Immediate plans
Indirect mode is still flaky, but it's good enough for a beta release. I only have to polish a couple details and it'll be good for a 0.7.4 release, so, expect that release soon.




I also wanted to fix one of the issues with local multiplayer: when more than two players are involved, clients receive replies sent by other clients, which they shouldn't receive, and this likely contributes to it shitting itself big time.

But alas, this will be more complicated than anticipated. This is also the main reason why local multiplayer pretty much stagnated after melonDS gained its "wifi emulator" reputation back in 2017: emulating local MP is a large pile of issues that are all interconnected. Wifi emulation in melonDS is more or less a pile of hacks, and it works, but it's full of issues. Some stem from incomplete understanding of the DS wifi hardware (after 15 years. welp), but most of them are timing issues.

(which are also why I'm pretty much pessimistic about ever connecting melonDS to a real DS)

Local multiplayer 'a la Nintendo' works on a host-client scheme detailed here. Long story short, the host polls the clients at a regular, small interval (for example, every 4ms for Pictochat). Dealing with the sheer amount of packets transferred is in itself a challenge.

But that's not all. When the host sends its packet, each client is given a window within which it should send its response. Miss your window and it's considered a failure.

This works well with actual DSes because they're all running at the same speed, so the timings are reliable.

With melonDS, it's another story. We get lag inherent to the platform on which we're running: the network stack, thread scheduling, etc... Running multiple DSes in one melonDS instance might help alleviate these lag sources, but it wouldn't be a perfect solution either (it would likely be running the DSes on separate threads).

We also learned by experimentation that the framerate limiter is a problem, and connections worked better when disabling it. As silly as that sounds, it makes sense when looking closer. When disabling the framerate limiter (or when running below 60FPS), the melonDS instances run as fast as possible, and they may end up running at roughly the same speed, consistently, which makes for a better connection (less chance that MP replies miss their window). However, when enabling it, your melonDS instances may be running at any speed above 60FPS, but they will be spending several milliseconds per frame doing nothing in order to bring the framerate back to 60FPS.

Which, you guess, is bad bad bad for MP communications. The wifi system is driven by the emulator's scheduler, so it will end up running faster than it should, squishing MP reply windows and making it way more likely that replies get dropped.

And indeed, disabling the framerate limiter greatly reduces the amount of MP replies missing their window, even if the framerates are barely above 60FPS. The framerate limiter might be a bit zealous there.

However, the emulator instances might run at different framerates and possibly desync. And that's not too convenient if they end up running at absurdly high framerates.

blarg.

To get anywhere with this local multiplayer shito, we'll need a redesign. No amount of hacky solutions will get us anywhere with this pile of hacks.

First part is how the wifi system is driven.

melonDS runs ~560190 cycles per frame, which is 33611400Hz under ideal circumstances, close enough to the DS clock frequency.

Wifi is updated every microsecond. The handler is called every 33 cycles, which means that one emulated microsecond actually lasts ~0.9818 microseconds. I'll spare you the nerdy calculations about how much that represents in offset, because so far that hasn't prevented it from working.

But on the DS, the wifi system is driven by a 22MHz clock, independently from the system clock. So driving melonDS's wifi system independently from the scheduler would not only be accurate, but also isolate it from the core's variable execution speed. However, two main issues arise from this:

1. We need to keep the core somewhat in sync with the wifi system, or the game would eventually shit itself. How to synchronize and when to do so? That's the question.

2. The current wifi system needs to be updated per microsecond. If we put it on a separate thread, how to take care of this without pegging the host CPU and killing performance? We could design a scheduler similar to the core one. However the wifi system has a readable microsecond counter, and we need to take care of that somehow. Without per-microsecond updates, we can only approximate it and hope it will be good enough.


To further prove my point:




welp.


We'll think of all that later. Past 0.7.4, we're going to focus on the hardware renderer.
SpiffyJUNIOR says:
Mar 18th 2019
HW renderer?!

shut up and take my money
AsPika2219 says:
Mar 19th 2019
Nice local multiplayer! Waiting for next version! 😎
NM64 says:
Mar 19th 2019
I recall Cen64 needing to use vsync forced via the GPU driver in order to framerate-limit the emulator...I don't suppose something like that word work just as well (if not better) than an actual uncapped framerate?

(though of course, this requires you to be using a 60Hz refresh rate)
Jinkson says:
Mar 20th 2019
Hmmm, I wonder if savestate streaming between host and client like you see in RetroArch could help keep the wifi synced. If the wifi desyncs, immediately roll both back to the last state before desync, ACK ACK and try again?
Jinkson says:
Mar 20th 2019
Either way, I'm really interested in seeing the development of DS wifi emulation. Especially if local wifi can be tunneled over the internet. My dream for melonDS is that it will be the first and only DS emulator to allow Dragon Quest IX to be played as intended.
Ammako says:
Mar 22nd 2019
One day, no matter how distant, we will have perfectly accurate and perfectly functional emulators for all older systems.

And it will be glorious.
Comlud says:
Mar 25th 2019
Ammako, hopefully, but depends on how much we as a community push the dev ;)

Keep up the amazing work Arisotura!
InsaneFanta says:
Apr 26th 2020
Can you use melonDS to do local multiplayer with someone who has an actual DS if on the same wifi connection?
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