Architecture of the Nintendo DS

https://www.copetti.org/projects/consoles/nintendo-ds/

351 103 6 years ago

swiley2• 6 years ago

The GBA and NDS are surprisingly pleasant to develop for, especially compared to smartphones. My first C programs were written for these.

I still can’t believe what that thing was capable of with a honebrew cartridge. I had dev tools, emulators for old desktop computers, web browsers and all kinds of stuff on a machine with just 4mb of ram (and this was before smartphones so being able to have that in your pocket was still niche.)

I thought smartphones would be like homebrew except projects would be abandoned less often because people could make money with them. I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed in my life.

jokoon2• 6 years ago

I have this 4y old Android smartphone which is slow for no good reason. I tried everything, removing/disabling apps, reset etc.

The problem is that apps are just too big. Tinder is unusable.

I thought I could root it and install a custom Android, but I realize now that it's not as easy as installing Debian on a desktop.

If you combine capitalism with wirth's law, you end up with expensive hardware that you cannot use. It's the same problem with JavaScript and web page size.

Everything is bloated.

Cthulhu_2• 6 years ago

Not everything; at least early on, iOS apps were great. But over time, on the one side the developers started adding more and more features, or switched to web tech or some hybrid technology, convinced that it would save them time and money (it didn't and the user experience is the worse for it). I also believe Apple itself added more and more cruft to the system.

One thing my colleague (who was a bit more hardcore than me) was convinced of is that hand-coding interface code was faster than using Interface Builder. I want to believe; I can imagine that the IB interface was just an XML file that had to be read, parsed and its layout built up, whereas handcoded layouts is very dumb code that would compile easily and execute quickly. But at the same time, I want to believe Interface Builder would be converted to obj-c code and compiled as normal.

Anyway Apple had years of head start in terms of performance and user experience (= perceived speed) to Android, their technology decisions was one of the reasons.

And yet, thinking about it, it wasn't even as fast as I could be; because of how objective-C works, function calls are somewhat dynamic so every function call, the runtime has to look up what to call the function on. Later on (with Swift) they managed to add an optimization that could omit this check if they detected the target could not change.

I'm rambling a bit and speaking from memory here btw, take this comment with a grain of salt. I'm no computer scientist, just a developer.

NietTim• 6 years ago

Is the battery easily replaced? I feel like at least some part of slow down I've encountered is deterioration of the battery, since the battery can't deliver the same power for peak moments like before the device feels slower.

Yetanfou• 6 years ago

As to whether installing an AOSP-derived Android distribution is easy to install or not mostly depends on whether the device is locked in some way or other. If it is you'll need to unlock it which - again depending on the device - can be as easy as flipping a switch or as hard as trying to get some code from a vendor which doesn't really want to give that code or which might not even exist any more. Installing a distribution is no harder than installing Debian, keeping it up to date is easy as it supports OTA updates. Once you're over the first hurdle - unlocking - it should be easy enough.

As an alternative you could root the device and disable (or remove) the bloat in the stock distribution, this often goes a long way towards getting a more usable device. This is what I did on those few devices which I've used on the stock distribution - remove as much bloat as possible, remove all social media cruft, etc. This can lead to surprising results like the battery lasting twice as long and with that giving new life to a tired old device.

Lammy2• 6 years ago

I have this 4y old Android smartphone which is slow for no good reason. I tried everything, removing/disabling apps, reset etc.

Does it use eMMC storage, or is it new enough to be NVMe? Any pre-2016-ish smartphone is built with basically the guts of an SD card (or MultiMediaCard rather) for internal storage and is a ticking time-bomb with a limited number of write cycles. They'll get slower and slower and then eventually stop working completely. My NoteⅡ and then later my NoteⅣ both succumbed to this. I never owned one but I remember the Nexus 7 being especially notorious for dying this way. You can replace those chips with the right equipment but I've never tried.

Izkata• 6 years ago

The problem is that apps are just too big.

At least in part, I expect this is because of the AppCompat library that Google recommends using. If you pull in the whole thing, as tutorials show, it adds a huge number of images (icons and such) that don't get trimmed during compilation (which they're supposed to, if unused) - these make up something like 95% of the size of an app I'd recently been working on. I'd only noticed it because this was a rework of one I'd made ~10 years ago, before AppCompat existed.

I can't help but wonder if some of the "optimizations" done by Google when you turn over your keys and let them compile the apk is just removing this extra bloat.

spoopyskelly• 6 years ago

Try buying an iPhone.

m4rtink• 6 years ago

Well, there is not just Android & iOS - there are other Smartphone OS (such as Sailfish OS which I use on my daily device) & with PinePhone we can hopefully see mobile Linux distro explosion, like what happened on PCs in the past.

Basically, I think modern mobile hardware is fine, it's just the software from Google & Apple that makes it often unusable & out of user control.

