Nintellivision (NINTV-DS) emulation for DSi

[ZillaRUSH]

I know there was a few posts already from Rick and a few others in other subject...I'd figure I'd start a new post for all to ref.

 

I dont have tons of skills when it comes to jailbreaking products...basically none.  I saw the recent post from Dave Bernazanni on FB.  He developed an emulator for the DSi.  I luckily had an old one handy and charged it up to begin the process.  It was easy!!!   This is so awesome!!

 

Here is his post from FB:

If you've got a love for Intellivision and have a DS/DSi available, be sure to check out Nintellivision (NINTV-DS) which emulates the system (including Intellivoice, ECS and newer JLP cart homebrews). It doesn't support bankswitching - so World Series of Baseball is out... but otherwise should be compatible with just about everything. This took me a solid 200 hours of development - but you can use it freely.

Tons of options - manuals, high scores, generic overlays included and custom overlays possible (my AD&D Treasure of Tarmin overlay shown - for my own personal use... this is my favorite Intellivision game and I play it almost daily!). Many games support the 'dual action controller' so you can move and shoot at the same time. Cheat and Hack support included and you can save your game in one of 3 slots per game.

Many of us bought (and still own) the "Inty Lives" DS compilation but that has a number of problems (screen bottoms cut off in some games... some sounds and some voices missing, screen glitches where the running-man and other objects get caught in walls, etc). This is my love-letter to the Intellivision which fixes all that.

 

https://github.com/wavemotion-dave

 

I'm sure there are options, but I read you had to add the Twilight menu on your DSI...I watched and followed step by step this incredible youtube post...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8g3pQWGG3A&t=604s

 

I just started adding ROM's...certain not all work.  Next up is to add in overlays (for those that are available).

 

My pics attached.  Im sure others can add to this post.  Thanks to Dave for this incredible work!!  Takes a little time, but for a noob...it was not bad at all!!

Added to that he has emulators for CV and Atari systems...adding those later tonite!

 

[+wavemotion]

Hey - that looks familiar!

 

Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate the appreciation.  

 

If you have any games that don't run correctly (outside of the few Bankswitched games - I haven't implemented that handling yet), please let me know via a private message. I'm usually able to figure that out quickly and provide an updated release or at least a .cfg file to get you going. If it's an available ROM file, I can usually debug fast... if not, I've successfully worked with various people who have private ROMs (and I never ask for them) to get them running and make the next iteration of the emulator even better. My goal is as close to perfect as can be had on this retro-handheld. 

[ZillaRUSH]

It is amazing, thanks so much!!!   No issues so far.  The password protected ROM's for the LTO Flash only...I had a feeling they would not work. I tried. Wish I could play a few of those...WOWor especially.  Oh well.   Added the Atari Emu's last nite.  CV tonite...wow...makes that DSi unreal!   I could not believe I was playing my fav game...Super Pro Baseball handheld.   D2K is a fav as well...handheld = perfection.

[ts-x]

@ZillaRUSH be sure to check out the custom overlays as well.  Dave and others have put together a number of really nice full screen versions.  I’ve also put together a number of partial screen overlays aimed at those who prefer to keep their left thumb on the Dpad while using their right for the keypad. Some examples are here and there’s a link in that same post to the source files. Pre-made overlays of either type are very easy to install and get up and running.

[ZillaRUSH]

Awesome!!, thanks so much @ts-x.  I'll try to tackle the install for the overlays tonite.  Downloaded them all! 

[+Steve Jones]

After reading this thread and the other one, I bought a used DSI XL and set about doing this.

The YouTube video above was very helpful and yesterday I got it up and running.

 

It runs almost every Intellivision game including some I am beta testing, as long as the files are roms and not bin+cfg.

 

I have also grabbed some of the other emulators and have it running games

for Atari 5200, 7800, Colecovision, MSX, NES, SNES, and Genesis.

 

The Twilight launcher runs a few other systems too but I haven't got into those yet.

 

As an Intellivision emulator it works way better than the PocketGo, it plays games the the PG wouldn't, for example Intellivania.

 

I'm very happy with this setup, it really seems to be the way to go for handheld Intellivision emulation.

 

Thanks to Dave B for developing this, and anyone else who was involved.

 

Hey Dave, if you feel like doing a TI99 emulator like you mentioned online I would be all over that

Edited September 29, 2022 by Steve Jones

[+wavemotion]

Glad to hear you got it going, Steve! The DSi XL with TWL++ is the dream - that's going to give you the maximum ability for homebrew emulators and opens up the 2X CPU and 4X Memory of the DSi (vs the original DS/DS-Phat/DS-Lite).  The six emulators I helped develop will all run really well on your setup - it's an 8-bit paradise!  Be sure to check out S8DS for SMS goodness (it also supports Coleco and MSX but not nearly as well as my ColecoDS) and Nitrografx which is not perfect but STUNNING in how fast it will render the Turbo Grafx 16 games...   You'll find the SNES and Genesis emulators are just not able to run fast enough even on the faster DSi... just too much CPU and graphic processing to make that happen.  There's one guy I know that could do it... FluBBa - he's an ARM assembly wizard and has mastered all the tricks on the DS handhelds... His emulators are really technical marvels.

