Gaming Underground: Nintendo DS Emulation

A look into the Nintendo DS Emulation Scene

Nintendo DS emulation has been around before the DS even game out.  As Nintendo DS brinks on near phenom status, the emulation scene has been growing with it.

Emulators are programs that run on platforms other than the platform they are emulating.  In the past there have been console emulators for every console that has ever been released.    In the early 2000's Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo 64 emulation were probably the most active of their time.

The underground emulator scene has been thriving for a very long time and its only fitting that it continues with the Nintendo DS.

The first Nintendo DS emulator was called NDS Emu.  NDS emu" was released before the Nintendo DS itself in November 2004. The purported emulator was packaged with a demo file, as no commercial games had been made available. When commercial games were released, NDS emu was unable to emulate them. "Dualis" was released on March 5, 2005. It could not run commercial games, but could run homebrew games.

 "NO$GBA" was released with Nintendo DS support on January 22, 2006. An update of the emulator released on August 4, 2006, was stated by the creators to be the first emulator supporting commercial Nintendo DS games.

There are currently several supported Nintendo DS emulators including DeSmuME, Dualis, Ensata, iDeaS, NO$GBA and NeonDS.

Nintendo DS ROMs are personally spread, such as through peer-to-peer networks and torrents. They are also made available through websites and Internet forums. The distribution of copyrighted Nintendo DS ROMs is illegal, and websites offering them are actively threatened by the Entertainment Software Association.

Portions of this article references Wikipedia article on Nintendo DS Emulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_emulation