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
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To make it clear
Jun 21st 2017, by Arisotura
There is no Patreon version of melonDS. There will never be such a version.

Donating doesn't entitle you to anything. Not donating doesn't make you miss out on anything. You get the same package in all cases.


(this post used to be directed towards a particular news post, but it has since been corrected, so I will leave this here as a general note)


While it's nice that there are emu sites spreading the news, it is really better when they do some basic research and fact checking instead of posting mere assumptions that only cause confusion.


Thank you.
3 comments (last by Simply) | Post a comment
Opening to the outer world
Jun 20th 2017, by Arisotura
If you have followed melonDS from the beginning, you'd know that wifi was one of the goals. And well, it's getting there.


The first melonDS release, 0.1, already included some wifi code, but it was a very minimalistic stub. The point was merely to allow games to get past wifi initialization successfully. And it even failed at that due to a bug.

Chocolate waffles to you if you can locate the bug, by the way ;)

But well, at that stage, the focus wasn't much on wifi.


It was eventually fixed in 0.2, and some functionality was added, but it still didn't do much at all. Games finally got past wifi initialization, but that was about it.

It wasn't until 0.3 that some serious work was done. With the emulator core getting more robust, I could try going for the wifi quest again. Not that 0.3 went far at all -- it merely allowed players to see eachother, but it wasn't possible to actually connect. But it was something, and infrastructure for sending and receiving packets was in place and working, as well as a good chunk of the wifi hardware functionality.


You may already know how it went back in the DeSmuME days. As far as local multiplayer was concerned, I kept hitting a wall. Couldn't get it working, no matter how hard I tried. WFC is a separate issue.

It didn't help drive motivation knowing that my work was doomed to stay locked behind a permanent EXPERIMENTAL_WIFI wall, requiring a custom wifi-enabled build, and that the DeSmuME team's public attitude is to sweep wifi under the carpet and pretend it doesn't exist, but the main issue was the lack of documentation as far as local multiplayer is concerned.


The DS wifi hardware isn't a simple, standard transceiver. It is a custom, proprietary wifi system made by Nintendo for their purposes. It has special features to assist local multiplay communication at a fast rate.

... read more
14 comments (last by Newcomer) | Post a comment
So there it is, melonDS 0.3
Jun 4th 2017, by Arisotura


So what's new in this version?

A bunch of bugfixes. This version has better compatibility than the previous one.

This includes graphical glitches ranging from UI elements folding on themselves to motion blur filters becoming acid trips, or your TV decoder breaking.

But also, more evil bugs. As stated in previous posts, booting your game from the firmware is no longer a gamble, it should be stable all the time now. An amusing side note on that bug, it has existed since melonDS 0.1, but in that version, the RTC returned a hardcoded time, so the bug would always behave the same (some games worked, others not). melonDS 0.2 started using the system time, which is what introduced the randomness.

The 3D renderer got one-upped too. Now it runs on a separate thread, which gives a pretty nice speed boost on multicore CPUs. This is optional, so if it causes issues or slows things down, you can disable it and the renderer will work mostly like before.

When I had to implement the less interesting aspects of this (controlling the 3D renderer thread), I procrastinated and implemented 3D features instead. Like fog or edge marking. You can see them demonstrated in the screenshots above.

Then I went back and finished the threading. I'm not a big fan of threaded code, but it seems to be completely stable.

However, resetting or loading a new game is still not completely stable, it has a chance of freezing. Oh and the UI still sucks. I plan to finally get at the UI shit for 0.4, and I want to ditch wxWidgets, so I don't really feel like pouring a lot of time into the current UI.

... read more
4 comments (last by pog) | Post a comment
Threads!
May 24th 2017, by Arisotura
In the previous post, I said I wanted to run the 3D renderer on a separate thread. Well, we're going to see how all that works in detail.


Ever since 3D rendering was added into melonDS, it's been one of the bottlenecks whenever games use it. On the other hand, 2D rendering, while not being very well optimized, doesn't make for a big performance hit.

2D rendering isn't very expensive or difficult though -- the 2D renderers are oldschool tile engines, essentially drawing raster graphics onscreen at the specified coordinates, optionally with a bunch of fancy effects, but nothing too complex. In comparison, the 3D renderer is a full-fledged 3D GPU. It basically turns a bunch of polygons defined in 3D space, into a 2D representation that is then passed to the main 2D renderer and composited mostly like a regular 2D layer.

