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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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Little update on what's going on Oct 18th 2021, by Arisotura |
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I've been wanting to write this post for a while now, but I'm having trouble focusing on it (as usual, I guess :P ). Regardless, I figured I'd just tell you folks about what's cooking in the melonDS HQ. The focus for the next release is basically on making melonDS less obtuse to the average user. One of the biggest parts of this is removing the requirement for external BIOS and firmware files. We started the work in that direction by merging some relevant pull requests, making melonDS able to fall back to the DraStic FreeBIOS and a generated firmware for DS mode. There are still some issues we need to take care of in one way or another, namely: * We need to either force direct boot, or include some small bootloader inside the replacement BIOS/firmware. The easiest route is to force direct boot. * The original BIOS includes the Blowfish key required to decrypt the secure area in encrypted ROMs. Lacking the key would make it impossible to support encrypted ROMs, but including it is muddy waters from a legal standpoint. * A notable exception is that some of the encrypted ROMs, like those found in VC titles, contain the data for Blowfish crypto. It could be possible to make melonDS take advantage of it, but not all ROM dumps out there contain that (it's not normally readable in retail cartridges). All in all, it seems pretty manageable on the DS side. Things get more rocky on the DSi side: * As the NUS is still online, it is in theory possible to build a DSi NAND from scratch, though it needs to be studied closer. Some of the contents, like font files, would have to be replicated in free variants. The NAND bootloader would not be terribly difficult to replicate. * There are several more crypto keys found in the DSi BIOS. While it is still possible to load DSi ROMs without requiring any key from the BIOS (provided the secure area is decrypted, which it generally is), I'm not sure about things like DSiWare. ... read more |
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Sometimes issues are simple... sometimes not Sep 5th 2021, by Arisotura |
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You might have noticed that one of my goals for the 1.0 release is to get DSi mode in melonDS up to par with DS mode. Not just in the sense of running DSi games faithfully: a good reproduction of the DSi environment is also useful to would-be homebrewers. However, the road to DSi emulation is paved with all sorts of challenges. One example of a fun issue that had been reported a while ago: the DSi menu would freeze after the health/safety screen if any pictures were stored that could be displayed on the top screen. The issue was another unimplemented AES feature, and was fixed in melonDS 0.9.3. Sometimes I wish all issues were this simple. I felt like looking at another of the known DSi-mode issues: the fact that we currently don't implement the RAM size register in SCFG_EXT9. The RAM size register is mainly used to restrict the accessible main RAM to 4MB before launching a DS game. In theory, not a very difficult thing to implement. In practice, however, there is an issue that kept us from enabling that feature: when it's enabled, the DSi launcher crashes when launching a DS game, while they would otherwise run fine (albeit with the full 16MB RAM instead of the 4MB they might expect). As explained in GBAtek, nocash ran into the same issue: SCFG_EXT9.bit14-15 affect the Main RAM mapping on <both> ARM9 and ARM7 side (that, at least AFTER games have been booted, however, there's a special case DURING boot process: For NDS games, the firmware switches to 4MB mode on ARM9 side, whilst ARM7 is still relocating memory from the 16MB area at the same time - unknown how that is working exactly, maybe ARM7 isn't affected by SCFG_EXT9 setting until ARM7 has configured/disabled its own SCFG_EXT7 register).
The basic process of the loader is as follows: the ARM9 syncs with the ARM7 via IPCSYNC, then both CPUs run through lists of memory areas to copy or clear, then the ARM9 changes the main RAM size if required. However, while the ARM7 has a bunch of regions in main RAM to clear, the ARM9 is given empty copy/clear lists, and all it has to do is clear its DTCM, which is quickly done. As a result, the ARM9 changes the main RAM size while the ARM7 is still clearing regions, causing it to overwrite the ARM9's code, and you guess how this goes: kaboom. Yet, the same code works fine on hardware. I had already experimented with the RAM size register, to try and find out if there's anything fancy about it, but there's nothing special at all. The RAM size gets changed instantly on both sides, and there's nothing fancy about memory mapping either. Oh and the ARM9 caches are disabled when the loader is running, so they don't come into play here. So I made a homebrew that reproduced the loader code: same ASM code, same memory regions, same everything. My first tests were to see if there was any kind of secret register altering main RAM mapping somehow, but there was none. Then, another test determined that, infact, on hardware, the RAM size change isn't applied until the ARM7 has cleared all its memory regions. We then added code to measure how long each side takes to complete its tasks, and it turns out that the ARM9 takes much longer than expected. The ARM9 code is running in main RAM, and the ARM7 has a bunch of main RAM regions to copy and clear: as EXMEMCNT is set to give priority over main RAM to the ARM7, the concurrent accesses are slowing down the ARM9. A lot. This is some shitty news. ... read more |
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melonDS 0.9.3 is out! Sep 1st 2021, by Arisotura |
