Hey guys so looks like I will be making a part 2 for this video to talk about multiplayer options and the android side of things including drastic. Just because it seems like there’s enough interest in these topics.
The "Android side" is likely the biggest side of emulation for the DS. A missed opportunity for sure, but an even better opportunity for a second video. Nice work, btw.
Yeah, Android has quite a few options, though there are three big ones. First, Retroarch, which has existed on Android for a long time. Second, MelonDS, which works very well on mid- to high-end devices, is pretty accurate, and has a lot of great options, but it definitely gets some stutter and slowdown on budget devices. And last, DraStic, which is kind of the ZSnes of DS emulation: not very hardware-accurate, essentially a collection of *hacks* that gets the games running, but they've tackled a lot of stuff so compatibility is still fairly high and it runs on a freaking 10-year-old potato. 😆
I personally wouldnt even have brought up ios but thanks to a recent lawsuit, they are now obligated to allow emulation on their devices so its intresting, but I do think that android always been the definitive way of emulating on smartphone because of how much u can do anything u want without having to jailbreak the device, just being able to make ur own programs and manualy compile them and run them on ur phone without anything stoping u is something I generally need as a base function as a dev myself
Important note: The MelonDS core on RetroArch is pretty much fine, but what you really want is "MelonDSDS", which is a rewritten core that's in line with standalone. It has the dumbest name you could possibly imagine and that makes it confusing, but it should be in the current build of RetroArch by default.
I think it's done on purpose. It's an easy way to lower perceived quality for legal battles, most projects that exist in a grey area in the legal gaming space that get as good or better than the system cause companies to see it as a threat to their bottom line, especially when it's a current system. My biggest question is which emulator is going to allow me to use a Wiimote's rotation function to rotate the DS
DraStic's dev really needs to finally follow through on his promise to open-source it, so it can become a retroarch core. It's way faster than melonDS but it's held back by all the jank which comes from being a standalone emulator.
Try noods. That's the best one for me. If it ever gets dsi emulation and the other features melon has it can overtake it. Melon music is lower than noods and noods doesn't have graphical glitches in the ds pokemon game intros where as I've seen glitches in melon, drastic and desmume. Noods plays the pokemon games just as well as my 3ds.
@kitestar yeah. So far noods is the best in my testing and I've tried all. Desmume was supposed to be the most accurate and idk where that info came from cause it always had graphical glitches on pokemon ds games to this day. Noods is the only one out of all of them that renders those soulsilver and diamond intros as good as a real ds. Seem another post where they said they played one of those music games for ds that need good input lag and only noods was able to allow the game to played without inputs messing up. So that shows noods is the most accurate.
If you think that emulation on iOS is good, you can't imagine how it is on Android, since there are more emulators and customization options, it has all the advantages of emulating on iOS but without many of the disadvantages.
I desperately wish at least one DS emulator would let you assign your screens to separate monitors. I have a drawing tablet sitting under my main monitor that would be perfect for the DS's bottom screen / stylus input, but no DS emulator I have tried seems to implement this :(
@christianr.5868 yeah. I seen a 3 year old post for emulation on android on reddit that talks about someone doing it. And that was a older way I'm sure now it's easier by now. Android is even easier actually cause you can do it with almost anything while apple usually is done with mostly apple devices. Not sure why people act like only apple can do things android always has done lol. I also have a iphone 13 so I'm not biased in choices but i definitely prefer android.
Ok so I know this technically isn’t og DS emulation, but Citra for 3DS emulation allows you to do just that by allowing you to render both screens in separate windows!
Yeah everyone says how great it is and it's not bad on my s24 ultra the biggest issue which pushed me to get a new 3ds is stability. All citra forks keep using too much ram and eventually this causes crashes after long game periods. And then the audio later on can start lagging even with good performing drivers.
Thank you, I swear people are getting dumber about this stuff every passing week. I'm sure Nintendo would love for that to be true but come on, it's yours!
modding your console is exactly as illegal and immoral as piracy and repairing your console (according to ifixit this has a specific carveout for repairing broken optical drives, newly added a few years ago), since they are prohibited by the same law (DMCA). Make your own conclusion.
