EmuNations

Most Recent Changes

--1.0 RC--

A bit of a disclaimer about this unusual version number: due to the large number of changes since 0.9.5, this version is a Release Candidate. We have done a thorough round of testing and bugfixing, but there is always the chance that further issues went unnoticed. This release will be the occasion to catch them and fix them for the actual, proper 1.0 release.

Now, the biggest changes this release brings:

Core refactor
This is the biggest change by far. We have undertaken a large and ambitious refactor of the melonDS core, in order to make it possible to run multiple instances of the emulator within one single process.

What does this change mean for end users? It means that local multiplayer is easier to deal with, since we no longer have to deal with inter-process communication. It also means that depending on your platform, local multiplayer may be more performant now.

However, much like in 0.9.5, this multiplayer mode only works when running multiple instances on the same computer. But we have another ace up our sleeve, which we'll see next.

It's also worth noting that this refactor was partly motivated by the idea of adding netplay support. While I haven't been able to get netplay working yet, the refactor has laid a very important foundation for it. We'll get there, eventually!

LAN support
You might remember LAN multiplayer and the associated betas. This feature has been backported and brought to you proper in this new melonDS release.

This means that you can play local multiplayer games with family or friends over the local network.

Do note, however, that due to the tight timing requirements of the local multiplayer protocol, it requires a pretty good ethernet network to work. Do not expect it to work well over wifi. And, most importantly, do not expect it to work at all over VPN, Hamachi, or any sort of tunnel that goes through the internet. We will not accept issue reports about LAN connection failures that involve tunneling.

OpenGL compute shader renderer
Until now, we had the software renderer and the OpenGL renderer. The software renderer produces very accurate graphics but can't be upscaled. On the other hand, the OpenGL renderer supports upscaling, but it is prone to all sorts of problems and glitches.

So Generic brought us this new OpenGL renderer, which uses compute shaders to closely reproduce the DS GPU's rasterization algorithms on your computer's GPU.

This renderer brings together the best of both worlds: a graphical output that is very accurate, but at the same time, support for upscaling and other improvements.

The old OpenGL renderer will still be around, along with this new one. You can select them in the 3D settings dialog.

Software renderer improvements
Speaking of renderers, Jakly has been at work researching the intricacies of the DS GPU far more in depth than I have. She has committed several accuracy fixes and improvements to the software renderer, some of which might make a big difference depending on the game.

Jakly is also currently fighting our worst enemy, the Horseman of Timings. Compared to this, fighting the Horseman of Wifi was a walk in the park. But she's been doing some impressive work figuring out the intricacies of the DS's timing model, and might finally deal with a lot of the old timing issues. So stay tuned!

Multi-window support
This has been a long requested feature: the ability to split melonDS across two windows, or more. And it is finally here.

The way this feature works is quite similar to DeSmuME: you can open a new emulator window (View -> Open new window), which will function like the initial window. Then the layout settings can be set per window, allowing you to have one screen per window, but also many other possibilities. melonDS also remembers how many windows you had open and how they were configured.

We have also moved the layout settings to a separate View menu to make things clearer.

This is a first iteration of this feature, so it may get refined based on user feedback.

R4 Revolution and M3 Simply support
Until now, the way DLDI support was done in melonDS was pretty high-level. It was implemented through a custom DLDI driver that melonDS patches in, and a special cart class (CartHomebrew) is used, which can interface with melonDS's DLDI driver. While it isn't too far off reality, and works just fine, it is an entirely custom solution not based on any existing hardware.

asiekierka has been working on emulating specific flashcart models: the R4 Revolution and the M3 Simply. This makes it possible to, say, run these flashcarts' original menus. Can be a nice touch!

It's also pretty nice to have a reference as to how that hardware works.

Many other fixes
There are way too many fixes, changes, and general improvements to list here. You can find them in the changelog, for the most part.

--0.9.5--

As of today, the melonDS project is 6 years old. For this occasion, we present you this special version of the melonDS logo, recolored to the same pretty sky-blue color as 6 itself.

We wanted to have Peach bake a cake shaped like this, but Bowser kidnapped her again. We aren't great bakers at the melonDS HQ, so... yeah.

