with features such as emulation of cutscenes - though at a low framerate, due to the yet primitive nature of the 3D rendering engine. The previous version of DeSmuME reportedly crashed during the loading of the game. Official website for DeSmuME

Dualis

Dualis is a plugin-based emulator for Windows. It is written in x86 assembly and C++. The emulator also has the capability to record videos using the VFW encoding system, outputting in AVI containers. Official website for Dualis

Ensata

Ensata is an official emulator provided to developers in Nintendo DS development kits. It emulates the ARM7 and ARM9 dual screen processor at 100% with some software exceptions. The touch screen is fully emulated with a cursor and works with a keyboard. Ensata is a cycle accurate emulator, and is designed for testing games which are in development, and not for general gameplay. Ensata version 1.3c was leaked to the emulation community by an unknown source and cracked by the "SMT" group to operate without a Nintendo developer account. Version 1.4d was leaked and cracked by the "EXPERiENCE" group. Official website for Ensata

IDeaS

iDeaS is an emulator that runs a few commercial games on a Windows PC with OpenGL. iDeaS has emulated the ARM7 GameBoy Advance processor at 100%, and the ARM9 dual screen processor at 99%; enabling it to run many commercial ROMs, including Super Mario 64 DS and Pokémon Diamond & Pearl (with a few graphical errors). The touch screen is fully emulated with a cursor instead of a hand, and a keyboard can be used to emulate the Nintendo DS buttons. iDeaS uses a plugin system that originally came from the UltraHLE Nintendo 64 emulator so that further support can achieved without looking at the source code of the emulator. Plugins are available to download on the homepage. Official website for iDeaS

NO$GBA

NeonDS

NeonDS is a Windows-based emulator. The emulator lacks touch-screen and sound support, but preliminary tests show that its emulation is fairly advanced and produces reasonable speeds. Official website for NeonDS

ROMs

Dumping

Distribution

Nintendo DS ROMs are personally spread, such as through peer-to-peer networks and torrents. They are also made available through websites and Internet forums. The distribution of copyrighted Nintendo DS ROMs is illegal, and websites offering them are actively threatened by the Entertainment Software Association.