Nintellisivion Version 3.0 Released

[+wavemotion]

An emulator for the Nintendo DS/DSi. 

Version 3.0 is released! https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS

Features:

• All known games run at full speed on a DSi or above including all Intellivoice games.
• Many games at full speed on the older DS-LITE and DS-PHAT hardware but you can play with config settings to get the most out of these games (even if you have to disable sound to gain the speed).
• Custom Overlay Support - overlays the way you remember them. See the 'extras' folder for details.
• Manual/Instructions Support. See the 'extras' folder for an example.
• High Score support... 10 high score slots per game with custom sorting options (highest-to-lowest, lowest-to-highest or alpha-numeric)
• Save Sate support (3 save slots per game).
• Tons of button / controller mapping options including Dual-Controller support (so you can run-and-fire in games like Tron Deadly Discs or AD&D Cloudy Mountain).
• JLP support for accelerated functions, extra RAM and flash memory. When loading a game, use the X button to load and force JLP support ON if not auto-detected.

Missing / Known Issues:

• No ECS support - ECS games will not load/play. No bank switch support either.

 

[ClassicGMR]

I'm going to have to swap my DS Lite for a DSi I think!

[Hwlngmad]

22 hours ago, llabnip said:

An emulator for the Nintendo DS/DSi. 

Version 3.0 is released! https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS

Features:

• All known games run at full speed on a DSi or above including all Intellivoice games.
• Many games at full speed on the older DS-LITE and DS-PHAT hardware but you can play with config settings to get the most out of these games (even if you have to disable sound to gain the speed).
• Custom Overlay Support - overlays the way you remember them. See the 'extras' folder for details.
• Manual/Instructions Support. See the 'extras' folder for an example.
• High Score support... 10 high score slots per game with custom sorting options (highest-to-lowest, lowest-to-highest or alpha-numeric)
• Save Sate support (3 save slots per game).
• Tons of button / controller mapping options including Dual-Controller support (so you can run-and-fire in games like Tron Deadly Discs or AD&D Cloudy Mountain).
• JLP support for accelerated functions, extra RAM and flash memory. When loading a game, use the X button to load and force JLP support ON if not auto-detected.

Missing / Known Issues:

• No ECS support - ECS games will not load/play. No bank switch support either.

 

Cool!  Thanks for sharing.  Much appreciated ?

[jenergy]

It works perfectly. Wonderful ?

Thank you very much

[Gamemoose]

I just got around to trying it out.  This is an awesome emulator!  I gave a couple of my all time favorites a shot-Cloudy Mountain and Space Spartans.  Cloudy played great and Space Spartans sounds wonderful, ESPECIALLY compared to the DS mess up the Blue Sky Rangers put out.  Speech didn't work right in that compilation-you couldn't hear the number of aliens or how much energy you had! 

 

This...this is a Baby Bear product-juuuussst right.  Thank you for making it and happy new year!

[ClassicGMR]

OK. I am using an R4 card on my DSi. Can someone tell me where to put the folder and how to run this? It crashes my DSi every time from wherever I try to launch it.

[ClassicGMR]

Never mind. I have Twilight running now (Silly me) and this is exactly what I wanted the Intellivision Lives! DS cartridge to be. Thank you for this.

[+wavemotion]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone. 

@ClassicGMR - in theory an R4 card should work (there are many different knock-off clones of the R4 - every one has slightly different firmware).  The firmware for your R4 should auto-patch the NINTV-DS.NDS executable to deal with the file system... but not all cards do this perfectly in the same way and so it's not 100% compatibility. Twilight Menu++ which is a sort of all-encompassing menu system for the DS/DSi tends to be more robust in how it deals with file systems.

[ClassicGMR]

Everything I tried with my particular R4 and Nintellivision led to it crashing and turning off the system. The Twilight Menu makes everything work and I can play right from the SD. I'll probably give the R4 to my grand daughter who has a DS and show her dad how to use it.

 

I bought my DS Lite years ago for one game - Intellivision Lives... and holy hell what a stinker. I got what I finally wanted out of my DS - portable, playable Intellivision.

 

EDIT: Question - is it supposed to turn off the DSi when you exit from the menu? I select "Quit Emulator" and the system shuts down.