Nice video, but I have some gripes. -Despite being fully aware, you include the 3DS as a DS emulator when, even without using a cartridge, no emulation is happening. -You state that you would not explain how to download ds roms for the wiiu because you say it's illegal, then proceed to show yourself downloading games from the hShop, and then later again by explaining how to illegally acquire copies of the DS BIOS online. -I think in a video simply comparing emulators, you should avoid having nearly 8 mins of filler at the start.
DesMuMe was something I already hated especially when I got my gaming PC, literally the most unoptimized emulator for the DS that existed for way too long. When melonDS came out, I then became super happy and hopeful.
Did you use the nightly builds? Stable has not been updated in years. Edit: Apparently Stable got updated in 2022. That makes it two years without an update.
@@Ozzianman I did, I always uses nightly builds for emulators, my biggest problem still remains the massive lack of optimization, especially for increasing resolution.
@@soulsolis3096 MelonDS was legit made out of spite for the lead dev of Desmume-- a lot of people who worked on Desmume actually created and moved to Melon DS bc they shrimply couldn't take the bs anymore
@@HollowRick I regret tossing the memory card, Acekard 2 flashcart, throwing the pokemon blue rescue team box somewhere, tear down the game itself loosing its value.
Drastic seems to be more customisable than the options on IOS atm. Enable/disable any buttons you don't want, move and resize the two screens with no restriction, ability to save per-game screen/button settings, double the resolution and add screen filters. You won't need to spend much to get a good experience if you plan to make a video on it. Something like a prepaid or better if you want to use the cool looking scanline filter.
Nintendo has stated that DS stands for "developer system", not necesarily "dual screen" Nintendo handhelds have had stereo sound since the gameboy, you just needed headphones before, even the original gameboy has "stereo sound" writen next to the dox matrix label on the screen
The only thing missing from these emulators on PC, is to have the second screen actually be able to be moved to a second screen kind of like how Citra lets you do it, so that if you have systems like the Ayaneo Flip DS, that you can fully take advantage of the dual screens, without having to mess around with any mirroring software or anything that lets you copy a section of the screen, like the current Ayaneo Flip DS youtubers have needed to do in order to get a close enough feeling for DS game emulation. The other thing that I would say I would want to see out of these emulators, is to see how analog stick functionality can be modded into the ROMS, kind of like how Twilight and its hacks let you use the 3DS circlepad for some games, and it actually feels more natural than using the DPad for some 3D games.
While Desmume has great complex tools for things such a TASes or LUA scripting to do all kinds of wild things with the games ( see how pro MKDS players record their ghost replays in HD ), it falls short in performance and accuracy. Modern desktops can put up with Desmume in high res nowadays but 5-8 years ago it wasn't very accessible to the point where Gamecube emulation was less taxxing. The software rendering is also inaccurate to real hardware, and appears to be just as bad as the official DS emulator found in the Wii U. Hardware anti-aliasing is missing and polygon vertices aren't snapping to pixels like the PS1 would do. MelonDS also features more accurate sound emulation ( especially with interpolation turned off ) MelonDS has gone above and beyond in redoing DS emulation from scratch, to avoid messy decade old coding spaghetti, resulting in the absurdly fast performance we get out of it, even at ludicrous upscales. And thanks to the Melon can slowly push towards more things Desmume couldn't do and possibly phase it out of relevance in the following years. Desmume will mostly be kept around by TASers and scripters or even folks trying to figure out a game's inner workings by examining the memory. It will remain as the technical emulator, sorta. Lastly, MelonDS is more convenient to use alongside real hardware. Not only both can communicate with eachother via Wimmfii (MelonDS doesn't require a WEP compatible router to connect online! ), but it stores savefiles in the same format used by most DS linkers or the DSi's Twilight Menu, so transferring saves and making backups is very straightforward compared to Desmume's DSV format requiring you to tinker.
nearly all dsvs in my experience are the exact same as savs, just with a different extension (and dsv files don't have "SPSS data file" as their MIME type); you can just rename it and it'll be perfectly fine much like every other emulator's save file extensions also the modern way of making a tas or lua script is by using the melonds core on bizhawk because tastudio is extremely good the new kirby squeak squad tas was made with that, and it actually loses some time over desmume and wii u from accurate load times
@@SomehowScarlet yeah but renaming is a pain when you have a lot of games and transfer saves between different devices running different emulators. One reason I use retroarch is because the saves are all the same srm format and changing a core would still allow me to continue the game.
