Desmumex v0.2 (NEW DS EMU RELEASE)

[fumanchu]

Desmumex v0.2
by hcf

WHAT IS THIS?
-------------

DesmumeX v0.2 is a proof of concept of a Nintendo DS emulator for Xbox. It is based on the version 0.9 of Desmume, plus the port DSONPSP of Yoshihiro, and some specific changesfor Xbox. Besides, lots of things related to 3D functionality, have been gathered from version 0.9.2.

Please, don't expect a good emulation in many of your roms!! This version is only a teaser, to show what we are doing, but it is still not optimized. Hopefully, next year we will be able to optimize this emulator, and several games may be playable.

Anyways, this version can play some games quite well. See the PLAYABLE GAMES section for some examples. If you want to see what this is emulator is capable of, I recommend testing games like "Franklin's Great Adventures", "Zoo Keeper", "Chicken Shoot", "Betty Boop Double Shift" or even "Yoshi's Island". They run very well.

IMPORTANT: To toggle between the different display modes, press the BLACK BUTTON (read the "Controls" section for more information). If all the action happens in only one screen, you will feel a much better experience if you choose to show only that screen at full resolution

Only uncompressed roms are supported.


LIMITATIONS - UNPLAYABLE GAMES
------------------------------

This emulator has 3 important limitations. Hopefully, some of them will be improved in later releases:

1) The 3D functionality is made by software, with no hardware acceleration support, so it is really slow.

2) No virtual memory has been implemented. So, we cannot play roms that don't fit in the RAM of the Xbox (games of 64 MB or more). See the "IMPORTANT" section and the FAQ for more information about this.

3) Many of the other games can have slowdowns, bugs, glitches, or simply don't work.


PLAYABLE GAMES
--------------

Despite the huge limitations described before, we can play some games. We can try 2D games with a size up to 32 MB, and some of them will run. Some of them will be fast, and other ones will be slow. If they run slow, please read the "CONFIGURATION OPTIONS" section, to try to make them playable. The 3D games will run almost allways slow at the moment, and also we can use 3D games only up to 16 MB.

This is a selection of some games that can be more or less playable. If you rename your roms exactly as they are written here, you will get a recommended configuration for them, and also you will be able to see the screenshots in the GUI:


* Artic Tale: The proof that 3D games can be playable too! Menus run slow, but gameplay works quite well

* Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses: This works a bit slow, but it is still playable (not tested deeply)

* Betty Boop Double Shift

* Chameleon to Dye For

* Chicken Shoot: It runs very well! Don't forget selecting "INVERTED CONTROLS: OFF" in the options menu of the game. Otherwise, the controls are really difficult. Select to display only the first screen during the gameplay for a better experience.

* Crazy Pig: The dreaming mini-games freeze, the rest works properly.

* Dig Dug - Digging Strike

* Dora the Explorer - Dora saves the mermaids: Audio is disabled, because it sounds ugly.

* Elf Bowling 1 and 2

* Franklin's Great Adventures

* Left Brain, Right Brain: Playable, although the screen is shown sideways.

* March of the Penguins: Show the second screen for a better experience

* New Super Mario Bros: The main game does NOT work, but almost all the MINIGAMES work quite well.

* Ni Hao, Kai-Lan: New Year's Celebration

* Polarium

* Retro Atari Classics: Do you want to play an emulator inside another emulator? It runs very well! If a game runs very fast, try selecting Fixed Frameskip 0, or Auto Frameskip <= 1.

* Snood 2

* Sudoku Mania: It runs slow in the menus, but it is playable

* Sudoku GridMaster: It runs slow in the menus, but it is playable

* Whac-A-Mole: Slow, but playable

* Yoshi's Island: Intro and menus run a bit slow, but game runs well.

* Zoo Keeper

* 1500 DS Spirits Vol 4 - REVERSI

* 3 In 1 Uno & skip-bo - Uno Free Fall


Besides, there are many other games that run really slow, but they are still playable because they are board or card games... Remember that this version is an unoptimized teaser. Hopefully, in next versions, many other games will be playable too.


If you find more good playable games, please let me know!



IMPORTANT!!!!!
---------------

* Roms MUST be placed in the "roms" directory.

* Roms must be UNCOMPRESSED, with the .NDS extension.

* The size of a Nintendo DS rom is allways a power of 2 (2 MB, 4 MB, 8 MB, 16 MB, 32 MB, 64 MB, 128 MB...). If you select "3D functionality OFF", you can play games up to 32 MB. Bigger games (64 MB and bigger) can be played, but they will hang sooner or later.

