0.8.3 JIT / 08-12-2019
MelonDS
melonDS is a work-in-progress Nintendo DS emulator aiming for better performance than DeSmuME and to emulate Wi-Fi and local multiplayer capabilities. It's developed by a former contributor of DeSmuME and even has libretro core available.
CPU: Very high but will be reduced with optimizations (as described by author)
It requires BIOS/firmware copies from a DS
bios7.bin, 16KB: ARM7 BIOS
bios9.bin, 4KB: ARM9 BIOS
firmware.bin, 128/256/512KB: firmware
Firmware boot requires a firmware dump from an original DS or DS Lite. DS firmwares dumped from a DSi or 3DS aren't bootable and only contain configuration data, thus they are only suitable when booting games directly.
Most Recent Changes!
As Arisotura has stated in her last post, there's now another head working on melonDS. I'm Generic on IRC and RSDuck on Github.
For some reason I started messing with DeSmuME a bit more than a year ago, trying to write a JIT recompiler targetting ARM64, to improve performance on the Switch. After many struggles something working came to be, but it missed it's original goal of being fast for several reasons (see the link if you're interested).
After recovering from the disappointment I put my hopes into melonDS, but since it lacked any JIT compiler (besides the abandoned attempt by Arisotura herself) I wanted to start with a x64 recompiler. Skip forward a bit and the JIT started take on form. After taking everything apart and putting things more cleanly back together around the beginning of last summer things only got better, with most instructions being recompiled and the opening of the pull request on Github, which later got merged.
At this time the ARM64 backend was started this time avoiding my previous mistakes. With autumn it reached a similar level of completion as the x64 backend while both backends received some optimisations. Until this point we were catching up to DeSmuME but at this point started to surpass it. Here is where I want to thank all developers of open source emlulators whose dynarec I was eable to look into and especially the developers of the JIT of Dolphin. We're not only using their code emitter but they also gave me some great advice on IRC!
With some further optimisations of the 2D GPU emulation using ARM NEON instructions, most 2D games already run at fullspeed on the Switch, while most 3D games run at fullspeed with overclocking. The ARM64 JIT and the GPU optimisations are currently located in my own fork and are distributed by me in binary form on Gbatemp in an admittedly chaotic way.
I am very grateful to Arisotura for creating the emulator in the first place, as well as trusting in me and my work. For the future the already mentioned GPU optimisations are my current focus. I'm currently rewriting the old ARM NEON optimisations to be more clean and adding some additional ones which hopefully increase the performance a bit more. The logical step following would be a NEON 3D GPU backend. I have some more plans lying around, e.g. there is still one major JIT optimisation we're missing out on (fastmem).
Note
These builds are my JIT branch (generic_jit) merged with master into a separate branch.
The JIT recompiler has to be enabled in Settings -> Emulation. The default maximum block size is 10, this is a very conservative number, as I don't know of any game which breaks with high maximum block size. If you experience any bugs which can't be reproduced with JIT disabled, please try lowering the maximum block size and disabling one or both of the options Literal Optimisations and Branch Optimisations and let me know. Though there already has been some testing through people building from source themselves and the semiofficial Switch builds, both uncovered some bugs.