Long-due status update

< Happy birthday melonDS!Merry belated Christmas >

Long-due status update
Dec 17th 2023, by Arisotura

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. Mental health has been rough. Hopefully it's going to get better with the Christmas holidays...

What's new since the last post? I had started working on refactoring the melonDS codebase for the ambitious changes to come. JesseTG mostly finished the work on the core, so that's one big thing out of the way.

The frontend code is now going to need adequate refactoring too. That's, well, more work. We'll get there over the coming days.

On my side, I (finally) ordered a new laptop, so I'm waiting to receive it and set it up before I do more big work on melonDS.

I will need a while to adjust to the new changes that have been done to the melonDS core. It's also likely not perfect, we will likely have to do more work to clean up and harmonize the codebase. But atleast, the biggest part of the work is done.

On the frontend side, we need to add support for multiple different emulator windows. Historically, the frontend was structured around one emu thread and one emu window. The latter provides a means to display the emulator's video output and lets the user interact with the emulator, the former feeds the inputs into the melonDS core, runs it and manages it.

It wouldn't be difficult to spawn multiple emu threads, one per emulated DS. Window management is another deal. We thought we might want to support attaching multiple windows to one emu thread, for example to support displaying each DS screen on a separate window. For netplay purposes, we might also want to support headless instances, that is, running an emu thread with no window attached, no sound output, and inputs received from the network.

This also poses the question of OpenGL context management, all things we will need to look into.

We'll get there. It just... takes time.

9 comments have been posted.

< Happy birthday melonDS!Merry belated Christmas >

anti-person says:
Dec 18th 2023

ignore the other guy, he's just a transphobic loser
but anyways, I wish you the best of luck with your projects and whatnot

signed by,
A. W. M.

Arisotura says:
Dec 18th 2023

that clown somehow thinks that after 6 years I will detransition. funny

(if he's who I think he is, he's deep deep in denial, so that might explain this)

anyway, thank you :)

Trunks says:
Dec 18th 2023

Thanks for the update! Don't work yourself too hard especially over the holidays season. Make sure you take care of yourself first. I'm excited for things to come in 2024. Hope to hear from you soon. Merry Christmas!

somedude123 says:
Dec 19th 2023

Yo man, can you make it so i can connect melonds to a real ds, like they can play together locally, it would be pretty cool, i just can't afford a second ds.

Jose32 says:
Dec 19th 2023

Por casualidad no han pensado usar el motor gráfico de direct 11 que funciona mucho mejor que opengl , esto sería un cambio muy notable en el rendimiento y para las pc de gama cartón

Stylis man says:
Dec 23rd 2023

i tried out some experimental versions from github earlier and i gotta say, im very impressed with the work done on lan/netplay. I cant wait to try out some mkds on a more stable version of that.

DS Fanboy says:
Dec 23rd 2023

The best DS Emu gets another update. Huzzah! I've been turning more friends onto melonDS and DS games, so local netplay'd be really cool to see. Hope you feel better Ari, you're one of the coolest people I know. Regards, DS Fan

kevincrans says:
Dec 26th 2023

Merry Christmas🎄

^.^ says:
Dec 26th 2023

Happy holidays Ari, and thanks for all your work.