we can have someone else host that download

or hell, even put it on this server here

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Kuribo64

still brainstorming how to do it without killing performance, but I think I have ideas

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Kuribo64

namely, seems to be 2x2 tiles?

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Kuribo64

probably not a good idea to publicly say where you got your ROM


regardless, wifi is in a 'beta' status, it sometimes works sometimes doesn't

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Kuribo64

source issue is nothing you can fix yourself unless you have some coding and emulation knowledge. basically, wifi support is not good enough.

there's a wifi setting you can try changing, but that's about it.

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Kuribo64

now that's weird af

maybe the working directory is being set to somewhere else by the launcher, or something shitty

also, that's not how you embed an image. we have a tag for that.

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Kuribo64

oh, right

the [imgs] tag is there for that. it's the 'thumbnail' button on the post toolbar.

actually lemme edit your post to fix that for ya.


as for knowing what the working directory is... dunno.

try opening a terminal, cd'ing your way to the melonDS directory, then running it from that, and see how that goes?

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Kuribo64

Posted by shibboleet

Very possible it's trying to look in the folder that melonDS is in somehow?

that's what it's set to do as a first attempt, and seeing as the files are there, it should find them... unless it's looking elsewhere on accident.

Posted by shibboleet

Or you can just compile it yourself and insert a debug here to see where it's trying to access.

I don't know whether the OP is willing to delve into source code, so for now let's keep this simple

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Kuribo64

try playing with the wifi setting. otherwise, not much you can do.

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Kuribo64

savestates (.mln) =/= save files (.sav)

from what you're saying, the one you want is .sav. melonDS takes raw .sav files.

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Kuribo64

no, that also points to an actual issue with melonDS.

for example, if you launch a ROM by, say, dragging it over the melonDS executable, it will try looking for BIOS/etc in the ROM's directory, and fail.

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Kuribo64

probably what caused your issue is that your file was one byte too short. melonDS detects the save type based on the file size, so it needs to be exactly a power of two.

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Kuribo64

might help, but I'd have to try it someday

there's already a related optimization in place tho, and it helps a little

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Kuribo64

saving binary files with Notepad is a bad idea, it turns all zero bytes into 0x20, wrecking the file

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Kuribo64

As title says.

We're not showing screenshots because they wouldn't be a good medium for conveying the number of changes in this release.


The biggest change here is that the core timings were entirely renovated to try being closer to the hardware.

First of all, after several days of gruelling testing and guesswork, we were finally able to understand the GX timings, and emulate them properly for the first time. But, as we weren't gonna stop there, we also renovated the timings for DMA and memory accesses, so that both of them are closer to their hardware counterparts. DMA and ARM7 should be pretty close to perfection now, ARM9 less so but it's still more realistic.

We have also been fixing the emulator's main loop, so that the ARM9, ARM7 and system clocks shouldn't desync anymore.

All of this, with a few added optimizations, fixes a whole bunch of issues, from things flickering to audio crackling to games outright going haywire (hi RaymanDS). Your games are now running better than ever!

... or not. That's also the point of the 0.7.1 release, I want to hear about any issues caused by the timing renovation, so we can get them fixed for the epic 0.8.

We already have one such issue, all of this is causing sprite flickering in Pokémon Platinum. Quick attempts at fixing this went nowhere, so we will have to investigate this proper.


There's also a number of misc fixes. For example, the 3D glitches that showed up in Mario Kart DS were fixed, but there's already a lengthy post about this.

There's a small fix to 2D windows, nothing really noteworthy, just fixes a game that was setting up backwards windows.

The input system no longer requires a dpad to be mapped to directional keys for joystick axes to work.

The code that looks for local files (melonDS.ini, BIOS, firmware...) was modified to explicitly check the directory melonDS is in, if that is not the same as the working directory. So in these cases it will no longer fail to find its files. Also, if melonDS.ini is absent, the preferred directory for creating it is the directory melonDS is in.

And, finally, we finally got rid of the old savemem type autodetect code. Considering its complexity and the amount of failures, it was a trainwreck. So instead, now, melonDS will pull that information from the provided ROM database (romlist.bin).


