Snes on Ds

[drucrous]

Ok, now I'm pretty new to this flash card thing and stuff, but I have been looking around forever with no luck to find what should be considered really simple for the DS. A SNES emulator, that is actually good, I mean really good, Zsnes good. No dissapearing layers, no frustrating configuration, and no even more frustrating not playing certin games. I really really wanted to be able to play Super Mario RPG on my DS but from all my looking, it looks like I can't. I mean come on this is the Nintendo DS, the best handheld gaming system out right now, I know Super Mario RPG isn't to advanced for, and I know that you can play it on a PSP, and I know the PSP isn't better then the DS. Also it would be really nice to get a picture viewer that is ok, the moonshell thing is cool, but wouldn't it be nice to have a picture viewer that lets say fits the picture to the size of the screen instead of blowing it up and you having to go through and resize it and stuff. Now I am new so don't yell to much if there is stuff out there like this, but through my hours of searching around I haven't been able to find any. So if there is much help is apperticated.

[voteforpedro36]

The best SNES emulator is SNEmulDS. It will be the first thing to come up on Google, DLDI patch it and put the .cfg file in the root. Super Mario RPG WILL NOT PLAY because it uses a special chip, and right now can only be able to emulate on powerful systems. The PSP is more powerful than the DS, so you can emulate better.

And Comic Book DS should be good for viewing pictures, DLDI patch it and run your pics through pictods.exe on a PC.

[bgmnt]

The DS has a 66 MHz processor and a 33 MHz one, and has 4 MB of RAM. Super Mario RPG runs at less than fullspeed on an emulator running on a 333 MHz PSP with 32 MB of RAM (even with my recent speedhacks). You do the math.

The DS is too underpowered to emulate the SNES the way ZSNES does (if it emulated like PC emulators do, you'd be at less than half speed all the time), so you're going to have to live with some graphical glitches and incompatibilities in exchange for full speed. As Pedro said, SNEmulDS is going to be your best bet at the moment, but it does not emulate any games that use special coprocessors.

SMRPG is actually incredibly advanced. The coprocessor it uses is the SA-1 chip, which is three times faster than the SNES's CPU itself. It is one of the fastest coprocessors available for the SNES, which is why SNEmulDS doesn't even try to emulate it. It's having enough trouble getting the SNES's 3 MHz CPU emulated by itself. The fact that some games are large enough to fill up the entire DS's RAM by themselves doesn't help matters, as it forces the emulator to waste time by implementing a paging system to call up 1-2 MB chunks of ROM into RAM as needed rather than loading the entire thing into RAM and indexing it quickly.

In any case, Moonshell and DSOrganize are your best bets for loading straight image files directly off your cart. However, like Pedro said, Comic Book DS is one of the best image viewing apps for the DS, but you must preconvert your files into *.scds compilations beforehand to use it. I'd say it's worth the effort though.

[KratosA13]

This may sound stupid, but if a ram expansion pack was used (or flash cart) could this make any difference by offering more RAM?

[voteforpedro36]

This may sound stupid, but if a ram expansion pack was used (or flash cart) could this make any difference by offering more RAM?

Not that much difference, I don't think.

[bgmnt]

The idea has been suggested, yes. However, RAM from slot-2 is slower than the DS's on-board RAM, so its uses are limited. The most likely use of this would be to store the entire game for large roms so that the paging system could be eliminated. This would not fix the graphical issues however because the DS's clock speed would still be too slow to do a full software renderer. Archeide might implement a software renderer in the future (the option is available in the menu but doesn't do anything at the moment), but it will be very slow if it ever happens.