Transformations by various matrices, culling, clipping, viewport transform, rasterization with perspective-correct interpolation... it's a bunch of work.


The approach originally taken was to render a whole 3D frame upon scanline 215. I'm not sure whether rendering should start upon scanline 214 or 215 (GBAtek says it starts "48 scanlines in advance"), but melonDS starts at 215.

Which basically meant that the emulator had to wait until the whole 3D frame was rendered before doing anything else.


However, in emulation, you can't just throw everything on separate threads. Considering a component, whether you can put it on a separate thread depends on how tightly it is synchronized to other components.

This excellent article from byuu explains well how all this works.

In the case of our DS 3D renderer, threading is feasible because tight synchronization isn't required. Once the renderer starts rendering, you can't alter its state, the polygon and vertex lists are double-buffered and all the other important registers are latched. The only thing you can do is change VRAM mapping, but I have yet to come across a game that pulls stunts like swapping texture banks mid-frame.

... read more
4 comments (last by Nintendo Maniac 64) | Post a comment
Slicing the melons!
May 10th 2017, by Arisotura
So here are the two main goals for melonDS 0.3: threading the 3D renderer, and starting work on wifi connectivity.


The first goal basically aims at running the 3D renderer in parallel with the rest of the emulator. On the hardware, the renderer's state can't be altered while it is rendering, so the timing doesn't have to be precise, and we can use it to our advantage. As the current 3D renderer is a bottleneck, threading it should give a nice speed boost for multi-core CPUs (which are quite the norm nowadays).


The second goal doesn't mean wifi will work, but hey, we need to start somewhere.

Well actually wifi emulation has already been upped a notch compared to 0.2. The wifi RAM and associated registers are functional, as well as most of the timers. What remains to be done is functionality for sending/receiving packets. Power management and specific multiplayer features also need proper investigation. Then we have things like the RF and BB chips, which will likely never be fully emulated since they control very low-level aspects of wifi, like "how much energy should it take to consider we're receiving data".

So where does this get us? I have tested Pictochat and NSMB multiplayer, and in both cases, the host sets up a beacon and attempts to send it regularly, which is a good sign.

(The beacon is a packet regularly sent by wifi access points to advertise their presence. Since the DS doesn't support ad-hoc communication, multiplayer games use a similar scheme to communicate, typically with the first player acting as a host and other players being clients.)

Anyway, don't get too hyped over this, there's nothing too new here. DeSmuME and NO$GBA both get atleast this far if not further.


In the meantime, I've been implementing another obscure feature of the DS: writable VCount.

Old consoles typically have a register that reflects which scanline is being drawn onscreen. There are various names it can be called (LY on the GameBoy, VCOUNT on the GBA/DS), but it's essentially the same thing.

... read more
1 comment (by Nintendo Maniac 64) | Post a comment
More fun fixes
Apr 27th 2017, by Arisotura
So as I said in the last post, I've been fixing the firmware boot issues. Basically, when booting from the firmware, there was a high chance that the game would crash upon boot. But the bug and its effects were random. Sometimes it would simply hang on a white screen, sometimes it would jump to an invalid address... and sometimes it would work fine.


So we're going to see how we try to fix a random bug.


First thing to do is finding a way to reproduce the bug consistenly. So, hoping my bug would be affected by the time taken before clicking the health/safety warning screen, I set up a quick hack to automatically click the screen after a fixed number of frames. That didn't cut it, so I made the RTC return a fixed time. Which finally allowed me to reproduce the bug reliably.

I landed on a variation where the ARM9 jumped to an invalid address, which made it easy to find where it was doing that. I then started backtracking, which eventually led me to find out that some data were being copied from the wrong place, but it appeared the bug had more consequences than anticipated, making the backtracking long and tedious.

So instead, I dumped the RAM at the time the game booted, and compared it with a RAM dump from before a direct boot. It appeared that a chunk of code got accidentally erased. The range that got erased was within the cart's secure area, so I checked the code that handled secure area reads, but the bug wasn't there.

So I tracked where that code region was getting erased. The bug appeared, and it was another stupid bug. It turned out to be a DMA from the ARM7 accidentally doing that.

The bug was that during cart transfers, melonDS tried to start DMA for both CPUs. The cart interface can only be enabled for one CPU at a time, and thus DMA should only be checked for that CPU.

The bug resulted from a combination of factors:

1. The ARM7 BIOS loads the cart secure area, using DMA. When it's done, it leaves the DMA enabled(!). So when the ARM9 went to load something else from the cart, it accidentally triggered the ARM7-side DMA.

