When will DS emulators work well?

Ya know... I love my DS. It's a great little device I've had since 2006... But unfortunately I don't want to carry both a DS around, AND my laptop to school.

So I've been doing research on DS emulators and it seems that none of them work even close to 100%... they skip frames, the sound is messed up, heck, even some emulators are made JUST for some of the more popular specific games... I find that ridiculous!

I never remember having much trouble with Gameboy emulators... hell in one of my MacWorld's "The Disc" back in 1997 it has a Gameboy emulator with 4 ROMs.

So why aren't DS emulators up to par? It's been 5 years.

This is for discussion about both Windows and Mac OS X emulators.

 

DeSmuME 0.9.6 seems to work well

 

the difficulty in crafting a good emulator is related to the complexity of the machine you are emulating.

the gameboy is much more simple than the nintendo DS. the gameboy has a single 4 mhz processor, a simple sound system, a few buttons and a display.

the DS has 2 processors running at 33 and 66 mhz, which are much more complicated, and run different aspects of the DS. additionally, it has 2 screens, wifi, a more complex sound system, etc.

modern computers have enough horsepower to run a solid DS emulator, but that doesn't make the job of crafting the emulator any easier.

the ps1 is sort of comparable to the DS in cpu power, and it came out in 94. the first decent emulators weren't around till almost '00. Good by your standards wasn't available until several years after that. Computers being faster today doesn't make the job any easier, but it does mean that once it works, it will run on basically any decent computer.

 

Not to mention there's much more demand for Dolphin/PCSX2, so that's where the good programmers are.

 

It will be interesting to see how long it takes before the PS3/360 is emulated, if ever, considering the hardware.

I'm honestly surprised The PS2 was properly emulated (more or less) so soon. Considering how long it took for the Playstation I thought it would be at least another 5-7 years for the PS2.

 

There are still tons of games not working at all on PS2 emulator. Some playable titles still lag like hell even on i7 and GTX480.

With only few people still trying to update it, we won't be seeing full-ps2 emulation ever.
DS emulation should work fine with 90% of the titles. Some games require an extra hack / fix to be playable though.
PSP and original Xbox projects have been all canceled.
X360 emulation is in it's first steps.
PS3 emulation is nothing but a theory. (Too complicated system and different hardware)

 

eventually the hardware will be there to emulate all these systems, but the complexity of the emulator design and possibly limited demand will be big hurdles to development for future ps3 / 360 emulation.

 

By the time you can software emulate an Xbox 360 or PS3 it will probably be cheap to manufacture the systems on a chip you can throw in your PC. I think the days of software emulating consoles is close to long gone without some additional hardware involved.

 

I have to disagree with you 100%. I have 2 DS units but I prefer to play all of my games on DeSmuME 0.9.6 at native resolution. Many games are full speed with near perfect sound. Some games I chose to set frame skip to 1 or 2 but many don't need that.

I am hitting 60 fps in most games (laptop specs in sig) but you need a powerful system to use that emulator because of how accurate it is. With a less accurate emulator like No$Gba, you will get much more speed but more graphical glitches and terrible sound too.

I no longer carry my DS around with me, my laptop is used for that now. I also like being able to have both screens next to each other making use of my full screen resolution.

@ masterchef341

Have you tried DeSmuME 0.9.6. What you wrote makes me think you might not have because that emulator deals with the DS extremely well.

 

i know laptop nut, but look at your specs and then his. U = core i7 him = Dual 1.6ghz.

I recommend NO$GBA it can play every game at full speed except for new super mario bros and animal crossing. Just when you get it go to emulation options and "Emulation Speed, LCD Refresh", in the drop down box, you can choose between different options. The fastest one is MHz disaster 10%

 

DS emulation works well for me, a few games though are more fun or better on the actual DS.

Thing is for me if I am at my computer I would rather be playing a computer game rather than messing with DS emulation.

I save the DS games for the actual DS to give me something to do when I am away from the computer and need something portable.

 

Works pretty well for me =p some of the 3D stuff is a little weird but it runs smoothly.