melonDS aims at providing fast and accurate Nintendo DS emulation. While it is still a work in progress, it has a pretty solid set of features:

• Nearly complete core (CPU, video, audio, ...)
• JIT recompiler for fast emulation
• OpenGL renderer, 3D upscaling
• RTC, microphone, lid close/open
• Joystick support
• Savestates
• Various display position/sizing/rotation modes
• (WIP) Wifi: local multiplayer, online connectivity
• (WIP) DSi emulation
• DLDI
• (WIP) GBA slot add-ons
• and more are planned!







Download melonDS

If you're running into trouble: Howto/FAQ
When things turn out unexpectedly simple
As I said in the previous post, melonDSi can't boot any DSi-enabled cart. I'd been banging my head against the problem for a long while, attempting to work out how the launcher on the ARM9 worked and why it was failing, but went nowhere. The code is a pain to track, relying on all sorts of threads and callbacks and things.

Shows that taking a break does wonders.

Just yesterday, I idly looked at that bug again. Reproduced the freeze, then pressed F11 (debug key printing some status to the console) a few times to see if I could see a pattern. The ARM9 seemed to exhibit typical 'idle thread' behavior; the ARM7 however, seemed to get stuck in a loop. A quick glance at my IDB of the firmware code confirmed this:

AES wait routine

If you aren't fluent in ARM assembly, this function waits for the AES engine to finish whatever crypto operation it is doing, by checking the busy flag in AES_CNT.

But, in our case, the ARM7 got stuck inside this because, somehow, said busy flag remained set forever.

Some logging of AES operations shown that, while loading the game, the firmware would start a decrypt operation with a block count of zero. melonDSi didn't check for that case, and instead waited for data input that would never come (heh), causing the busy flag to remain set forever. You guess how this goes.

After quickly fixing this bug, I tried loading a cart game again. It still froze on a white screen, but the logs showed it was getting further. In particular:

UNIMPLEMENTED ARM9 NDMA3 START MODE 04, 04100010->021153A0 LEN=1 BLK=1 CNT=A4044000

That meant the game was actually booting, and attempting to load its data, using NDMA ('new DMA' implemented in the DSi) for whatever reason. NDMA start mode 04 is for cart slot DMA, which is triggered every time a data word is transferred from the cart.

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melonDSi beta release
Apologies for the silent month. Things are shaking up here irl, as I'm starting that job, and looking for a new apartment, which is a bit of a shitshow.

Anyway, here we go: we present you melonDSi, in unfinished beta glory. The JIT beta will follow, but I first want to ensure Generic is comfortable with it.

The end goal will be to merge this with regular melonDS once it's in a better state, but, for now, we're providing it for the curious folks.


How to use melonDSi

BE SURE TO READ THIS BEFORE USING MELONDSI. You are using a beta release, provided with zero polishing and with a debug console. I expect that you know what you are doing to atleast some extent.

melonDSi will require several files to be dumped from a DSi. It's a bit messy right now, but we hope to come up with more user-friendly solutions in the future.

So, if you have a DSi, you might want to install unlaunch on it.

A quick rundown of the files melonDSi requires:

* bios9.bin / bios7.bin: DS-mode BIOS images. Those are the same as the ones from a DS. They shouldn't be required to get DSi software running, but melonDSi will refuse to start if they aren't present.

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2D accuracy: it's a rabbit hole too
Yeah. I've been wanting to fix mosaic support in melonDS, and, well, got sidetracked (I know I still have to release the JIT and DSi betas).

Anyway, mosaic is a typical feature of old consoles with 2D engines, including the DS. It basically applies a pixelation effect to graphics, as shown here:



The basic idea is that the screen is split in a grid, whose dimensions are variable (configured by register 0x0400x04C on the DS). For each 'cell' in the grid, all the pixels are colored the same as the first (top-left) pixel. In reality, it's a bit more complex, as on the DS the effect can be applied per-layer and per-sprite, and you can even specify different grid sizes for BG layers and sprites, but fundamentally it's more or less the same thing, it pixelates shit.

Sounds simple enough, right?

It's a bit tricky to implement when you're trying to write a performant renderer, though. Which is more or less why blargSNES never supported it.

As far as melonDS is concerned, mosaic was implemented in version 0.5, but (among other silly bugs) it never worked quite right as far as sprites were concerned, especially when those use rotation/scaling. But, at the time, I didn't do much past the original implementation, mostly because I don't know of a lot of games that use the mosaic effect. The lack of test cases meant it stayed supbar.

Until, well, now.

