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NDS/DS Emulators

From Dev-Scene

There exist a number of homebrew emulators for the Nintendo DS (i.e. emulators for the PC that run Nintendo DS Software). Although their developers are putting a lot of effort into their development, none of them can at the current time be used for serious development, because they lack features and/or are slower than the real DS. But some simple programs can be run on them, so you can start developing without having access to the hardware.

These emulators exist:

Contents 1 DSEmu / DSEmu-ng 2 Dualis 3 iDeaS 4 DeSmuME 5 NO$GBA 6 VGBA 7 HyperDS 8 Ensata 9 IS NITRO Debugger/Capture/Video

[edit] DSEmu / DSEmu-ng

DSemu was written by Imran Nazar and is open source (BSD License). It works quite well and is the only emulator that can run under Linux with Wine so far. Of interest to developers, the emulator features a debugger. When Imran stopped development of DSemu for a time, Chris Double continued the development effort.

Homepage: http://www.double.co.nz/nintendo_ds/dsemu.html

Imran has also started development of 'dsemu-ng', the next generation of DSemu. This is open source and cross platform, and it can be compiled on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Homepage: http://www.dsemu.org/

[edit] Dualis

Dualis is an open source DS Emulator by Michael Ollanketo (Mic). The homepage has some interesting hardware info, too. It also contains basic emulation of GBAMP, allowing you to test apps based on libfat.

Homepage: http://dualis.1emulation.com/

[edit] iDeaS

iDeaS is a freeware DS emulator by Lino Maglione.

Homepage: http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/nds/ideas.html

[edit] DeSmuME

DeSmuME is a new DS emulator by Yopyop. It can run some homebrew programs and supports both the ARM9 and ARM7 CPUs. Yopyop stopped development on DeSmuME around April 2006 due to stringent changes in French law affecting his work ("DeSmuMe project is over. You may don’t know but there are a new law in France that could put me in big trouble."). A new development team assembled around July 2006 to continue work on DeSmuME.

Homepage: http://desmume.sf.net/.

The original, outdated web site is still available at http://www.desmume.com/.

[edit] NO$GBA

NO$GBA is an emulator for Nintendo Game Boy Advance games and generally accepted as the most evolved emulator. NO$GBA's NDS emulation support is steadily increasing in compatibility and functionality. NO$GBA v2.3 contains almost full NDS emulation support including 3D graphics.

Homepage: http://nocash.emubase.de/gba.htm

[edit] VGBA

The Virtual GameBoy Advance is, as the name suggests, a GBA emulator, but it is gradually accumulating funtionality necessary to emulate the DS. The author Marat Fayzullin wrote, "I have also started adding Nintendo DS features to VGBA, such as the second ARM9 CPU and the cartridge loader. This work is far from complete though, so do not expect VGBA to run Nintendo DS programs right away."

Homepage: http://fms.komkon.org/VGBA/

[edit] HyperDS

HyperDS is an emulator written by Tim Schuerewegen (Firefly). It was never released.

[edit] Ensata

This emulator was developed by Nintendo as part of the commercial SDK and is only legally available to official developers.

[edit] IS NITRO Debugger/Capture/Video

This is probably the best DS emulator that exists :-) It is a hardware-based emulator and is part of the official developer kit. IS (Intelligent Systems) is a company that produces a couple of different Nitros.

Homepage: http://www.intsys.co.jp/tools/index.html (Japanese; here is a Google translation).

Dev-Scene (c)