A (hopefully!) speedy NDS emulator
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, and Android. Automatic builds are provided via GitHub Actions; to download them, you'll need to be signed in with a GitHub account. macOS and Linux builds are dynamically linked, so you'll need to install the correct versions of the wxWidgets and PortAudio libraries for them to work (see: Compiling for Linux or macOS). You shouldn't need anything additional for other systems.
NooDS doesn't provide high-level emulation of the BIOS yet, so you'll need to provide BIOS and firmware files dumped from your physical DS. The file paths can be configured in the settings. It also currently lacks automatic save type detection for DS games. If you load a new game and saving doesn't work, you'll have to manually change the save type. This information can be difficult to find, so it's easier if you have working save files already present.
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
makein 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 mingw-w64-x86_64-wxWidgets mingw-w64-x86_64-portaudio mingw-w64-x86_64-jbigkit make. It might also be a good idea to run
pacman -Syuto ensure everything is up to date. After that, you can simply run
makein the project root directory to compile.
To compile for the Switch, you'll need to install devkitPro and the
switch-devpackage. You can then run
make -f Makefile.switchin the project root directory to compile.
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
sdkmanagerto install
build-tools,
cmake,
ndk-bundle,
platform-tools, and
platforms;android-29, and set an
ANDROID_SDK_ROOTenvironment variable to the folder containing
cmdline-tools. You should then be able to compile by running
./gradlew assembleReleasein the project root directory.