Edited January 28, 2022 by ClassicGMR
added a question

[+wavemotion]

Yeah, the main reason I did Nintellivision was because of one game:  Treasure of Tarmin (aka Minotaur). I felt like I waited a year for DS Intellivision Lives compilation to come out and when I got it I was really disappointed. The entire bottom row of tiles was cut off... you couldn't see what was in your inventory. No way to get the click sounds for arrows/food. Glitches when you turned around (sometimes it would double or triple turn). Every year for 10 years I fired it up thinking "ok... maybe it's playable" and then after 30 minutes I'd turn it off in frustration. 

No more!

(custom overlay designed for my personal use - not for distribution)

As for quitting the emulator -  I just call exit() which should return to what called it. If that's TWL++ it should return to Twilight Menu (it does on my DSi).  I'm also running 'Unlaunch' as custom firmware so maybe that plays a role. On my DS-Lite, the emulator runs great on my R4 (SDHC 2019) clone card... but when I exit it turns off the emulator (as the menu launcher isn't re-enterent).   So it's more to do with what launches the emulator than the emulator itself (which simply exits).
 

[ClassicGMR]

OK so there's the problem. I'm still new to the DSi modding stuff. I was actually launching it from the Unlaunch menu. I do have Twilight installed but I had no idea I wasn't actually running it as the front end. From Twilight the emulator returns TO Twilight. If I run it in Unlaunch it shuts down the system. I'm good now.

 

12 hours ago, llabnip said:

Yeah, the main reason I did Nintellivision was because of one game:  Treasure of Tarmin (aka Minotaur). I felt like I waited a year for DS Intellivision Lives compilation to come out and when I got it I was really disappointed. The entire bottom row of tiles was cut off... you couldn't see what was in your inventory. No way to get the click sounds for arrows/food. Glitches when you turned around (sometimes it would double or triple turn).

And I am very happy you did. That's exactly why I bought the INTV Lives cart also! I was so stupefied by the fact that it passed any Quality Control at all?? I don't believe anything on that cart was playable at all. Wasn't Tower of Doom unplayable because of ZERO collision detection?

[+wavemotion]

52 minutes ago, ClassicGMR said:

OK so there's the problem. I'm still new to the DSi modding stuff. I was actually launching it from the Unlaunch menu. I do have Twilight installed but I had no idea I wasn't actually running it as the front end. From Twilight the emulator returns TO Twilight. If I run it in Unlaunch it shuts down the system. I'm good now.

Yep, you got it. 

 

Some emulators and homebrews will launch correctly only under Twilight Menu which is a full-featured menu launcher with a lot of "under the hood" support, configuration and tweaks for a lot of things most gamers don't care to worry about.

 

Unlaunch is a very bare-bones menu with minimal features - it's main purpose is as custom firmware (CFW) which pretty much opens up the system to more homebrew.

 

If I use a PC analogy... think of Unlaunch as a sort of replacement BIOS which unlocks the DSi and is just enough smarts to launch something more sophisticated like Twilight Menu++ (which you can think of as a kind of DOS). 

 

Having said that, I've tried to keep these emulators very simple and they should run from just about any launcher... and I often run Nintellivision directly from Unlaunch as it's faster to boot into  

[+wavemotion]

1 hour ago, ClassicGMR said:

Wasn't Tower of Doom unplayable because of ZERO collision detection?

I seem to recall ToD being one of the few playable ... Astrosmash was fine too (though it seemed a little choppy with the frame-rate even though I think it was only running 20FPS in the original).

 

My main gripes were with the two AD&D games (Cloudy Mountain had no arrow count and you sometimes just transported through walls... by the way, if you play Cloudy Mountain on Nintellivision be sure to set your controller to 'Dual' so you can run/shoot at the same time... I've set it up so ABXY shoot and the d-bad moves and either shoulder button is RUN and it plays like a dream!).

 

Oh... and I love Space Spartans and while it was playable, there were no alien numbers spoken. In fact, I think none of the numbers were working in any of the Intellivoice games - but for sure Space Spartans was not working. 

Speaking of voices - that's one area where Intv-Lives is better in that they cheat a bit and use WAV files (or some other sound files) instead of true sound chip emulation so what is spoken does sound clear. Nintellivision emulates the SP256 sound chip and it's a bit CPU-intensive so I had to set the quality to medium/low to keep the frame rate up... it's good enough and all spoken sounds will be present but it's not quite as nice as it could be.  On the DSi it can maintain a full frame-rate but on the DS-LITE it will struggle on the Intellivoice games. Someday I'll optimize that and get a bit more quality out of it.

 

[ClassicGMR]

39 minutes ago, llabnip said:

Space Spartans

You have my complete attention...

[+wavemotion]

Version 3.5 is coming later today with preliminary ECS support.