Display scaling for DS and GBA games on 3DS is considerably blurrier than the original hardware. DSi XL + Twilight Menu and GBARunner 2 is where it's at. Integer scaling with pixels so sharp they could cut you.
Drastic was, to me, hands-down the greatest leap in emulation for any console. When even PCs struggled to run DS emulators, yet your cheap android phone could hit 60
What about MelonDS and DraStic on Android? One of my favorite DS titles, Kirby Super Star Ultra, unfortunately has FMV sequences completely destroyed by DraStic due to bugs and that's not going to be addressed per the dev, while Melon deals with it beautifully. The big issue with Melon on Android seems to be power requirement, as RK3566 can't run it well at all.
They're not high-resolution models. They're polygonal models. They get rendered in real time to the frame-buffer's resolution. When, say, a triangle is drawn on a screen with 16 times the resolution of the original, then the resulting shape onscreen will be that much sharper.
really cool video, even though you missed the upscaling and widescreen patches that are available on a modded 3DS, or the analog input one too, cool stuff. Btw, it would be great an episode about the N64👍
OpenEmu for the Mac is similar to RetroArch, it's DS core, DesMuME does allow for screen rotation. I haven't played around with DS emulation much but at least for Mac users OpenEmu should be considered.
On the subject of MelonDS not letting you bind touch screen inputs to a controller: Steam Input is my workaround for that. I have MelonDS in my Steam library as a non-Steam game, and I have a desktop configuration for Steam Input where when I rest my thumb on the PS5 controller's touchpad, the gyroscope moves my cursor, and the R2 button acts as left-click. I find this works perfectly well for DS games that use both buttons and the touch screen, like Mega Man Star Force.
41:21 Android has Drastic emulator and right now is my go to on the couple of retro handhelds i own. Also loving your videos but I think adding some sort of background music would give em a lot more personality.
A little section in the video dedicated to emulation handhelds like the Miyoo Mini+ would be great to see, too. The DS consoles especially are a strange case where there isn't a great option in this regard yet, so discussing the possible options that do exist would be neat.
Great coverage, I'm not a DS expert, but I do emulate it for quite some time and it's nice to see a comparison like this. The Retroarch remarks were unnecessary, though, the emulator and the community behind it is great, it did have a few issues many years ago, from one or two individuals that aren't even part of the devs team any longer, but as you said, emulating the DS is best using it, because the devs went the extra mile to fine tune the core, and this obviously isn't limited to the DS cores, right? In any case, I enjoyed the video a lot!
*Great well-researched video overall,* however I wish to correct you on one incorrect piont Chrono Trigger DS can be controlled by the face buttons... it's not just a touch screen only game.
It's worth noting that methods now exist to hack the DSi itself to do the same thing as the 3DS in terms of running DS games and DSiware off the SD card. So if you still have a DSi or DSi XL you can do that. I wish I hadn't sold mine back in the day 🙃
I play DS games on the Nintendo 2DS, the one that looks like a doorstop. The image scaling is really good on it and it's super comfy to play on. So glad I picked it up back in 2014. Still in pristine condition and working like a charm.
You know what would be great? If we could use the DS itself as a controller for the emulators on computers! "If you have a DS then what do you need an emulator for?", one might ask, to which I respond: "Game preservation, customization beyond what Nintendo allowed, randomizers and all the extras that emulation allows, just with a controller suited for the task. Like using a Wii Remote for Dolphin."
I wish I could do that too. You can still have stuff like game mods and customizability with a ds flash cart like a r4 or tt ds. And you don't have to modify the console to make it work. But you can't use rewind or save states either so full compatibility with og hardware with an emulator would be killer.