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We bring you melonDS 0.9.3, a tad late, but it comes with a good deal of improvements. First of all, we fixed touchscreen input, it should now work as expected in all screen modes. We also added support for touchscreen devices (tablets etc). On the emulation side, we added support for audio interpolation, as an optional emulation improvement. Depending on how good your game's samples are, you may see an improvement in audio quality. There are multiple interpolation types to choose from, so you can see which one you like best. We also added a setting to optionally degrade the audio output to 10-bit, like the actual DS, for more authentic experience. This goes hand in hand with emulation of the SOUNDBIAS register, too. Emulating this register means nothing for the average game, but it could be used for cool tricks in homebrew. Hell, we even managed to make the DS play a song solely by regularly changing SOUNDBIAS. There have been several improvements to DSi mode too. Namely, touchscreen calibration is now automatically patched in DSi mode, eliminating the need for a recalibration. It is also possible to boot DSi games and homebrew directly now, although this feature is still experimental. Last but not least, the DSi title manager allows you to easily install your DSiWare titles to your emulated NAND. A ROM info dialog has also been added under System -> ROM Info. There's also the usual slew of bugfixes and other little additions, you can check the changelog for the full list. For the eventual 1.0 release, we also want to make melonDS less obtuse all around: providing user-selectable paths for savefiles and such, BIOS/firmware substitutes atleast for DS mode, less obtuse DLDI support, etc... Enjoy! melonDS 0.9.3, Windows x64 melonDS 0.9.3, Linux x64 melonDS 0.9.3, Linux ARM64 melonDS 0.9.3, macOS x64 melonDS 0.9.3, macOS ARM64 melonDS 0.9.3, macOS universal |
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Buffing up DSi mode Aug 24th 2021, by Arisotura |
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It's no secret that melonDS's DSi mode needs some love, but there are just so many things to do with melonDS. One of the recurring complaints is that, when running in DSi mode, touchscreen input is off, requiring the user to recalibrate the touchscreen, while this doesn't happen in DS mode. Reason for that is that on the DS (and DSi), the touchscreen hardware doesn't return pixel coordinates, but raw digitizer readings. Calibration data is then used to convert these readings to pixel coordinates. Every touchscreen digitizer is going to have a slightly different range, which is why users have to calibrate their touchscreen. melonDS makes up for that in a very simple fashion. It uses its own conversion, basically just multiplying the touchscreen pixel coordinates by 16 to make decent 'raw' coordinates. When booting, melonDS also patches the user's firmware data with its own adequate calibration data, so that no recalibration is required and the touchscreen Just Works(tm). Easy peasy. However, in DSi mode, it's another story. The old DS firmware data still exists, but the DSi system instead uses user settings files stored in the NAND. Thing is, it's less easy to access the data there: the NAND is mostly a FAT volume with an encryption layer. Not exactly trivial to deal with. I was shown fatfs, which is basically a lightweight FAT driver. It is meant to be used to access storage media such as SD cards on embedded devices, however it is trivial to make it work on a FAT volume contained within an image file. I wrote code to do that with the DSi NAND, taking care of encryption transparently, and bam, I had a viable base for NAND manipulation. I then wrote code to access the user settings files inside the NAND, and patch the touchscreen calibration data there. After taking care of all the details like SHA-1 hashes and whatnot, the initial issue was covered: the DSi-mode touchscreen Just Worked(tm), with no recalibration needed, just like its DS-mode counterpart. With this proof of concept being a success, I took it further: ... read more |
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Audio interpolation Jul 22nd 2021, by Arisotura |
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Apologies for the slow Summer! We don't have air conditioners in the melonDS HQ. The current climate is causing the team to slowly melt. Anyway, audio interpolation is one of the emulation improvements that have been requested for melonDS. My general policy for emulation improvements is that they should allow for keeping the accurate code paths, and they shouldn't add too much complexity to the code. Audio interpolation is well within these bounds. Actually, I had implemented it in DeSmuME back then, and due to the way DeSmuME's mixer works, it was quickly done. So I figured I would give it a try in melonDS. The basic idea behind audio interpolation is to smooth out the audio samples as they're being upsampled. DS games may have downsampled audio to save on space and bandwidth, and the DS mixer doesn't perform any interpolation, which can lead to rough sounding samples. The reason the DS does no interpolation is most likely due to how its mixer hardware works, but obviously as an emulator we can ignore these constraints and do a better job. It's also noting that, as far as melonDS is concerned, there are two parts we need to take care of: the DS mixer and the audio output. In the DS, the mixer is driven by the system clock, like nearly everything else. If you ever coded for the DS, you might have wondered why the frequency registers for the audio channels are weird: 40004x8h - NDS7 - SOUNDxTMR - Sound Channel X Timer Register (W)
Bit0-15 Timer Value, Sample frequency, timerval=-(33513982Hz/2)/freq The PSG Duty Cycles are composed of eight "samples", and so, the frequency for Rectangular Wave is 1/8th of the selected sample frequency. For PSG Noise, the noise frequency is equal to the sample frequency. The SOUNDxTMR registers directly control the channel timers, which are driven at half the system clock. These work like the general purpose timers: they are incremented at half the system clock, and every time they overflow, they are reloaded to the SOUNDxTMR value and the channel advances to the next sample. ... read more |
