DS Emulator Possible?
 

I was looking at some lets call them "Homebrew players" for the DS, and thought, "Wait a minute, I have an N800!".

Check here for a list of Emulators, 3 of them are Open Source.

It MUST Be possible, and it is probably easier considering the DS using ARM as well.... Only problem I can think of (but I'm not a developer) is the controlling, but I mean that can be solved by a BT Keyboard for those games that really need it...

Anyone? I can do testing or hell if you show me how to port I'll give it a shot. Already running Kubuntu, so I've got a leg-up.

Re: DS Emulator Possible?
 

Quoting directly from the page: "There exist a number of homebrew emulators for the Nintendo DS (i.e. emulators for the PC that run Nintendo DS Software). Although their developers are putting a lot of effort into their development, none of them can at the current time be used for serious development, because they lack features and/or are slower than the real DS"

We're talking of something which is still not capable to run at full-speed on a regular PC, I think that it would be hard to see it running at a playable speed on the N800 :(

Re: DS Emulator Possible?
 

Ahh, but see the main reason it doesn't work too well on PC's is due to the fact that PC's are on X86 (normally). Whereas the N800 is on ARM, just like the DS is.

See where I'm going with this?

Re: DS Emulator Possible?
 

Maxilogan is right. Sure, they're both ARM, and that'll get somewhere for everything that doesn't involve drawing to a screen. If you want to draw to the screen, the DS has specific hardware 2D and 3D acceleration. The Nokia doesn't have those same devices (which are no doubt accessed at a low level) so you'll have to either do all of that in the CPU, or at least translate it (somehow) to use the OMAP's acceleration. From the DS Wikipedia page These tasks are not trivial for a general purpose cpu.

See where I'm going with this?

Re: DS Emulator Possible?
 

The state of DS emulation is actually pretty good. The fact that they are not capable of playing every ROM perfectly has nothing to do with processing power. While the NIT might not be ultimately capable of handing it, I think there's a good chance that it will. If you look at what has been done on something like the PSP, you can see that emulation on devices with limited resources is very possible. There are emulators for NES, SNES, GBA, Sega Genesis, and even N64. So don't poo-poo it as implausible or impossible; with a dedicated development community I think we could easily see a DS emulator.

Re: DS Emulator Possible?
 

i have a desmume compiled here, but it's not fast enough or interesting enough to share imo

Re: DS Emulator Possible?
 

Wahh we need hardware OpenGL support on the n800.

(This schows me that desmume uses OpenGL: http://packages.debian.org/sid/desmume)

Re: DS Emulator Possible?
 

It can run without openGL. But it's only a few FPS on a N800

Re: DS Emulator Possible?
 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/unique0nez/


screenies of desmume running.

Re: DS Emulator Possible?
 

Sure, except that most of those don't run at full speed (not to mention at a framerate you wouldn't want to play at).