Missed Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days Melon Mix. A project that uses a version of MelonDS modified specifically for that game, and brings the game to something more akin to Kingdom Hearts 2. The team working on it is really pushing DS emulation to it's full potential imo and it's super exciting. They've put elements from both screens into one screen, and it's simply eyecatching
Rip no mention of the DSi XL or it’s giant extra stylus, also the DSi systems had better WiFi connectivity, a downloadable web browser, system updates, DSi Enhanced DS Games like Pokémon White Version (and Black Version), and the best thing of them all…a rainbow pen option in pictochat. But it was locked out of any DS combo games that added functionality to the games by plugging in an accessory into the GBA slot which included the original DS Internet Browser. Oh and for some reason the DS systems couldn’t play GB or GBC games from the GBA slot
with upscaling ds games are there any moments when 2d objects are too small ? like i noticed this when i play old pc games designed for 768p or 800x600 or 480p on my 4k monitor. so i wonder if this is a problem with games on the ds that are way lower resolution and were not programmed with different resolutions in mind .
One important feature DeSmuME has over any other DS emulator is the ability to emulate the GBA Slot. This feature allows DeSmuME to simulate any add-on made for thr Slot 2, including a GBA cartridge, making it possible to migrate Pokemon from Gen 3 to Gen 4. You'll need a GBS ROM and the corresponding Save file in the same directory and name to eork. But this feature alone makes DeSmuME still a must have for Pokemon players. Also, DeSmuME has a neat import and export save file feature. You can use DeSmuME to convert DS dave files from flashcards, other emulators, and original DS cartridges.
You can do that in MelonDS too, in fact, I traded an egg from pokemon box to pokemon black using this emulator. For anyone interested: I moved the egg to pokemon ruby using dolphin, then I hatched the egg in ruby using mgba and then used melonds to trade my egg to SS and finally I used two instances of melonds to trade from SS to black
Fun fact: there is a MelonDS version FOR THE NINTENDO SWITCH, that allows you to control the touch screen with the right joystick, or even with gyro if I'm not mistaken. And, even though it's kinda limited by the Switch's power (or lack thereof), it's a pretty good way of playing DS games on the TV if you have a "jailbroken" Nintendo Switch.
Something you failed to mention is that OpenGL in MelonDS can't reproduce some effects like outlines or shading on models properly. You can notice it the most in Sonic Colors DS where Sonic's outline disappears on OpenGL and his shading is less accurate on the result screen. Software Mode fixes this, but can't increase the resolution, so you're stuck with the original internal resolution. Also, integer scaling is important, uneven pixel art looks really ugly if you play it on a smaller window and then play it with a slightly stretched resolution. Make sure to increase and decrease window sizes in the options tab (instead of manually scaling it by dragging the corners of the window).
Lets hope that melonDS 1.0 releases soon, with the compute renderer. It's basically software rendering but with high-res support. It's less performant, and not _quite_ as accurate as software renderer, but it'll definitely be a good option to have.
you can install custom scaling filters on the 3DS - in addition to playing 3D original DS games in wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidescreen, if that's your fancy
Recommending DeSmuME over melonDS is kinda... odd. Since the DeSmuME devs hate Pokemon with a passion, everything that would fix errors in Pokemon doesn't get fixed, which leads to errors in others games also not getting fixed, since that would mean to improve Pokemon. The software renderer is very inaccurate due to this. One look at Pokemon Diamon/Pearl/Platinum should tell you that things are very off. Even worse, in those games, switching to another renderer introduces different visual bugs. Sometimes, DeSmuME also struggles with saving, as seen in Kirby Mouse Attack (or Squeak Squad), which hangs for several seconds while the sound repeats over and over every time after finishing a level. Streamed music, like on the Ni no Kuni title screen or the Pokemon Black 2/White 2 title screen (Pokemon again. Now guess why this doesn't work out of the box) also needs you to fiddle with the settings to make them work without killing your ears, whereas melonDS just works. And the biggest thing: Multiplayer. Guess what games would profit a lot of multiplayer. Pokemon. Which is why DeSmuME doesn't have multiplayer options. melonDS supports local multiplayer on one machine out of the box. System -> Multiplayer -> Launch new Multiplayer instance. That's it. Connecting the emulated DS to the Internet is also possible, which opens up online multiplayer for games that support it and have replacement servers even across platforms, since all of them connect to the same servers. melonDS has matured a lot and already surpassed DeSmuME if you just want to play DS games. Those who want to poke around in the code of DS software might want to take a look at no$gba's DS debugger.
