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< melonDS has been acquired by MetaLong time no news >

Opening your eyes to the world Apr 17th 2022, by Arisotura

I haven't been very active these days, mostly real life getting in the way, as usual. Anyway, I have been thinking of cool things I could work on for melonDS. I have some ideas in mind regarding input, like supporting multi-touch and other fun touchscreen-related features, but lately I felt like working on some actual emulation, especially in the DSi field. It's well known that DSi emulation in melonDS needs more love. I was thinking of implementing things like SoundEx and microphone support, but Generic said he was going to implement that, so I'm letting him having fun there. Instead, I went for improving camera emulation. After all, cameras are the main thing DSi-exclusive games make use of, so DSi emulation with no camera support just feels incomplete. melonDS 0.9.4 already has some very basic camera emulation, but it basically just does the bare minimum to pass the camera init sequence, and then returns a fixed stripe pattern (which is basically just the picture data register returning a fixed value). Nothing exciting. For example, you can open the DSi camera app and get to the actual camera part of it, but trying to take a picture will result in a system error. Reason for this is that the camera can be set to output at multiple resolutions. It has two modes of operation, named 'preview' and 'capture', which makes sense in applications like digital cameras: preview mode would provide a low-res preview of what the camera sees, that can be displayed on a built-in screen, while capture mode would provide a full-res picture that can be saved. The DSi camera lets you configure two contexts, each with their output resolution, image format, and various other options (for example, flipping the picture...). So I first had to add support for these modes of operation. I first implemented the registers necessary to handle the camera mode/context switch. But, of course this wasn't enough. The stub in place for picture transfer assumed a resolution of 256x192, but in this case, the resolution is changed to 640x480. This also means that the DSi camera app expects more picture data to come, and it will softlock if there isn't enough data incoming. This is where my camera test homebrew came in handy. I modified it so that I could do things like switching between the front and back cameras, switch between preview and capture modes, and even use the picture cropping feature to view different areas of the picture in 640x480 mode (as obviously it wouldn't fit onscreen). Doing this let me get a good grasp on how these features were supposed to work. Then I felt confident implementing all that into melonDS. This is a preexisting still picture, not actual camera input. But regardless, we have working camera emulation now, and this is half the battle. The other half would be reading picture data from sources like an actual camera, feeding it into the emulator, and integrating all that into the UI. Taking a picture in the DSi camera app also works, and thanks to the SD folder-sync system, I can easily retrieve the resulting picture. For example, the original file, and the resulting DSi picture. There is also still a bunch of tidbits to take care of, as far as camera emulation goes. For example, all details and edge cases pertaining to the picture transfer hardware. It's tricky to work with, because from my understanding, picture data is transferred from the camera on a per-scanline basis, but the transfer hardware holds it in a buffer which is limited to 512 words, and it has no idea what resolution the picture is. It just knows to trigger a DMA transfer every N scanlines (N being configured in CAM_CNT), but if these N scanlines amount to more data than the buffer can hold, you're going to get blank lines in your picture. The DSi cameras themselves also have a looooot of low-level details, many of which don't matter in the case of melonDS. It's like for the DS wifi hardware: we have to deal with these things to some extent because we're doing low-level emulation, and the games/apps we emulate run on the bare metal, but a lot of it isn't useful to our emulator, and in most/all cases a lot of it is initialized to some generic settings and never touched again. But hey, this looks like a pretty good start. If you're interested, you can check it out in the camera_betterer branch, atleast until we merge it.

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< melonDS has been acquired by MetaLong time no news >

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