If I work on another emulator for the DS/DSi it will be a TI-99/4a emulator. That's the last of the classic systems that I have an affinity for. But each emulator is 100+ hours of my time to tune up and I'm not mentally ready for another round of torture

[Eisengrim]

Does anyone who has gone through the DSi jailbreak processes have any recommendations for the exploit path? The video linked in the first post recommends "Lazy DSi File Downloader" which has been removed in favor of a manual process with three different exploits to choose from as shown here: https://dsi.cfw.guide/get-started.html#requirements. Apparently there's some risk of bricking the console so I'm unsure of which is the best way.

 

[+wavemotion]

1 hour ago, Eisengrim said:

Does anyone who has gone through the DSi jailbreak processes have any recommendations for the exploit path? The video linked in the first post recommends "Lazy DSi File Downloader" which has been removed in favor of a manual process with three different exploits to choose from as shown here: https://dsi.cfw.guide/get-started.html#requirements. Apparently there's some risk of bricking the console so I'm unsure of which is the best way.

 

The "brick risk" gave me pause as well... but in the end (from a ton of google searching) it was one person who was vocal about it in a virtual ocean of successful custom firmware installs. I suspect any writing of any kind to the firmware in NV memory (even on a normal update) has some chance of causing problems. I've upgraded all 8 of my DSi/XL/LL units and have heard from at least 100 others that have done the same with no problems.

 

Having said that, some of my devices are using the 'Camera Exploit' which is by far the easiest and doesn't actually require that you install any custom firmware. You just put one magic file in a specific spot on your SD card and you're ready to go (you click on camera, SD card and there will be one "phantom" picture in that folder that will launch the exploit). Your DSi/XL/LL remains factory - you just use the camera exploit to get your foot in the door and launch something like Twilight Menu++.  This does have a very slight drawback - some of the cooler features of homebrew menu launchers don't work as well without custom firmware but for the average user it's a good way to keep their system relatively pristine. 

 

On the rest of my units, I install Unlaunch custom firmware (using the Camera Exploit one-time to get my foot in the door and then running the Unlaunch installer). That's the one that you have to worry about bricking... but again, it's about a 3 second process and as long as you don't do some foolish power down mid-write... you're going to be fine (and by fine I mean 99.99% you will be fine - the risk is never zero).

 

Once you have the Unlaunch custom firmware, the recommendation is to NOT uninstall it unless you absolutely must go back to stock firmware. Apparently the author put a lot more time into the installer than the uninstaller which has much less field test time.

 

 

[Eisengrim]

Thanks! I got it up and running using the basic camera exploit. Took me a while to figure out the overlay folder setting was in Global Config (roms/ovl), but now the overlays are working too. Great job on this! Some of the touchscreen functions on the DS were kind of contrived (looking at you, Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow) but this is such a great way to use it!

[Eisengrim]

For editing or creating the overlays, is there any way to identify in the .s file that comes out of grit.exe where the palette block is? The overlay instructions say "Go to the bottom of the file where the pallette stuff is and change the block of .hword lines and replace every .hword with .pal". There are more .hwords that also need to be changed to .maps, so I'm not sure which .hwords I need to change to .pal.

Edited February 24 by Eisengrim

[+wavemotion]

Wow - you'll only be the 4th person on the planet to ever create an overlay

 

The .s that is spit out has 3 main sections.

 

The big section at top is the tiles - those .word need to be changed to .tile

The reasonably big middle section is the map where the .hword needs to be changed to .map

The smaller section at the bottom after xxxxxPal: is the .hword that need to be changed to .pal.

 

What I do is search/replace all .word with .tile

Then search/replace all .hword with .map

And then manually change the block (4 paragraphs worth) at the very bottom of the file to .pal

 

[Eisengrim]

On 2/24/2024 at 11:22 AM, wavemotion said:

The "brick risk" gave me pause as well... but in the end (from a ton of google searching) it was one person who was vocal about it in a virtual ocean of successful custom firmware installs. I suspect any writing of any kind to the firmware in NV memory (even on a normal update) has some chance of causing problems. I've upgraded all 8 of my DSi/XL/LL units and have heard from at least 100 others that have done the same with no problems.

 

 

You can add me to the list of Unlauch successes! Thanks again for the info.

[+cmadruga]

Finally gave it a try, and I’m very impressed.

I will test all my games in this emulator going forward, besides using Jzintv and real hardware.

 

Questions:

- is there a way to experiment with different scalers?

- is there a way to increase the volume even more? Somehow it sounds lower than other applications.

[+wavemotion]

35 minutes ago, cmadruga said:

Finally gave it a try, and I’m very impressed.

