A (hopefully!) speedy NDS emulator.
The goal of NooDS is to be a fast and portable Nintendo DS emulator. It's not quite there speed-wise, but it does offer most other features that you might expect from a DS emulator. It even supports GBA backwards compatability! I'm doing this for fun and as a learning experience, and also because I'm a huge fan of the DS. It may not be a worthy competitor for the other DS emulators just yet, but I believe that I can get it there someday. If not, that's fine too; like I said, I'm just having fun!
NooDS is available for Linux, macOS, Windows, Switch, Vita, and Android. Automatic builds are provided via GitHub Actions; you can download them from the releases page.
NooDS doesn't have high-level BIOS emulation yet, so you'll need to provide your own BIOS files. These can be dumped from a DS with DSBF Dumper, or you can use the open-source DraStic BIOS. Firmware is optional, but if you want to boot the DS menu, you'll need to dump it from an original DS; DSi and 3DS dumps don't contain any boot code. The BIOS and firmware file paths can be configured in the settings. There's basic save type detection, but it isn't always accurate. If you load a new game and saving doesn't work, you'll have to manually change the save type until it does.
To compile on Linux or macOS, you'll need to install wxWidgets and PortAudio using your favourite package manager. You can use Homebrew on macOS, since there is no package manager provided by default. The command will look something like apt install libwxgtk3.0-dev portaudio19-dev (Ubuntu) or brew install wxmac portaudio (macOS). After that, you can simply run make in the project root directory to compile.
To compile on Windows, you'll need to install MSYS2. Once you have that set up and running, you can install all of the packages you'll need by running pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-{gcc,pkg-config,wxWidgets,portaudio,jbigkit} make. It might also be a good idea to run pacman -Syu to ensure everything is up to date. After that, you can simply run make in the project root directory to compile.
To compile for the Switch, you'll need to install devkitPro and the switch-dev package. You can then run make -f Makefile.switch in the project root directory to compile.
To compile for the Vita, you'll need to install Vita SDK. You can then run make -f Makefile.vita in the project root directory to compile.
In compliance with a planned (at the time of writing) upcoming RetroFlow-Launcher release, this edition of NooDS supports direct boot. Everytime you launch a DS game from Retroflow (future release), Retroflow will generate a file called "retroflow.ini" in the data folder of NooDS, with the contents of: "ndsPath=ux0:(your rom location)/brain_age.nds (new line, empty)" Without quotes and the stuff in brackets you can figure it out. It doesn't have to be brain_age, that's just an example.
To compile for Android, the easiest way would be to use Android Studio. You'll also need to install the Android NDK for compiling native code. Alternatively, you can use the command line tools; use sdkmanager to install build-tools, cmake, ndk-bundle, platform-tools, and platforms;android-29, and set an ANDROID_SDK_ROOT environment variable to the folder containing cmdline-tools. You should then be able to compile by running ./gradlew assembleRelease in the project root directory.
- GBATEK by Martin Korth - This is where most of my information came from
- GBATEK Addendum by Arisotura - GBATEK isn't perfect, so some information came from here as well
- Blog Posts 1, 2, 3, and 4 by Arisotura - Great resources that detail the 3D GPU's lesser-known quirks
- ARM Opcode Map by Imran Nazar - Used to create the interpreter lookup table
- Hardware tests by me - When there's something that I can't find or want to verify, I write tests for it myself!
- Hydra's Lair - you can read about my progress here!
- NooDS Discord - here we can chat and do other fun stuff!