With the Nintendo DS being the best selling portable console by a long shot, a good deal of people are nostalgic for it which managed to generate pretty good emulators for PCs, smartphones and slowly yet surely even other game consoles. In this article, we’re going to look at the release of melonDS 0.9 which comes with DSi emulation and more!

What is melonDS?

Feeling nostalgic for some Mario Kart DS? melonDS has you covered with version 0.9 bringing even better performance and much more!

melonDS, by Arisotura, is a Nintendo DS (and now, also DSi) emulator that’s still in active development to this day and comes with a good deal of extra features in order to enhance the actual experience other than simply emulating it accurately and with good performance. Among these features, one can find the usual stuff such as save states and 3D resolution upscaling together with support for more DS-specific features including local multiplayer and WiFi.

When it comes to supported platforms, melonDS is officially available on Windows & Linux with RSDuck currently updating/optimising a Switch port originally made by Hydr8gon. Efforts to port it to the PSVita by Rinnegatamante were also made but work on it stopped in late 2018 due to the console not being powerful enough to emulate the Nintendo DS with no notable updates since.

What does melonDS 0.9 bring along?

Feeling nostalgic for the Nintendo DSi? If so, melonDS has you covered… to some extent! (image from release post below)

As mentioned in the introduction, melonDS 0.9 is a pretty big release and it comes with:

• The ability to emulate the Nintendo DSi which allows one to play various DSiWare games exclusive to the console
  • In its current state, DSi emulation is still considered experimental and some hardware like the DSi’s cameras isn’t emulated yet
  • That being said, if you wish to take a go at emulating one of the 366 DSiWare titles, melonDS may be your best bet as DSi emulation on PC is a bit iffy overall
• A JIT recompiler has been added which allows melonDS to provide much better performance than Interpreted mode
  • This was creatd by Generic (RSDuck) who’s the one maintaining on the Nintendo Switch port
• It is now possible to cheat in melonDS – this is because Action Replay codes are now supported!
• A new UI using Qt is in place which eliminates the external DLLs that came with the previous libui-based interface
  • This user interface also brings some stuff including the ability to choose BIOS & firmware files without having to put them in specific directories
• DLDI support has been implemented allowing DS homebrew to access an SD Card image
• More stuff which you can find lurking around in the GitHub commit history or by simply messing around with the emulator

Conclusion

In order to grab melonDS 0.9, you can simply follow the link below which comes with 64-bit binaries for both Windows & Linux. When it comes to the Switch port, RSDuck/Generic/catlover007 has plans to apply the new Switch GUI on top of melonDS 0.9 then put in Switch-specific optimisations so a release will take a while but it’s still on the cards!

melonDS 0.9 Release Post (+ Download Links): http://melonds.kuribo64.net/comments.php?id=101

melonDS’ Patreon (monetary support): https://www.patreon.com/staplebutter

The post Emulation News: melonDS 0.9 released with lots of stuff after a long wait – Comes with DSi emulation, a JIT recompiler, Cheats, a brand-new UI & more! appeared first on Wololo.net.