Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Have you tried melonDS ?

Have you tried using melonDS for DLDI-based homebrew? It's my personal preference, it emulates the DSi too, and it's getting GDB support for debugging soon (though not yet). (@asie.pl) [...]
It's free software (doesn't even require any dumps for DS mode, though hardware dumps are required for DSi emulation) and I use Linux exclusively.

This post was a draft last updated on 20th November ... Asie's comment was from March 2023, after I tried to get my demo running on 3DS and believed it wouldn't be hard to fix DLDI support in desmume... (but I was wrong)

And today I just notice that I do have "hobby/melonDS" folder in my fresh-Debian laptop. 111MiB of cmake & dependencies later, I can rebuild the emulator (got hell lots of warnings, but it did build) and managed to make it load and play the current "Three Rooms of Dreamland" demo.

It has polished UI for setting keyboard/joystick, it has much more stable sound output than desmume had and did load my files properly, despite I couldn't do it from the command line yet (EFS files wouldn't be found unless I use the menu to load the .nds)

It has a nice "DLDI" entry indeed, where you can define some appealing "sync SD to folder" ... but I'll have to read more documentation if I want to make any use of that. If it can let me use Level Editor for DS straight on files hosted on my laptop, that could excuse the lack of a GDB stub ...

No fancy VRAM preview or any similar power-emulator as those I've seen on 8-bit and 16-bit console emulator either ... sigh.

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