For Android, everything said about Retroarch applies, the other main options are MelonDS and DraStic. Generally, DraStic has better performance and layout custimization, but MelonDS has multiplayer and RetroAchievements support. For most people, I'd recommend DraStic, but none of the three are bad options. For devices, I've used these on a Samsung Galaxy S21 (with and without a Backbone One controller), Retroid Pocket 2 Plus, and Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. If you're interested in emulating on the go, I highly recommend getting a vice controller like the Backbone to add physical controls to your phone, or a dedicated device like the Retroid.
Will you be doing a state of wii emulation that would be a really cool video as well also i liked how you went into detail of the different finctions and features the original consoles have
RetroArch cores support shader presets and overlays. With 'Duimon Mega Bezel Graphics,' you can use emulator cores with various handheld console overlays and shaders that include reflections.
PC struggling to emulate DS, and iOS just recently getting it Android and 3DS: **signature look of superiority** like fr Drastic is so well optimized even an LG L3 from 2011 can run most DS games with no issues, if not every game
Ios been had it if not as long as android but it's only now officially allowed (before was only sideloaded) as for drastic that's true but it also has audio lags even on the latest flagship androids. Melon ds and noods (my fav is noods right now it's the most accurate from my tests) don't have audio lags at all that I've noticed.
@akiradkcn nah it's slow if you have a lower end device or much older lol my old pixel xl snapdragon 821 2016 had issues with it. If you can have a decent snapdragon like the latest or even the past few years man even a snapdragon 855 should be fine. Otherwise melon runs full speed. It's the same reason if you use a older iphone it won't run melon either.
18:20 the ironic part is that they probably made this to ensure that newbies wont panic because they put an window in fullscreen mode and dont know how to toggle it back
you forgot to say, the new 3ds has the ability to use the CPAD on ds games and with legit widescreen, also you can patch a filter that reduces the total blurriness from games
8:35 You can connect a DualShock 4 to your PC and the built-in touchpad will act similarly to how a trackpad does on a laptop, giving you the ability to move the cursor and left click from the comfort of your controller. In my experience, there's not even any additional setup to it; you just connect the controller and the touchpad is automatically recognized. Now this still won't be the ideal way to play DS games by any stretch and not everyone owns one of these controllers, but for emulating on a PC, the touchpad is almost as good as using a mouse if you can get used to it. This also means MelonDS and DeSmuME can now actually be enjoyed on a TV, and despite using a Sony-branded controller the experience feels much more natural this way compared to mapping touch-related functions to a control stick. Currently, I'm not able to vouch for how well the PS5's DualSense works in this regard, but since those controllers also feature a touchpad I don't see why using one shouldn't work just as well as its predecessor.
a reminder that the desmume developer held back ds emulation by years because it was the only good ds emulator for a long time and the developer is a DS purist who refused to add gpu upscaling until competition came out because "it wasnt what nintendo intended" additionally, they hate pokemon and would actively gut features because they would help pokemon players
Video is made by an emulator enthusiast, and doesn't have an Android phone. Bruh, you need to fix that. There are many more emulation options on Android. Edit: Not blindly hating on Apple crowd since they recently just joined mobile emulation. I'm just surprised that people who use emulators deprived themselves for so long in the smartphone department by only using an Apple device. Yes sideloading is a thing on Apple devices, but it's tedious and you don't need to do it on Android.
Retroarch on iOS is easily the goat if you’ve got one of those controllers like the backbone one which attach onto the phone. Beautiful picture quality on an oled screen that you can configure however you want by playing around with shaders for the lcd look and get a crisp interger scaled look, and on top of that, you have a touchscreen that is nice to use. That combined with retroarch’s per game settings and such is so powerful. Shaders really do it for me though. Want it to look like the original phat model DS’s screen for early DS titles? You can do that, dim lcd image with motion blur and all. Want it to look like the DS lite? You can do that as well. Want it to look like your specific DS console that your cousin gave you with an extremely washed out screen? I don’t know why you’d want to, but you can even do that as well.