Regardless, these 6 years are a great success. Back in 2016, when I started working on melonDS, I was mostly just making it to have fun and pass time until my job started. I had absolutely no idea the project would go on for so long, and be as much of a success as it has been. So, first of all, I want to thank all the comrades who have helped make this possible. The melonDS team and other contributors. nocash and his great documentation. Everybody else who has been involved in reverse-engineering the DS/DSi hardware, cracking the DSi security, etc... And of course, everybody who has been using melonDS, testing games in it, reporting issues, suggesting improvements, etc...

Thank you all. melonDS is a team effort, and you deserve your part of the birthday cake.

Improved local multiplayer

This is a big change. If you know melonDS, you know that local multiplayer has always been finicky. You had to disable your framerate limiters, sacrifice some goats to the wifi deities, and hope everything would work without disconnecting. Well, this is past now! melonDS 0.9.5 is the result of the first season of the local multiplayer saga, and I dare say that the result is pretty good.

As an example: there was no way to get Mario Kart DS multiplayer to stay connected for more than a few seconds, before. Now? It's smooth as butter. Many games have been tested and most of them work absolutely fine, atleast in two-player mode. It is also possible to go for three players and more, but more atypical multiplayer settings might run into problems, or suffer from decreased performance. Oh and if you have an original DS firmware, it's also possible to use download play and Pictochat.

However, it is worth noting that I've had to completely rework the way local multiplayer communication and sync were handled. The new method requires all participating melonDS instances to be running on the same machine, so it isn't possible to play over LAN. Not that it has ever worked well tbh. But, essentially, the new IPC communication layer has extra smarts to avoid lag as much as possible, which are made possible by the use of shared memory -- these would be much more difficult, if not impossible, to replicate with BSD sockets over the network.

The melonDS UI has also been revamped to make the multiplayer experience smoother. It is possible to launch new isntances of melonDS easily from the emulator's System menu (opening them just by opening the melonDS executable should also work). Certain parts of the emulator's configuration will be unique to each instance, for example it is possible to configure each instance to use a different joystick, to select which instances can output sound, and so on.

There are a couple shortcomings to this. First one, some emulator settings (like BIOS/firmware files) are shared across all instances, but if you modify them, they may not reflect to instances which are already opened. These settings should be easily identifiable as I made them editable from the first melonDS instance only. Also, keyboard input, due to how it works, won't be suitable for playing a multiplayer game with a friend -- you will need joysticks for that.

However, we have big plans for this. There will be a second season to the local multiplayer saga, where we will implement netplay. This will make it possible to play with your friends over LAN, or even over the internet. The downside is that it will require each participating machine to run every participating melonDS instance, but we're confident that any decent computer can handle this. Besides, this is the cost to keeping a multiplayer game in sync. Due to how tight the local multiplayer timings are, there's no way Nintendo's wifi protocol would ever work over the internet.

The improvements to local multiplayer include improvements to wifi emulation itself, which may also improve stability in WFC games.

DSi camera support

melonDS had basic DSi camera emulation since version 0.9.1, but it wasn't very useful as it was just feeding a fixed stripe pattern as camera input. You guess this doesn't help sell our DSi emulation, seeing as cameras are the number one feature of that console, and the main reason some games support it at all instead of just sticking to the original DS.

melonDS 0.9.5 has actual DSi camera support now. That is, you can configure camera input to be sourced either from physical cameras on your computer, or from a fixed image file. Camera emulation has also been improved, which means that for example it is possible to take pictures in the DSi camera app, and they will be saved to your emulated SD card if you have one. Not the most useful thing, but this should also mean better camera support in DSi games.

Revamped OpenGL context handling

The way melonDS handled OpenGL contexts in the Qt frontend was weird. It was responsible for a number of problems, such as for example the inability to support proper vsync.

This is past now. Generic has been porting Stenzek's OpenGL context code from DuckStation to melonDS. This reworks the way OpenGL contexts are handled to be more sane and less prone to problems. This also means that we now have an actual, proper vsync setting.

DSi DSP support

Well, technically, we've had support for that since melonDS 0.9.3. It just didn't work due to a bunch of issues with it. Now it does.

Don't get overly excited over this, though. While I have verified that it atleast works to some extent, teakra (the DSP interpreter) is slow enough that melonDS will likely fall to a single-digit framerate when the DSP is used. That's an improvement over just freezing, but certainly nowhere near playable. We will work on a DSP JIT to alleviate this.