* On the other hand, if you select "3D functionality ON", the emulator has less memory available, and we can play games up to 16 MB.

* Games can be trimmed with a program like "NDSTokyoTrim25Beta2.exe" to make them smaller, and they will use less space in disk. This is a very good trick. But this trick will not make playable the games beyond 32 MB (or 3D games beyond 16 MB). For example, if we try to trim a 3D game of 32 MB, and the resulting trimmed rom is only 20 MB, we still won't be able to play it.

* This emulator can only work from hard disk.


PROBLEMS WITH SAVE FILES?
-------------------------

Some games will show a message when starting, telling that they are not able to read or write the save file. A few times, resetting the game is enough to fix it, but if it does not work, I have programmed a trick that will fix this issue: in the rom list, place the cursor over the problematic game, and press the "X BUTTON". This will create a BLANK SAVE FILE. You only need to do this step once. After that, you will be able to play the game properly (and you will be able to save your progress normally).

Please, do this trick only if you found problems with a game. If you do it with another games, you may have issues (for example, you will loose all your current saved games for that game). This trick is only usefull in the case that you cannot play a game, due to save file troubles.


CONTROLS
--------

The Nintendo DS has 2 screens. The screen of below can be touched with a digital pen named "Stylus". In this version of DesmumeX, I have implemente both the physical buttons of the DS, and the possibility of "touching" the screen with a virtual cursor.

Physical buttons:

* D-pad: It's mapped to the D-pad of the Nintendo DS

* A,B,X,Y buttons: They are mapped to the Triangle, Square, Circle, Cross buttons of the DS.

* Left and right triggers are mapped to the triggers of the DS. Start button is mapped to the Start button of the DS.

Control of the Stylus:

* Left thumbstick: Move the virtual cursor.

* White button: Touch the screen with the virtual cursor. You can even drag and drop, keeping the white button pressed.

If you don't need the Stylus, you can move the cursor down below the screen, and it will disappear. Move it up, and it will appear again.

Change of screen:

* Black button: Changes the screen to be displayed on the TV. We can toggle between seeing both 2 screens (above and below), only the first screen at full resolution, or only the second screen at full resolution.

Note: Showing only one screen is slightly faster than displaying the 2 screens.


With the BACK button, the configuration menu is displayed. Pressing START + BACK simmultaneously, you will exit to the rom list.


CONFIGURATION OPTIONS:
----------------------

If a game is slow, you can play with these options to try to make it playable. Of course you can try the configurations that you want, but I have put all these options in the order that I use to configure.

For example, if a game runs slow, first of all I try to put Frameskip 3. If frameskip is not enough, we can go with the sound: disabling the sound can bring a boost of 20% of speed (depending of the game). If you don't want to disable sound, you can decrease its quality (for example overclocking it, or reducing the number of audio channels) and this can make things speed up too.

Here is a description of the configuration options:

* Frameskip: There are two options related to Frameskip: a Mode (Auto/Fixed) and a Value. Let's explain this with an example: if you select FIXED frameskip and value=3, the emulator will use a constant value of 3 for the Frameskip. On the other hand, if you select AUTO-frameskip and a value of 3, the emulator will change the value of the frameskip automatically, with a maximum value of 3 (i.e, between 0 and 3) to try to achieve a ratio of 60 frames per second. So, in the "AUTO" mode, you configure a value that is the maximum frameskip that you are going to tolerate.

Unfortunately, in several games the Auto function does not work very well, so many times the Fixed option is better.


* Sound: You can disable sound (of course this brings the greatest boost) or overclock it. Overclocking x2 has no effect (I still don't know why), overclocking x3 or x4 will reduce the audio quality and boost the emulation.

* Number of audio channels: The DS has 16 audio channels. We can configure to play 16, 8, 4 or only 2 channels. This speeds up things too. There is no "cracking" sound (as in the overclocking option) but you will feel a lack of notes in the played songs.

* Graphics: We can select if the emulator is going to draw only the screen that we are seeing ("optimized"), or both screens ("everything"). The "optimized" choice is faster, but some games will not refresh the screen properly with this method. If your game is frozen, try selecting "Graphics: everything".

Finally, with BACK you can show the configuration menu, and with START+BACK you will exit to the rom list.