my man you missed a lot of stuff something cool about twilight menu++ on the 3ds is that there are cheats available that can, for example, make the use of the joystick an actual full 360° control, since the native ds gameplay on 3ds only allows 8 directions even using the joystick, and also there are patches for TM++ that allow for better resolution scaling and filters
My first ever console was dsi I was super young then my mom bought it for me as a surprise for my birthday if I remember right man I had so many good memories on it 😢 I'm 20 years old now time flies
3DS is the way to go. Same form factor, more power, the circle pad, online function (yes, I know melonDS can also work online), and you can patch TWiLight to run DS games at the widescreen aspect ratio the 3DS has which I’m surprised you didn’t mention in this video. The only downside is the scaling will make text more blurry but personally I never notice it
I think it's justified to not have the images centered vertically in 1:1 mode on the 3DS. That's because some DS games use images that span across both screens, and while the 3DS's larger hinge (especially on the XL model) already messes with that a bit, having a thick black border on either side of the hinge would just make that that much more jarring.
Youve probably been corrected but the Phat DS had two FRONTLIT screens. The AGS-101 was backlit, however, that console did not hit markets until the time of the DS's release, so not many people experienced one before the NDS. I've never seen an AGS-101 in european retro game stores. With the DS Lite they finally made the screens backlit. I got my pink phat in november 2005. I was more than a little jealous when my sister recieved a fancypants DS Lite for Christmas 2006.
Just here to provide a correction. The original DS did have backlit screens. This has been proven already by a video by Makho if you look it up. The only thing is that it has "transflective" backlit screens, not "transmissive" which is what most screens are nowadays. Nintendo wanted to have their cake and eat it too, so they had a combination of the two reflective and transmissive types. This is why you can actually see the screen when you turn off the backlight in a game that lets you toggle the backlight off on the DS, like Super Mario 64 DS, but on a DS Lite, it's just plain black unless you shine a REALLY bright light on it to just barely see. You can also tell because there isn't tons of light in front of the image giving it a tint like the AGS-001 which actually is frontlit and you can see the lights bordering it. To tell the difference, think back to the non-lit Game Boys that required ambient light. Those were reflective. Light comes from in front of the screen, goes through it and hits the reflector in the back, to bounce the light back into your eyes. Transmissive screens require light coming from the back and are almost entirely unusable in strong ambient light. Transflective is a hybrid between the two, which allows for light to come from the back AND the front to light the pixels. It has a light that comes from the back as well as a reflective layer for light to come in and reflect off of, working similarly to a one-way mirror. If you go outside into bright sunlight, you'll still see the screen because that's when the reflector in the back has gotten enough light to overpower the relatively dim backlight. The reason the DS looks so awkward and washed out is simply due to the maturity of transflective screens at the time, as well as the price for a higher quality one. There are better looking backlit transflective LCDs with much nicer colors out there nowadays, but they aren't common.
@@DarkBowser64 Thanks for the explanation. I didn't realise it was actually backlit because it looked so similar to the GBA's screen and dissimilar to the DS Lite's screen, but this explains why I had a much easier time playing the DS at night whereas the GBA was always funky looking.
The phat DS was NOT backlit. I own an original one. The screens were FRONT-lit like the original GBA SP was. The AGS-101 was the first backlit LCD display and that didn’t hit the DS until the DS Lite. This means I can still see my phat DS screen outside in direct sunlight, because just like the GBA and AGS-001, it’s a front-lit reflective TFT display. Looks best in very bright light.
side note: you mentioned the original DS screen/screens being a step back from the GBA AGS 101 screen, well, the GBA AGS 101 came out after the original DS so that checks out
I'd say between the DS and 3DS, the former is harder to emulate mostly because DS games tend to really utilize both screens most 3DS games use the touch screen for inventory management or as an extended UI so switching between the two screens is less cumbersome,. There are also ton of really good DS games and while yes the 3DS has a good library too I do feel like its a fair bit smaller than the DS.
Yeah I agree. Playing through the 3ds pokemon games and I'm not too mad I missed them before. The ds ones and gba and prior are much better. They made it too easy. For gen 6 and 7 I literally turn off exp share and lucky egg because you already get experience just from catching pokemon and when you switch you get full exp. I know it's worse gen 8 and up starting with the let's go games cause you can't even turn any of that off. So I can imagine how bad evs and ivs are in later games.