First thing to do is to write some test cases for sprite mosaic. BG mosaic seems quite simple, even though I would still have to probe it extensively for edge cases, but sprite mosaic is a bit more oddball, as seen here:

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melonDS 0.8.3
About fucking time, I guess.


So what does this release bring? Well, we have been trying to address the issues present in previous 0.8.x releases (or sometimes even older releases, heh).


For example, I fixed the bug that was introduced with the new support for Ctrl+K type hotkeys. Basically, using Shift/Ctrl/etc as regular keys mapped to buttons was no longer possible. So, support for key mappings with modifiers was restricted to hotkeys. Meaning that using right Shift as R (as done by the default key mapping) should no longer cause input problems.


I have been trying to fix the issues we had with the framerate limiter and audio output, too, with moderate success. As I haven't been able to come up with a one-size-fits-all fix, there are now three different sync modes you can use, individually or together:

* Limit framerate: the oldschool framerate limiter. Although this is a revamped version that tries to average over several frames, reducing the likelihood of limiting too aggressively on certain games that internally run at 30FPS and are otherwise able to run fullspeed.

* Audio sync: synchronizes emulation to the audio output system. Seems to result in a bit more fluctuation in the framerate, but should prevent any audio stuttering.

* VSync (in the video settings dialog): synchronizes video output to your monitor's refresh rate. This only works with OpenGL, and currently only works under Windows (OpenGL support under Linux still needs more love). Also, DS games/programs may alter their framerate by messing with VCount, which VSync would be ill-equipped to deal with (unlike the two other sync methods).

I think most of the audio issues came from not properly syncing, which resulted in semi-regular overflows or underflows in the SPU FIFO, causing stuttering. The current audio output system cannot be precise enough to prevent those, as it works with small audio frames.

Speaking of which, I have also been revising it to use a more standard output frequency, in case some bad audio driver doesn't appreciate the previous frequency of 47340Hz. Now, it will attempt to run at 48000Hz, but it also allows SDL to specify another frequency if needed.

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We're alive
Not a lot to say other than that I'm still trying to figure out how to fix audio output. And I hope the fix will work. It would be utterly soul-crushing if I spent all that time figuring out a fix and implementing it only to have it be a trainwreck for half the userbase or whatever. So... let's pray.


Also, on the DSi front:

I'm also unsure what to do. there are BIOS dumps out there that have been filled as much as possible, by dumping the lower half and adding back the known parts of the upper half that can be sourced from elsewhere, as seen there: http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#biosdumping . NO$GBA expects these particular dumps. I might want to adopt that method too, but I'm afraid such dumps are less complete than dsikeys.bin/initmem7.bin/initmem9.bin.

Opinions on this are welcome. I'll need to check how much of the AES keys is sourced from the BIOS, vs how much is needed to run shit like the DSi firmware.

For reference: dsikeys.bin contains all the AES keys, as extracted from the AES engine after an unlaunch boot. initmem7.bin and initmem9.bin are chunks of ARM7 WRAM and ARM9 ITCM that contain keys (RSA, Blowfish) and other shit needed for initialization, those are mostly (but not entirely) sourced from the BIOS.


On other fronts, all sorts of exciting things are being developed for melonDS! Those who follow repo activity may have noted that DLDI support is being worked on. Stay tuned!


Edit- comments about how "I don't give a shit about DSi emulation!! Work on the features I want!!" or "nobody cares about DSi" or whatever, are getting on my nerves. There are very good reasons to work on DSi emulation, so I swear that if this shit continues I'll be deleting comments and handing out bans.
Progress on the DSi front
The other front would be, you know, getting 0.8.3 good for a release. Which means, fixing the goddamn audio output system. Have been rather unsuccessful at that task for now.

So instead, I did what I typically do in these situations: procrastinate and work on something else.

In this case, the DSi front.

If you remember, this was at a point where it needed wifi initialization to be able to launch titles. I was stuck at a particular point of the init procedure, where it waited for something and I had trouble figuring out what. But, regardless, I set to work.

In the meantime, googling some of the strings present in the firmware's wifi code brought me to this Atheros driver codebase which is very close to what the firmware uses. This helped me a lot in figuring out how things work and what the firmware was expecting.

And, well...

melonDSi config melonDSi flipnote

It's possible to boot shit from the firmware now!

Couple issues with this though.

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The JIT
Things have been slow lately, you may have noticed. Couple reasons to that.

I meant to fix a few of the issues we had lurking around, so we could release 0.8.3. I managed to fix some issues that caused random crashes on exit, then began trying to fix the framerate limiter. Thing is, it is directly related to the audio output code and the issues that has. So, yeah, I still haven't found a solution to that tricky problem.