INSTALLING:
-----------
To install the emulator, simply copy it to your hard disk, and put the roms inside the "roms" folder.



BACKGROUND LOGO, MUSIC and SCREENSHOTS:
---------------------------------------
The image of the screen is the logo.jpg one. You can replace it if you want. The background music is the BGM.ogg file, and you can also replace it if you want.

You can put screenshots of your games in the media/artwork/action folder. Some sample screenshots are included. I recommend resizing your screenshots to the same size of these samples (200 pixels height), and they will show very well in the GUI.


TRUSTY XBOX / MODIFIED XBOX OWNERS
----------------------------------
There are a NDSX-TRUSTY.xbe and a NDSX3D-TRUSTY.xbe files included in this package. If you don't own a Trusty Xbox (or a modified Xbox with extra RAM), you can delete them. But if you own a Trusty (or a modified Xbox with extra RAM), you can replace the NDSX.xbe file with the NDSX-TRUSTY.xbe, and the NDSX3D.xbe with the NDSX3D-TRUSTY.xbe, and you will be able to take advantage of your extra RAM. Now, you should be able to run games of 64 MB, and they will not crash. Games like "Mario & Luigi Partners in Time" and some of the Castlevania games may be playable, although I cannot test it because I don't own a Trusty


WANT TO HELP?
-------------

If you have some free time and you want this project to advance faster, you can help! There are two ways of helping: as a tester, and as a developer.

* As a tester: The Nintendo DS has thousands of games, so I am not able to test all of them (it was easy with the Atari Jaguar emulator, as it had only 60 games, but it's impossible with the huge Nintendo DS romset). If you want, let me know and I can tell you games that you can test. This will help a lot to fix hangs and bugs.

* As a developer: If you are learning Xbox development and want to be part of a project, DesmumeX can be a good option. Lots of improvements can be done, and I don't have enough hands to do all of them!

Please, contact me if you want to help



FAQ:
----

Q: Will this emulator be improved?
A: Probably, but I don't have a timeline. Many things can be improved: 3D hardware support, virtual memory to play bigger games, improve the speed, increase the compatibility, fix bugs...

Q: Can I use compressed/zipped roms?
A: No

Q: The game is running, but the image is frozen!
A: Try selecting "Graphics: everything", or selecting a different value for Frameskip. Some games only refresh the screen on odd frames or on even frames. So, if we use an odd value for frameskip and the game refreshes in odd frames, we will not see any change on the screen...

Q: Can I use some software to make the big roms smaller, to be played in DesmumeX?
A: The program "NDSTokyoTrim25Beta2.exe" can make roms a bit smaller. But you will not be able to play the bigger games, even using this program.

Q: Can I use the Opera browser for DS to connect to internet?
A: In this version no. You can launch the Opera browser (like a normal rom) but you will not be able to connect to internet. This "maybe" could be fixed in future versions, but keeping in mind that this browser is limited and has no Flash support, I will not probably spend a lot of time trying to do it. I don't think that many persons were interested in launching a Nintendo DS emulator and loading Opera to browse internet in a Xbox...

Q: I have a Trusty console...
A: You will probably feel that the games run faster than in a normal Xbox. Also, if you replace the NDSX.xbe file with the NDSX-TRUSTY.xbe one, and the NDSX3D.xbe with the NDSX3D-TRUSTY.xbe one, you should be able to launch 64 MB games without crashing.


THANKS
------
Thanks to all the persons that, during the years, have built an awesome scene for the Xbox: developers, graphic artists, contributors, Xtras creators, admins, moderators... and gamers too!

Thanks to all the people that have helped me in the development of this or any other of my projects: Neobomb, Hyper_Eye, Madmab, Freakdave, weinerschnitzel, XtecuterX73, darknoir, bigby, elconejotres, the Surreal64 CE team...

Thanks to the creators of Desmume, and thanks to Yoshihiro for his port of Desmume for PSP, as it was a good reference to create DesmumeX.

Thanks a lot to the beta testers: darknior, dominater01, elconejotres, NOTTHESAME and xcalibur. Their help has been very important to advance with this emulator.

The sources of the emulator are in the same package, so if anyone wants to see them and try to improve them, it will be very wellcome. You can contact me if you want to do it.

Thank you for reading this!

HCF

1 link download and mirrorlinks

http://www.multiupload.nl/NML32QRE8C

http://www.putlocker.com/file/363BCD87121B052A

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njoy.

[Robert]

Thx for the news