Enjoy!


Windows 64-bit
Linux 64-bit

melonDS Patreon

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Kuribo64

If your game is failing to save:


* You might have an old failed savefile causing this, try moving/deleting it.

* If it still fails, try downloading a fresh romlist.bin from the repo.

* If this doesn't help, that means we need to correct romlist.bin.


Last resort: you can get an existing savefile and place it next to your ROM.

When a savefile is present, melonDS determines the savemem type from that file's size, ignoring the autodetect/romlist.bin result. The idea is that if the initial setup fails, you can still get around that and play your game by providing an already-working savefile.

Of course, you are still encouraged to report any such errors.

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Kuribo64

you can get XVI32, it's good for files not too big

(don't go opening DVD ISOs in it, it tries to store the whole file in RAM)

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Kuribo64

whichever games you like

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Kuribo64

it's planned

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Kuribo64

The melonDS company celebrates Christmas! Albeit one week early. But this new release of melonDS is a neat little pile of presents.

You have already gotten a glimpse of it, but let's go over all the changes since 0.7.1, because it's been a fast week.


So first of all, the issues we have seen pop up in NSMB, Pokémon, or Etrian Odyssey after the timing renovation, have been fixed. Nicely, the new timings uncovered some stealth GX bugs that would surely have bitten us another day under other circumstances.

So the claim that was made for 0.7.1 ("now your games run better than ever") is finally more than a phony advert


Second big thing is, as you probably guessed by now, microphone support. If your machine has a microphone connected and if you are using SDL 2.0.5 or more recent, you can blow or blare bullshit into it and it just works! If that is not the case, you can also opt to feed a WAV file or white noise as microphone input.

Note that this feature is still experimental. Quality of microphone input may not be optimal, especially when using a physical microphone. WAV input works better.

WAV and white noise modes send input when pressing a microphone hotkey (default is the key right next to right Shift, '?' on QWERTY keyboards). WAV mode can take any reasonably small file, encoded as 8-bit or 16-bit PCM, signed or unsigned, any number of channels (it will read the first channel).

All this can be configured in the new audio settings dialog, where you can also set the volume for audio output.


Which brings us to the new hotkey system. For now, aside from the aforementioned mic hotkey, there is only another one: 'Close/open lid', which simulates closing/opening the DS. Default key is Backspace.

Oh and the hotkey system is an extension of the regular input system, which means you can also assign joystick buttons to these hotkeys.


Speaking of the input system, Windows users may have noticed that the input config dialog was abysmally slow, taking several seconds to open and generally feeling quite laggy. With a quick little fix in libui, that is no more, and the dialog now feels a lot more normal.

Some attempt was made at fixing possible crashes with that dialog under Linux, but those crashes may need more investigation. In my current setup (Ubuntu 16.04), I am unable to reproduce them, or break the input config dialog in any way. I don't know which are caused by melonDS and which are obscure GTK bugs. While one of the stack traces that were reported showed something I could easily work around, the other pointed at some obscure bug where some function internal to GTK is getting a NULL value and crashing.


On a whim, I added support for nocash-style debug print, which enables homebrew to print to the emulator's console. Also, Windows users don't need to get a debug build to get console output -- running the release version of melonDS from cmd will dump the console output there.


We also have some welcome contributions from some fine Github comrades:

* FPS limiter toggle, courtesy abcdjdj
* flatpak manifest, by cpba
* Linux libpcap library names added to the libpcap loader by dogtopus
* and finally Aqueminivan renovating the readme, it looks cool now!


And, last but not least, a whole bunch of misc bugs were fixed:

* black screens in Puzzler World 2
* American Girl - Kit Mystery Challenge! screeching garbage audio in the house
* blending fail in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon - Explorers of Sky
* lack of background music in Club Penguin: Herbert's Revenge
* a few wrong entries in romlist.bin were corrected
* config dialogs could be opened multiple times


Merry Christmas!


melonDS 0.7.2, Windows 64-bit
melonDS 0.7.2, Linux 64-bit

melonDS Patreon if you're feeling generous

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Kuribo64