melonDS 0.7.2
The melonDS company celebrates Christmas! Albeit one week early. But this new release of melonDS is a neat little pile of presents.

You have already gotten a glimpse of it, but let's go over all the changes since 0.7.1, because it's been a fast week.


So first of all, the issues we have seen pop up in NSMB, Pokémon, or Etrian Odyssey after the timing renovation, have been fixed. Nicely, the new timings uncovered some stealth GX bugs that would surely have bitten us another day under other circumstances.

So the claim that was made for 0.7.1 ("now your games run better than ever") is finally more than a phony advert :P


Second big thing is, as you probably guessed by now, microphone support. If your machine has a microphone connected and if you are using SDL 2.0.5 or more recent, you can blow or blare bullshit into it and it just works! If that is not the case, you can also opt to feed a WAV file or white noise as microphone input.

Note that this feature is still experimental. Quality of microphone input may not be optimal, especially when using a physical microphone. WAV input works better.

WAV and white noise modes send input when pressing a microphone hotkey (default is the key right next to right Shift, '?' on QWERTY keyboards). WAV mode can take any reasonably small file, encoded as 8-bit or 16-bit PCM, signed or unsigned, any number of channels (it will read the first channel).

All this can be configured in the new audio settings dialog, where you can also set the volume for audio output.


Which brings us to the new hotkey system. For now, aside from the aforementioned mic hotkey, there is only another one: 'Close/open lid', which simulates closing/opening the DS. Default key is Backspace.

Oh and the hotkey system is an extension of the regular input system, which means you can also assign joystick buttons to these hotkeys.


Speaking of the input system, Windows users may have noticed that the input config dialog was abysmally slow, taking several seconds to open and generally feeling quite laggy. With a quick little fix in libui, that is no more, and the dialog now feels a lot more normal.

Some attempt was made at fixing possible crashes with that dialog under Linux, but those crashes may need more investigation. In my current setup (Ubuntu 16.04), I am unable to reproduce them, or break the input config dialog in any way. I don't know which are caused by melonDS and which are obscure GTK bugs. While one of the stack traces that were reported showed something I could easily work around, the other pointed at some obscure bug where some function internal to GTK is getting a NULL value and crashing.


On a whim, I added support for nocash-style debug print, which enables homebrew to print to the emulator's console. Also, Windows users don't need to get a debug build to get console output -- running the release version of melonDS from cmd will dump the console output there.


We also have some welcome contributions from some fine Github comrades:

* FPS limiter toggle, courtesy abcdjdj
* flatpak manifest, by cpba
* Linux libpcap library names added to the libpcap loader by dogtopus
* and finally Aqueminivan renovating the readme, it looks cool now!


And, last but not least, a whole bunch of misc bugs were fixed:

* black screens in Puzzler World 2
* American Girl - Kit Mystery Challenge! screeching garbage audio in the house
* blending fail in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon - Explorers of Sky
* lack of background music in Club Penguin: Herbert's Revenge
* a few wrong entries in romlist.bin were corrected
* config dialogs could be opened multiple times


Merry Christmas!


melonDS 0.7.2, Windows 64-bit
melonDS 0.7.2, Linux 64-bit

melonDS Patreon if you're feeling generous
Dragios says:
Dec 16th 2018
Your NDS emulator is the best ever. The animation is so buttery smooth it is as though I'm playing on the real hardware itself. The frametime and framepace is so consistent that I don't even need v-sync for this. DeSmuME needs v-sync for this but turning it on introduce micro-stutters at times so the experience is not that good.

The only thing needs to be improve is on certain scene transitioning will drop below 60 FPS.

Thank you for creating such awesome NDS emulator.
A Guy says:
Dec 16th 2018
Hello i just want to ask if the Android retroarch core will get updated it's still at 0.6.

Then I saw you mention a port to Android for you emulator, do you mean a standalone app like drastic for example? 😍

Aside from multiplayer this would bring DSi emulation to the Android OS, if/when you implement DSi xD
X says:
Dec 16th 2018
0.7.2 crashes after loading any rom. 0.7.1 works fine. Im using Windows 10 x64.
Alex says:
Dec 16th 2018
0.7.2 Crash Win 10 x64...
Saizo7 says:
Dec 16th 2018
Yeah, it crashes after loading any rom on Windows 10 x64.
coulthard says:
Dec 16th 2018
Crashes in msvcrt.dll after loading any rom on Windows 7 x64.
Arisotura says:
Dec 16th 2018
that's been fixed, pls redownload
Dean H. says:
Dec 16th 2018
By sliding your cursor over the options the emulator makes the screen flashing. Seems unstable.
T3st3r says:
Dec 16th 2018
Oh your the man of today! your fixed the flickering in FF chronickles so fast. Nice. And Its so smooth yet. Whoopi!
Dean H. says:
Dec 16th 2018
It can help a bit: https://pasteboard.co/HS1fP3v.png

Only the emulator's screen turns white. :s
Arisotura says:
Dec 16th 2018
odd. doesn't happen here.
Dean H. says:
Dec 16th 2018
Try moving the mouse cursor in the direction shown in the image, the screen turns white by less than a second, you might not have noticed.

I'm using windows 7 x 64. Maybe it's a bug related to OS...
Arisotura says:
Dec 16th 2018
maybe Direct2D is going software mode on your system, or something like that. I tried exactly what you described there and saw nothing.
Mauricio says:
Dec 20th 2018
Hi and thank you for making this great emulator of NDS.

I'm using Archlinux by now the program crash if you configure the btns as the same for all. Example: A=0 B=0.....Left=0.
Then when you close the program and launch again and I go to configure the control, if you try to configure, then it just only crash.

I have configured by editing the melonDS.ini's file.

Regards
BTW, the best emulator for NDS by far.
Mauricio says:
Dec 20th 2018
I forgot to say, I've compiled the GIT version " f86fe46"
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