CLI improvements courtesy patataofcourse

The command line interface (CLI) of melonDS has been revamped. Most notably:

• It is possible to boot melonDS with no game loaded, or to load a game without booting, with the -b (or --boot) switch (values: always/never/auto)
• the -f (or --fullscreen) switch lets you start the emulator in fullscreen
• when loading an archive via the CLI, it is possible to specify which file to load from the archive
• the CLI help (invoked by the --help option) will show all the possible CLI arguments and values

Change Log

• remove incorrect color profile from PNG icons (Nadia)
• DLDI fixes for the Smash demo (Arisotura)
• fix gaps in I/O handling (Arisotura)
• fix invalid savemem commands, fixes Dementium (Arisotura)
• FreeBIOS: add VRAM-compatible LZ77 decompress function, fixes Yoshi's Island (Arisotura)
• default firmware: in DSi mode, emulate DWM-W015 wifi board instead of DWM-W024 (Arisotura)
• default firmware: save WFC settings to separate file (Arisotura)
• disable firmware overrides UI when firmware override isn't checked (Nadia)
• 2D: more accurate fade/blending (Arisotura)
• DSi: add support for GXFIFO NDMA (Arisotura)
• DSi: add mainRAM mirror at 0x0C000000 (Arisotura)
• add 3DS 5:3 aspect ratio, refactor aspect ratio code (Nadia)
• OpenGL: fix 16x resolution on macOS (Nadia)
• fix triggers being recognized as negative analog stick values during mapping (Nadia)
• fix joystick mapping buttons on macOS (Nadia)
• DSi: preliminary implementation of SNDEXCNT (Generic)
• DSi: fix SD inserted/removed IRQ bits (Generic)
• DSi: implement 8/16bit access to AES registers (Generic)
• DSi: fix SCFG_MC cart-inserted bit (Generic)
• JIT: invalidate blocks in ARM7 VRAM/WRAM when it is remapped (Generic)
• fix ROM banner reading when the ROM has no banner (Rayyan, Arisotura)
• fix UTF16 ROM title handling in the ROM info dialog (Rayyan)
• wifi: improvements to wifi emulation (Arisotura)
• wifi: shared-memory based sync/comm mechanism for local wifi (Arisotura)
• proper support for multiple melonDS instances for multiplayer (Arisotura)
• DSi: actual, proper camera support (Arisotura)
• DSi: fix DSP enough that it will actually work (Arisotura)
• fix OpenGL context handling (Stenzek, Generic, Nadia)
• force-align all memory accesses (instead of just CPU memory accesses) (Arisotura)
• better CLI parameter handling (patataofcourse)
• fix bugs in DSi direct boot (Arisotura)

--0.9.4--

I know this has been a long wait, but finally, here it is: melonDS 0.9.4 is out.

It has been numbered this way because 1.0 is going to be a milestone release: we want to get local multiplayer stable for 1.0.

Anyway, what's new in melonDS 0.9.4? A bunch of improvements that should make things easier for the average end user.

Most notably, in DS mode, melonDS no longer requires you to obtain BIOS/firmware files. You can always supply these if you have them around, for a more accurate experience, but if you don't, melonDS will default to using DraStic's FreeBIOS clones. Similarly, a barebones firmware with default configuration data will be generated.

However, for now, DSi mode still requires you to provide BIOS/firmware/NAND dumps. We are studying ways to get around this requirement, but it's going to take us some work.

There is also a new dialog for firmware settings, which allows you to override the firmware settings with your own. This is intended for when using the default internal firmware, but it can also override the settings in an external firmware, and it even works in DSi mode.

DLDI support has also been upgraded: it is now possible to have melonDS generate a SD image for DLDI on its own, and it is also possible to have said SD image synced to a folder on your computer. This means that you can place files in that folder and they will show up in the emulated DLDI SD card, and conversely, any changes made to the emulated SD card will be reflected to the folder on your hard drive.

While this has been tested extensively, we still recommend that you keep a backup of any folder you intend to use with this, just in case. You can also set your DLDI SD card to be read-only if you don't need it to be writable.

All of this is also supported for the DSi SD card in DSi mode.

Support for ARM9 PU exceptions in interpreter mode has been added. For commercial games, this doesn't mean a lot, other than making certain crashes work like on hardware. But this may definitely come in handy for homebrew developers, as that means exception handlers will work as they should.