... read more
3 comments (last by River) | Post a comment
Fixing Pokémon White
Apr 26th 2017, by Arisotura
This post will get into the bugfixing process for a particular bug. Bugfixing in emulation may look like black magic, but it's not so different from general bugfixing-- it boils down to understanding the bug and why it occurs. Of course, emulation makes it harder when it involves blobs of machine code for which you have no source code, but nothing insurmontable.


Anyway, the issue with Pokémon White (and probably others) was that the game wouldn't boot unless it was launched from the firmware. Not really convenient, especially as at the time of writing this, firmware boot in melonDS is unstable.

I first suspected the RAM setup done prior to a direct boot (NDS::SetupDirectBoot). There are several variables stored in memory by the firmware, which games can use for various purposes. For example, the firmware stores the cartridge chip ID there, games then check the cartridge chip ID against the stored value, and throw an exception if it has changed (which typically means that the cart was ejected).

However, some testing revealed that there was nothing the direct boot setup was missing that could have broken Pokémon, atleast regarding the RAM.


So I had to dig deeper into the issue. It turned out that during initialization, the ARM9 got interrupted by an IRQ, but for some reason, it never returned to its work after processing the IRQ.

DS games often use multiple threads, so it isn't uncommon to switch to a different task after an IRQ. But that wasn't the case here, it wasn't even picking a thread to return to. It got stuck inside the IRQ handler.

The IRQ occured upon receiving data from the IPC FIFO. In particular, the ARM7 sent the word 0x0008000C. The ARM9-side handler was coded to panic and enter an infinite loop upon receiving this word.

More investigation of the FIFO traffic showed that the ARM9 first sent the word 0x0000004D, which is part of the initialization procedure. To which the ARM7 replied with 0x0008000C. But it appeared that the ARM7-side FIFO handler was coded to do that. For a while, that stumped me. I couldn't understand how it was supposed to work.


I then logged FIFO traffic when booting the game from the firmware, whenever it successfully booted, to see where the exchange differed. The ARM9 sent 0x0000004D, to which the ARM7 replied 0x0000004D. But it appeared that in that case, the ARM7 was using a different handler.

... read more
3 comments (last by Mythological658) | Post a comment
melonDS 0.2, there it is
Apr 24th 2017, by Arisotura
You can check it out on the downloads page.





I'll let you find out what the novelties are ;)
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Breaking the silence
Apr 8th 2017, by Arisotura
You may have noticed that there's one thing melonDS 0.1 lacks sorely: sound. It's an integral part of the gaming experience.

It's also one of the big items in the TODO list, so let's do this.


Getting basic sound playback going wasn't too difficult. The DS sound hardware is pretty simple: 16 channels that can play sound data encoded in PCM8, PCM16 or IMA-ADPCM. Channels 8 to 13 also support rectangular waves (PSG), and channels 14 and 15 can produce white noise.

I first worked on PSG as it's pretty simple, there would be less things that could go wrong. And indeed, the issues I got were mostly dumb little things like forgetting to clear intermediate buffers. Once that was working, I completed it with support for the remaining sound formats.


And there it was, sound in melonDS. That thing finally begins resembling a DS emulator :)

The sound core in melonDS is synchronous. The major downside is that it sounds like shit if emulation isn't running fullspeed. But it's been stated that the goal of melonDS is to do things right. There are other reasons why it has to be synchronous, too; the main one is sound capture.


The DS has two sound capture units, which can record audio output and write it to memory. Those are used in some games to apply a surround effect to the audio output, or to do reverb. The idea is to send the mixer output to the capture units instead of outputting directly, then use channels 1 and 3 to output the captured audio data after it's been altered by software.

Setups using sound capture expect that capture buffers will be filled at a fixed interval. This breaks apart if your sound core is asynchronous, because there is no guarantee that it will produce sound at a regular rate. What if you end up producing more sound than the game's buffer can hold? In these situations, the best way is to ignore those effects entirely. Same reason why the old HLE audio implementation of Dolphin didn't support reverb effects.


Anyway, sound output is still in the works, but it's fairly promising so far.


Oh by the way, have I mentioned that there are other DS emulators being worked on? Check out medusa!
1 comment (by naknow) | Post a comment
melonDS 0.1 is out!
Mar 30th 2017, by Arisotura


It's here, finally! Without further ado, check it out on the downloads page!

You can also read the release notes on the board for more information.
17 comments (last by YueR) | Post a comment
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