I also need to struggle to keep some motivation at times. Looking at the patterns in how I work, it is likely that I have ADHD. I have yet to get diagnosed and all, but this wouldn't surprise me.

Anyway!

As you may have noticed, Github user RSDuck sent a pull request for the JIT recompiler. This is a bit of a tricky situation though. I don't want to have to deal with a situation where people make third-party JIT builds, but at the same time, the JIT isn't quite ready for general use, as we're still ironing out various issues with it.

However, the JIT is said to give a performance boost ranging from 30% to 100%, which is fairly nice, especially as there's room for improvement. RSDuck also said that porting the JIT to other architectures, like ARM, should be easy, so we might finally have Switch builds that run at acceptable speeds.

Or, also, Android builds. But, dunno. On one hand, this is a market I want to address, but on the other hand, history from Dolphin has shown that the Android userbase isn't exactly the nicest to deal with, so... yeah. And don't get me started on Android itself and the fun that coding for it is.


But first, let's focus on what we have in front of ourselves.


I'm going to try as hard as I can to fix the audio issues for 0.8.3 (and also add a vsync setting).

We will also be releasing beta builds of the JIT and the DSi branch, for those of you who want to mess around with things.
welp.
Slowly figuring out what makes the DSi menu tick. Aaaaand...

It will require some amount of wifi support to be able to launch titles. The amount required makes the 0.2 wifi stub look tiny in comparison. Basically the DSi menu tries to communicate with the wifi CPU thing and upload firmware to it.

We can either HLE it given sufficient documentation (and have to deal with ass-shitting high-level wifi concepts) or LLE the damn thing.

We'll see.
the heat
glarg

..

Let's just say it's a bit hard to be productive when your outside temperature is a scorching, capitalism-induced 43°C.

It's back to more reasonable temperatures now, but regardless, we don't do much besides bathing at the beach or at the nearby river.

I kind of need to take a break at this point though. Like, there are many things I want to do with melonDS, but I have too much ideas, and there's only so much I can do at once.

I will need to release a quick-fix 0.8.3 though. Atleast to fix the bug I introduced when adding support for 'Ctrl+M' type keys'. Basically you can't press any key while keeping R pressed if you keep the default mapping (right Shift).

I also want to try and fix the framerate limiter, which, askskfdksgsf.

On the DSi side, there will be some alpha builds of melonDSi once I finish the DSi dumper. Right now, the dumper is able to extract AES keys from the AES engine. The rest will be a breeze: dumping the BIOSes, the memory holding RSA/Blowfish keys, the NAND, the eMMC CID and console ID. It's mostly just matter of copying memory to a file, except the NAND is going to be a bit more involved, but nothing insurmontable.

I gave melonDSi a small pause, because I got stuck on AES-CCM (needs hardware tests) and also didn't want to let the master branch rot. Right now, it's not in a very interesting state -- all it does is boot the DSi menu, but it's still not getting further. And also because I keep fixating on the lack of full DSi bootroms. I'm even considering getting in touch with someone who is doing the hardware haxing required to dump them, or attempting to do it myself.

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melonDS 0.8.2
melonDS 0.8.2 is out! This is not so revolutionary, but we're fixing a few issues.


Namely, there have been some fixes to the OpenGL renderer. If you were one of those for whom it did not work, we hope that now it will work. There are still issues with it, but we will eventually find them and fix them all.

I also undid a quick hack I did in 0.8.1 to try fixing texture alignment problems, that in the end caused more issues than it fixed. This problem will need a cleverer solution. It basically stems from the fact that the DS rasterizer works differently from OpenGL: it has no subpixel precision, and calculates color/texcoord for exact pixel positions, where OpenGL calculates them for a position that is +(0.5,0.5) inside the pixel.

I also hope to improve the GL renderer some more. In mind are: texture cache, texture upscaling/filtering, applying filtering to the 2D layer, doing something for dual-screen 3D...


We fixed a bug with the 'map joystick button and axis' feature of 0.8.1, where, if you mapped an axis control alone, it would also map 'button 1' alongside it.


melonDS now explicitly disables VSync when using OpenGL, atleast under Windows.


We also fixed a bunch of issues, potential crashes, etc...


... and changed kMaxIterationCycles from 16 to 64. That constant controls how many maximum cycles the ARM9 can run before control is given to the ARM7 and other system components. This change might affect accuracy negatively (it is worth noting that melonDS has several provisions for on-demand sync, bypassing kMaxIterationCycles) but has been found to give a small speed boost.


We're also using Github releases now. I'll add the builds to the Github page (and to the downloads page on this site) soon :)

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