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Tragic news Jun 27th 2021, by Arisotura |
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[CONTENT WARNING: mention of suicide] ... read anyway |
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Pride month and DMA timings Jun 7th 2021, by Arisotura |
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Well, happy Pride month, or whatever, dunno how to put it. As a trans girl of some flavor, I just want to reiterate support to the LGBTI+ community. I'm also not the only LGBTI+ member of the melonDS team, btw. Now, let's talk about something more technical (so this post is not just a 'political statement' :P ). DMA timings. You might have noticed the timing17 branch. So what, another timing branch. Arisotura just loves these. Or something. It's going to be some general timing renovation, depending on how far my motivation will take me. I started the work with DMA timings, figuring it would just be matter of taking into account that sequential timings only work when the address is incrementing linearly... well, it's hairier than that. This is based on tests done at like 04:00, and this is the DS, so take this with a rock of salt. Most memory regions in the DS have such timing characteristics that sequential accesses make no difference, atleast from the standpoint of DMA. The ARM9 and its 3-cycle penalty when using the bus are another story. However, there are a couple regions that have different rules. Main RAM (0x02000000) ... read more |
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Well, guess we owe you another release soon May 19th 2021, by Arisotura |
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A quick 0.9.3 release would be welcome, especially to fix the stupid bugs that appeared in 0.9.2. Like how touchscreen input will wrap around instead of properly clamping like it's always done. This is a good reminder to us to always test all features, even those that are granted for working. They work... until somebody introduces broken code that breaks them. It's not like this hasn't happened in the past, either, so we should do more quality control. Sorry about this. I haven't been doing a whole lot of melonDS coding lately either. I began researching some issues, began working on timing test suites, then veered to MPU stuff, and, well... There are other things going on in real life, which doesn't help. I can't really focus on more than one big thing at once. There are a few going on right now: trying to find a bigger apartment to move in with friends, another housing-related thing I can't really post details about, and dealing with the obnoxious little pricks who live right next to my apartment and like partying all the damn time. Seriously they look like kids who got a fancypants sound system for Christmas or something. Once these things have settled I will hopefully be able to work more on melonDS. The first test suites I was making were for DMA timings. I'd need to polish them and add more test cases to make it good. Although really, the timings mostly boil down to a set of rules, some of which I have yet to implement into melonDS: for example, the maximum length of a sequential read/write burst is 118 units, and (figures) sequential bursts only work when the address is incrementing. The main issue I face is implementing the rules in an elegant and efficient way. This doesn't even get into the fun part of CPU timings. You get the code fetch cycles, data access cycles, and other internal/etc cycles, which may interact and overlap in all sorts of fancy ways. I want to address the timing issues once and for all, and I feel it's pointless to attempt things like full cache emulation if our underlying timing model is wrong. |
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Introducing the compute renderer May 1st 2021, by Generic aka RSDuck |
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To make things short, I've been working on porting melonDS's software rasteriser to run on the GPU via compute shaders. So how is this different to melonDS's existing OpenGL renderer? The OpenGL renderer uses builtin functionality of your GPU to draw triangles. This is of course fast, since it uses hardware specifically made for this, but it has the downside that some things can't be controlled by us, so the behaviour of the DS can't be replicated completely faithfully. On the otherhand this only utilises the programmable parts of the GPU (which means we have full control over them), so it's like the software rasteriser, only it utilises the parallel computing power of GPUs. Ideally it should be eable to be just as accurate as the software rasteriser is. Why are we doing this in the first place?
Currently the main part of the work is done (it's already somewhat playable with a lot of games), so it's easier to list what's still missing:
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melonDS 0.9.2 is out! Apr 26th 2021, by Arisotura |
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This release brings some welcome changes. Namely, improved Mac support: there have been fixes to the JIT, but also to the interface, so things should work more smoothly under macOS. melonDS also supports loading ROMs from the most common archive formats, now, which means users with large ROM sets should have it easier. We also have a new menu listing the ROMs you have opened recently, making it quicker to open them again. We got new fancy screen modes courtesy Generic. These make it possible to use 16:9 hacks along with melonDS, among other fun things. Speaking of renderers, he also went and fixed a whole bunch of OpenGL issues. The cart interface refactor was finished in time for this release, and with it, support for NAND save memory. WarioWare DIY and Jam with the Band are now able to save correctly under melonDS. And, as usual, there are a bunch of other misc changes, which you can find about in the changelog or commit history. Enjoy! melonDS 0.9.2, Windows 64-bit melonDS 0.9.2, Linux 64-bit melonDS 0.9.2, Linux ARM64 melonDS 0.9.2, MacOS 64-bit melonDS 0.9.2, MacOS ARM64 melonDS 0.9.2, MacOS universal |
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