Custom Firmware and iQue

[Kostas Gangstar]

Can you guys add firmware support and saving firmware settings like in desmume or saving directly to the firmware file itself along with an option to boot with the ds logo like a real ds.
Not only it will look cool but it will also make this emu closer to a real ds i emailed the my boy and my old boy team they added gba bios start up and are working on the game boy and game boy color start ups it would be real nice to see the only good ds emu to have this feature.

Also i found a ique ds lite firmware by a miracle on the net and by using it on desmume i was able to launch a chinese rom that was giving me the "can play only on ique ds" screen.
Maybe if custom firmwares are allowed and we use the ique firmware the chibese games will run on drastic?

This is basically one of the important things that miss in this emu imo along with multiplayer which is very hard to add and dsi emulation which is not perfect even on the pc emu nogba

[Exophase]

Firmware boot is a lot more work than it sounds like because it would need support for the DS's encryption hardware to work. And then the ROMs you load this way would have to be encrypted.. or you'd have to use some other loader or something.

You can however use a custom firmware, named nds_firmware.bin in <sdcard>/DraStic/system. It's read-only, but you can use something else to save the user settings, and it might allow you to boot iQue games. I asked some Chinese users about having an option to make iQue games bootable by changing one of the emulated firmware values and they basically said there's no point, but I think you can also make them work with a simple ROM hack.

[Kostas Gangstar]

So no for ds boot screen
Too bad all the other nintendo android emus can boot the logo with bios ds is like the only system that cant...
And drastic is the most advanced ds emu on android i wish desmume had an official port with all the features from pc lol.
Perhaps in the future this may get added?

[Kostas Gangstar]

Tried to put my ique ds lite firmware to drastic/system folder and name it like you said and nothing i still get the only on ique ds screen xD

[Nexus1999]

The issue maybe caused by the firmware file check sum size. As in The iQue DSL official firmware file size of 512 kilobytes isn't able to be loaded by DraStic. I have had the same issue. However, there is a set of patches for The iQue DS games. As well as The ROMs, prepatched on some torrent archive that shall remain nameless for forum rules sake. Even still, support for this fw should be added, because The iQue ofw has better technical specs than other NDS Lite ofws. The iQue Arm 7 & 9 BIOS files are confirmed to work with emulators.


On a side note The iQue GBA BIOS found in an iQue DS Lite is the best for GBA emulation. Which has been confirmed to work with emulators.

[Nexus1999]

I figured out what is causing the incompatibility, DraStic emulates a custom R4 flash cart by default. The R4 & alot of different flash cards in general don't support bypassing iQue DS region lock. Even with The iQue firmware in use, because The ROMs themselves can detect the software being used. I wish support for iQue ofw does get implementation.

[Nexus1999]

The MelonDS emulator has support for all DS Phat & DS Lite ofws. It also has a Libretro core port for Retroarch.

[Kostas Gangstar]

Too bad the melonds core is very slow in Android and I don't think firmwares can be used? (Haven't tested this yet)

Desmume can easily use custom firmwares and the Retroarch core for android does it!
Just tested the ique firmware and I could run a Chinese rom, but again the issue is games don't run fast in the core nothing seems to bea t drastic in terms of speed.

And I see saving firmware settings is possible but like the standalone desmume it writes the changes to a different file not the firmware.bin itself, only melonds saves directly to the firmware file :/

[SSUPII]

Too bad the melonds core is very slow in Android and I don't think firmwares can be used? (Haven't tested this yet)

Desmume can easily use custom firmwares and the Retroarch core for android does it!
Just tested the ique firmware and I could run a Chinese rom, but again the issue is games don't run fast in the core nothing seems to beat drastic in terms of speed.

And I see saving firmware settings is possible but like the standalone desmume it writes the changes to a different file not the firmware.bin itself, only melonds saves directly to the firmware file :/

The MelonDS core should be tested on a x86 architecture device. I think that what is happening is the same as Drastic running on x86, slower (in this case not by much) because of a less optimized code.
I think that MelonDS is still not ready for ARM devices.
I haven't tried the Android core (Tried the Windows version, it is slow on an Intel Core 2), so im probably saying a bunch of crap.

[Nexus1999]

MelonDS can load every DS Phat & Lite ofw. Even the 128 k/b DS-Mode fw used in 3DSs. MelonDS being open source I wonder if Exophase can use their source code to implement the bootloader. Which only happens when actually using the ofw in MelonDS. So DraStic wouldn't be pirating by not including it in it's custom BIOS.