We have added a much requested feature: custom paths for saves, savestates and cheat files. The default behavior is that melonDS will place these files alongside your ROMs as it has always done, but you can specify paths where you want these files to be placed if you don't want them to pollute your ROM directory.

In the same vein, the File menu has been revamped to hopefully make the process of loading ROMs more intuitive. This post already talks about it in detail, so read it if you have any doubts.

Generic has been working on properly supporting wifi power saving. This is probably not perfect yet, but it should fix the weird issues you can encounter in Pokémon games when communications are enabled.

We also have some new fun features: Github user 2jun0 made a RAM search dialog, which may come in handy to those who want to make cheat codes. Rayyan also made a new dialog for changing the emulated battery level, which may come in handy to homebrew developers and such, and he's been remaking the input config dialog to be all fancy.

Change Log

• Redesign of the Input dialog (Rayyan)

• Use DraStic open-source DS BIOS replacement (Swordfish90, asiekierka)

• Generate non-bootable firmware replacement (Swordfish90, asiekierka, others)

• Support for syncing DLDI/DSi SD image to a folder (Arisotura)

• ARM9 PU (code/data abort) support in interpreter mode (Arisotura)

• Fix ADPCM decoding bug resulting in potential crackling (Arisotura)

• Block sound DMA from reading the ARM7 BIOS (Arisotura)

• Smarter SDL initialization (andrigamerita, Nadia, Arisotura)

• Properly center the main window on macOS (Nadia)

• Don't try to render if the emulator is inactive (Nadia)

• Fix potential issues with DSi title importing (Nadia, Epicpkmn11)

• Custom path support (Arisotura)

• Fix nifi socket init on BSD and macOS (Nadia)

• Add support for zero addresses in AR codes 3xxxxxxx to Axxxxxxx (Arisotura)

• Lower window refresh rate if running too fast (RSDuck)

• Wifi power-saving support (RSDuck)

• Allow swap-screen hotkey to swap between displaying only top screen and only bottom screen (ZackWeinstein)

• Add RAM search dialog (2jun0)

• Add power management dialog for setting battery parameters (Rayyan)

--0.9.3--

Fix macOS right modifier detection (Nadia)
• Fill most gaps in ROMList (Arisotura)
• Fix touchscreen code in non-hybrid layout mode (Arisotura)
• GBACart: simulate open-bus decay roughly (Arisotura)
• Frontend: handle tablet and touch events (Generic aka RSDuck)
• Implement NO$GBA debug registers (BlueTheDuck)
• Make Setup Cheats option reappear on macOS (Nadia)
• Add frame step hotkey (Yukitty, additional fixes by Gal20)
• Add DSP code (PoroCYon, purringChaos)
• Save window state (Arisotura)
• JIT optimisations and fixes (Generic aka RSDuck)
• Add ROM info dialog (WaluigiWare64)
• Allow using DSi footer within NAND images (MightyMax)
• More accurate NWRAM implementation (MightyMax)
• Only open microphone if necessary (Arisotura)
• Fix undo load savestate loading (Generic aka RSDuck)
• Fix pause when inactive (Generic aka RSDuck)
• Add audio interpolation (Arisotura)
• Add SOUNDBIAS and optional 10bit audio (Nadia)
• Patch touchscreen calibration data in DSi mode (Arisotura)
• Add DSi title manager (Arisotura)
• Fix threaded rasteriser deadlock when VCount is moved (Generic aka RSDuck)
• Add preliminary DSi-mode direct boot (MightyMax, Arisotura)
• More accurate DMA timings (Arisotura)


--0.9.2--
• fix JIT on ARM Macs
• add proper Mac builds
• GX: optimize single-param commands
• add recent-files menu (abcdjdj)
• add support for loading files from archives
• fix JIT bugs
• fix wifi bugs
• improve performance of save-memory writeback
• add hotkey for swapping screens
• 3D/GL: attempt fixing various bugs
• fix OpenGL scaling on hiDPI displays
• rework GPU2D for easier integration of full GL rendering
• rework NDSCart and GBACart to make it easier to implement new cart types
• add support for NAND save memory (WarioWare DIY, Jam with the Band)
• fix bugs in DSi I2C and SD/MMC interfaces
• new screen modes