Nintendo DS Emulators

[alexkidd2000]

Just picked up an R4 for my DS, hoping to find some emulators for it. Anyone know of any running near 100%? I have found a couple but none ran very well. Mostly want Coleco Vision, SMS, NES, Genesis, SNES.

Thanks!

[Cryomancer]

DSMasterPlus for SMS / GG

Picodrive for Genesis although it has no sound and might not be 100% speed or support either.

The others I haven't really tried yet. You'd think there'd be better support for stuff. At least we can play Phantasy Star.

[GrandAmChandler]

Since this pertains to the actual Nintendo DS hardware, I am going to move this to Modern Gaming.

-GAC-

[agbulls]

DSMasterPlus for SMS / GG

Picodrive for Genesis although it has no sound and might not be 100% speed or support either.

The others I haven't really tried yet. You'd think there'd be better support for stuff. At least we can play Phantasy Star.

Do you know about NES at least? Ive been thinking about getting an R4 myself.

[Cryomancer]

NES I haven't tried. I'll take a look later when I update my R4.

edit: seems like the NESDS emulator doesn't have DLDI support, but will eventually, so maybe I'll just wait after all.

edit2: here's a coleco http://www.portabledev.com/pages/ds/jeuxdev.-perso/colecods.php they also have a few others, I'll give em a shot later and report back.

[jcalder8]

I was looking for the same thing and after checking out what was out there I bought a PSP.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

nesDS doesn't necessarily need DLDI support since it comes with a Windows program that lets you build the ROMs and emulator together into a single DS ROM that doesn't need any FAT access. DLDI would only be needed for SRAM saves in battery backup games or save states. The emulation is just about perfectly and nesDS has some nice extra features, too, like the rewind button and different display options. Mapper support is not 100%, but it's good and most regular games will work, it's mostly only pirate original or obscure games that don't work. It'd be nice to see an update (it's been a long time since anyone's touched the nesDS source) with DLDI, better mapper support and maybe an improved interface, but as it is it's definitely highly recommended.

DSMasterPlus is okay, but it's slow and a little fluttery. The older SMS emulator, DSMS actually has perfect speed, but the sound is awfuland there's major graphical errors in some games. DSMS isn't getting updates anymore, but DSMasterPlus is and I expect it to get to something near perfection within the next year. The Master System will be a nice system have emulated well on the DS since the SMS mostly uses a 256x192 video mode whihc is exactly the same resolution as the DS screen, unlike most other systems where the picture has to be quished to fit on the DS screen.

The Colecovision also uses a 256x192 resolution and in addition the DS touchscreen would make Coleco emulation ideal for the system. ColecoDS isn't all that great, though. It's okay and many games are playable, but I know the DS can do better. I'm thinking of trying my own hand at a Coleco emulator on the DS even though I have no experience with coding or even porting emulators. We'll see, though.

Genesis and SNES emulation on the DS are both at about the same level, though it's grahics priorities that keep the SNES emulators back and it's mostly sound that keeps Genesis emulation back. General compatibility is also a problem for both systems. PicoDriveDS and SNEmulDS are both playable and even quite good for certain games, but overall they're not entirely satisfactory emulators. They'll both get better, but I'm personally not ever expecting to see full speed, perfect sound and great compatibility for Genesis or SNES emulators on the DS.

Gameboy, Atari 2600 and TurboGrafx are still emulated better on the GBA than on DS native emulators. For the Gameboy that's okay, but hopefully good 2600 and Turbo emulators will come along for the DS sometime before long. Maybe a Neo Geo CD emulator, too.


...word is bondage...

[alexkidd2000]

ya i couldnt get that coleco one to work. no matter what i did it said there were no roms in the menu. the sms one i got was dsmasterplus, games run all slow and wonky. will be sweet once we get some good emus tho.

[boatofcar]

So just to recap, is there any DS NES emulator with good rom compatibility and that runs with accurate speed?

[Poofta!]

i dont see this being very popular. most of homebrew developers who are worth a damn all develop for the psp. its easier platform to develop for, more powerful and just about anyone who has one can run homebrew on it, unlike the ds where you gotta buy a card. i have both, for classic games psp all teh way.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

Maybe I wasn't clear enough (though re-reading what I said, it seems pretty clear), nesDS is an excellent NES emulator on the DS.


i dont see this being very popular. most of homebrew developers who are worth a damn all develop for the psp. its easier platform to develop for, more powerful and just about anyone who has one can run homebrew on it, unlike the ds where you gotta buy a card. i have both, for classic games psp all teh way.
The DS homebrew scene is way, WAY bigger and more advanced than the PSP homebrew scene, so you are quite apparently wrong. The DS has the largest homebrew scene of any system aside from Windows and possibly the GP2X (which seems to have a very large scene, though I don't follow it very closely since I don't have the system.


...word is bondage...

[hbkprm]

sweeeeeeeeeeeet

[alexkidd2000]

anyone have any updates to add? i would really like to get some decent emu for ds.

[Cryomancer]

nesDS works well on R4s now, I ahven't really put a ton of effort into playing it yet but it seems to work fairly ok.

Better than the damn snes emulator nayway, which has problems with pretty much every game i played, and demands i have a "SNES" folder on my card's root even if i change the path manually in the cfg...

[Jorpho]

This Marca DS thing, a MAME derivative that runs several Z80-based arcade games, seems kinda nifty.