It's really more of an 'ECS-Lite' approach. I'm not supporting the UART nor the full keyboard - just enough keyboard support to start and play the games (e.g. the on-screen hand controller will mimic keys 1-9, Space, 'N' and Return... except for Mind Strike where keys 6-9 are STAR to allow the word 'START' to be typed to run the game).  Basically I'm including the RAM, extra PSG and minimal keyboard support mapped to the hand-controller.

 

One drawback is that I currently only support 2 audio sources... so that's either:

 

PSG + Intellivoice

PSG + ECS_PSG

 

That means that PSG + ECS_PSG + Intellivoice is not supported. Nor is bankswitching - two strikes against World Series Baseball being playable.

 

But if you want to play Mind Strike, Jetsons or Scooby-Doo Chase... have at it!

 

Oh... and the ECS PSG means that homebrew games like Space Patrol can utilize all 6 sound channels.

 

Edited February 27, 2022 by llabnip

[Asaki]

On 1/28/2022 at 9:58 PM, llabnip said:

Speaking of voices - that's one area where Intv-Lives is better in that they cheat a bit and use WAV files (or some other sound files) instead of true sound chip emulation so what is spoken does sound clear. Nintellivision emulates the SP256 sound chip and it's a bit CPU-intensive so I had to set the quality to medium/low to keep the frame rate up... it's good enough and all spoken sounds will be present but it's not quite as nice as it could be.  On the DSi it can maintain a full frame-rate but on the DS-LITE it will struggle on the Intellivoice games. Someday I'll optimize that and get a bit more quality out of it.

Couldn't you do the same thing? Just have a toggle in the options to choose between emulated voice and samples?

And then just state in the readme that you have to provide your own samples (and some directions on what the filenames/directories should be)

 

I remember having to do that for a few MAME games back in the day...I know Donkey Kong was one of them. Maybe Berzerk?

Edited February 27, 2022 by Asaki

[+wavemotion]

14 minutes ago, Asaki said:

Couldn't you do the same thing? Just have a toggle in the options to choose between emulated voice and samples?

It’s possible but maybe not worth the effort. The current emulation is good enough to understand all voices - just not in high quality. To utilize WAV sounds, I need to understand more about the actual game code so I know when a game is requesting a specific track. I’ve no real idea how to do that and the DS lives folks struggled too as so some voice sounds went messing. 

[+wavemotion]

Version 3.5 is released! https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/NINTV-DS

ECS support complete. Bankswitching is not supported yet - so World Series Baseball won't play - and there is no Music Keyboard yet... but other ECS (and ECS music enhanced) games should be good.

[SiberianSpForces]

Just slapping the file on a SD will make it work, or is there something else I would need to do? (Complete noob to DS/DSi stuff ?)

[+wavemotion]

4 hours ago, SiberianSpForces said:

Just slapping the file on a SD will make it work, or is there something else I would need to do? (Complete noob to DS/DSi stuff ?)

So... nothing is ever quite that simple

 

If you have a DS (without SD card slot on the side), your only real option is a 'FlashCart' of some sort. Most people end up with an R4 clone (often called R4i, R4SC, R4i-SDHC or similar). Some are better than others - but really cheap ones tend to work OK and cost less than US$20.  

If you have a DSi (SD card slot on the side), you will have to unlock the device so it will load homebrews from the SD card... which is usually done in one of two ways:

• Memory Pit Exploit and Twilight Menu++
• Unlaunch (or other Custom Firmware) - with or without Twilight Menu++

Both are soft-mods meaning you only need to add software to an SD but it's not trivial... thankfully there is a site which details what you need to be able to run homebrew software from your SD card:  https://dsi.cfw.guide/ 

There are a number of really good emulators for the DS/DSi - most of the classic systems are fairly well represented (Atari 2600/5200/7800, Colecovision, Intellivision) so the effort is likely worth it if you're a fan of classic gaming and want to play on a rock-solid handheld.

[SiberianSpForces]

Yeah, I just put the stuff on the SD and no buenos...lol! 

[SiberianSpForces]

Got it going with the Memory Pit/Twilight method. This is very cool! So now, I can toss any other emulator nds file and be good to go?

[+wavemotion]

Yep. You’re good to go. I maintain 6 emulators that You can find by searching GitHub for the user wavemotion 

 

Some of the really old emulators will not work from SD but all the newer ones should work fine. Many great emulators are available as well as a number of other homebrews for arcade machines. It’s an 8-bit emulation workhorse!