Thank you - I've worked hard on it and I appreciate the appreciation!  Be sure to download the Extras.zip package on github for the large set of custom overlays. Just make sure the overlay (.ovl) file has the same base name as the game ROM.

 

35 minutes ago, cmadruga said:

- is there a way to experiment with different scalers?

Yes, but you may not like the results   

 

Using the Main Menu, you can select Screen Stretch. The DS screen is 256x192 and that works great for Intellivison in the vertical direction but is less than ideal in the horizontal direction. As such, you can stretch the screen but it's not likely to look any better than the default (which is a scale from 160 horizontal pixels of the INTV output to fill the 256 pixels of the DS screen).

 

35 minutes ago, cmadruga said:

- is there a way to increase the volume even more? Somehow it sounds lower than other applications.

You are not the first person to mention this - I will look into scaling the audio up a bit. 

[Eisengrim]

Another question. In my list of roms each file has a duplicate title preceded by ._ that I believe are supposed to be hidden files. Am I seeing these because I moved roms over on a Mac? Can these be hidden by Nintellivision?

[+wavemotion]

Just now, Eisengrim said:

Another question. In my list of roms each file has a duplicate title preceded by ._ that I believe are supposed to be hidden files. Am I seeing these because I moved roms over on a Mac? Can these be hidden by Nintellivision?

Interesting ... I've never seen those. The SD card should be a standard FAT32 and you should be able to delete those files... 

 

I could hide files starting with an _ but really... those files should not be on the card (and are not needed by the emulator).

[Eisengrim]

9 minutes ago, wavemotion said:

Interesting ... I've never seen those. The SD card should be a standard FAT32 and you should be able to delete those files... 

 

I could hide files starting with an _ but really... those files should not be on the card (and are not needed by the emulator).

I believe they're unused MacOS resource forks for files. I just checked and I can use a terminal to find and delete them without affecting the game, thanks.

Edited March 4 by Eisengrim

[+wavemotion]

@cmadruga - I just checked in 4.9b daily build with a 25% boost in amplitude for the audio. It's still not perfect but it should help. I have to be careful about how much I boost as the mixing I do (base PSG + ECS + iVoice) can start to clip. I wish I were better at audio engineering - it's my weak point in emulation. But this should be a step in the right direction and I don't think I'll hit the ceiling.

 

@Eisengrim - I also hide files that start with an underscore... can't see that causing any harm.

[Eisengrim]

 

2 minutes ago, wavemotion said:

@cmadruga - I just checked in 4.9b daily build with a 25% boost in amplitude for the audio. It's still not perfect but it should help. I have to be careful about how much I boost as the mixing I do (base PSG + ECS + iVoice) can start to clip. I wish I were better at audio engineering - it's my weak point in emulation. But this should help.

 

@Eisengrim - I also hide files that start with an underscore... can't see that causing any harm.

Great if it's not too much trouble. The files are actually starting with ._ (period underscore).

Edited March 4 by Eisengrim

[+wavemotion]

3 minutes ago, Eisengrim said:

 

Great if it's not too much trouble. The files are actually starting with ._ (period underscore).

Ah! Got it. I just patched the daily build: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS 

It should exclude any filename that starts with a ._ (period underscore)

[+cmadruga]

9 hours ago, wavemotion said:

@cmadruga - I just checked in 4.9b daily build with a 25% boost in amplitude for the audio. It's still not perfect but it should help. I have to be careful about how much I boost as the mixing I do (base PSG + ECS + iVoice) can start to clip. I wish I were better at audio engineering - it's my weak point in emulation. But this should be a step in the right direction and I don't think I'll hit the ceiling.

 

@Eisengrim - I also hide files that start with an underscore... can't see that causing any harm.

Thanks I will check out the impact on volume, but appreciate the fast response regardless.

 

On the scaling question, just curious if you have played with different methods like scale2x, hq2x, eagle, etc. Not even sure if they would drive a significantly different output…

[+wavemotion]

2 hours ago, cmadruga said:

On the scaling question, just curious if you have played with different methods like scale2x, hq2x, eagle, etc. Not even sure if they would drive a significantly different output…

I think with the tiny 256x192 screen resolution and an ARM core that is already running pretty close to full throttle, I don't know that it would be feasible to handle scaling methods like a PC emulator might. 

 

I just checked in another update that helps soften (almost eliminate) the slight pops and clicks as you transition from one game to the next by ramping the volume down/up. It should make transition from gameplay to menus back to gameplay smoother. I hadn't bothered to fix this before since the sound was already somewhat low - but with the boost in audio output, this rose to the top of the fix list.

 

Again, not perfect but improving. Audio output is my nemesis with emulation. It's way trickier than it should be.

 

In related news, I wanted to have a thread that I could edit the top-post as needed so I created this: 

  

[jbellanca]

I wish this would work with the Delta DS emulator somehow, now that Delta's available on iOS. Oh well, maybe we'll get something similar as a direct iOS emulator now that it's allowed.