Thankfully there are people working on that & I'm sure they are looking for contributors. :)

anthk4• 6 years ago

You can play Rogue in the GBA and Nethack/SCummvm ports exist for the NDS.

munificent• 6 years ago

You say that like it's an impressive feat for the GBA, but Rogue was originally developed for a computer that had less than 1/3 of the clock speed of the GBA's CPU. :)

aquova• 6 years ago

I didn't realize there was much of a homebrew DS scene. What is the state of it?

Polylactic_acid3• 6 years ago

Weirdly there is a fresh homebrew scene for the dsi which lets you install custom firmware and run games off the built in sd card slot.

ArtWomb• 6 years ago

GBA is a great platform for CS pedagogy too. There are a number university-level computational architecture classes that use it. And I think Nintendo could be amenable to licensing their IP for more curricula ;)

NDS development has always been something I wanted to explore. This article provides a nice excuse to get started.

Just to put things in perspective. DS could run a full 3D platformer like Super Mario 64 DS back in 2005 using only 32-bit ARM7 at 34 MHz. New PS5 specs: 8-core Zen 2 at 3.5GHz, 10 TFLOPs GPU, 16 GB GDDR6

VHRanger4• 6 years ago

The original DS had some impressive full 3d capabilities. Between Mario 64, mario kart DS, as well as some of the beautifully rendered scenes like the Sky Arrow Bridge in pokemon black:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE16BT9RFEc

CJefferson• 6 years ago

I would love to run a university course like this, but I am too afraid of getting the Nintendo banhammer half way through the year.

anthk4• 6 years ago

The PSX had similar MHZ but with a less powerful MIPS CPU and less RAM.

umvi• 6 years ago

It's nice to have a fixed resolution to develop for instead of any and all resolutions

mumblemumble2• 6 years ago

I totally understand why they decided they didn't actually want to die on this hill, but it has always seemed to me that the introduction of multiple screen widths was the moment when the average UI quality in iPhone apps took a turn for the worse.

anthk4• 6 years ago

web browsers and all kinds of stuff on a machine with just 4mb of ram

The PDA's have less RAM and they still had browsers and in some cases, even emulators.

reedf12• 6 years ago

It's interesting to have game formats for which emulation does not capture the magic of the hardware. When the last DS dies how will people play these games properly?

jayd16• 6 years ago

A portrait touch screen split top/bottom?

reedf12• 6 years ago

Some games even require you to close the screen! I suppose that's one of those emulation quirks you will just have to live with.

VHRanger4• 6 years ago

Yeah, the nintendo DS is one of those consoles which is mostly a joy to play emulated on a modern android phone.

Many games are very enjoyable with modern touch controls -- Inamuza Eleven for instance.

Farbklex• 6 years ago

Foldable smartphones are going to be Nintendo DS emulator machines.

Cthulhu_2• 6 years ago

Emulators, as the grandparent said, do not capture the magic (or convenience, or affordability, or energy efficiency) of consoles like this though. They are an expensive, imperfect approximation.

I do hope there's conservationists out there that have a way to "freeze" hardware like this in time, shield it from any kind of wear, corrosion, and idk, brittling of materials through time.

someperson9• 6 years ago

Clone hardware is becoming more popular. There have been Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis / Megadrive cloned consoles for decades, but recently there's been products like the Hyperkin Ultra Retron (which uses emulation), innumerable Gameboy clones (usually using emulation), but most interestingly also FPGA and ASIC based solutions.

Checkout the MiSTer [1] [2] an FPGA-based system where the community are trying to create faithful reproductions to the original hardware in Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) like Verilog. This FPGA based approach is NOT emulation in software, but reproduction of the electrical logic of actual silicon like the CPU and DSP chips.

I'll mention flashcards exist, and so do reproduction cartridges (could be called "bootlegs" but the original cartridges are no longer manufactured so if advertised clearly nobody has much issue with reproductions).

That's not even getting into the world of Android-based emulation (and the myriad of phone holders + custom controller type products).

In some ways the future of video game preservation is bright (but in other ways we're still settling for good enough instead of perfect reproduction)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5yPbzD-W-I

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dibLXWdX5-M

johnwalkr3• 6 years ago

New NES, SNES and N64 games are a thing now too!

canofbars• 6 years ago

Its still possible to get working original gameboys. Since the DS was massively popular you will still easily be able to source a working device. I did see a product recently that actually replicates the hardware of multiple game consoles using an FPGA. I guess something like that could be used for retro DS games in the future.

zwirbl• 6 years ago

The amount of detail going into all the write-ups on this page is insane, great work!

someperson9• 6 years ago

Hopefully the author receives ample support through his Patreon link!

otr• 6 years ago

username checks out...

Jasper_4• 6 years ago

Fun fact! The Nintendo DS audio chip has a distinctive buzz that's visible in all audio tips uploaded to YouTube, and you can even hear it on this page! It comes from.... a bug in the popular DeSMuMe emulator. Yes, it turns out that the people that designed the "2sf" format used for unofficial music rips simply used stripped down ROMs and code extracted from a version of DeSMuMe. Community tooling later allowed you to batch convert them to MP3, and the rest is history. Line rips recorded from the audio jack of the device don't have this distinctive buzz. Extra fun when some official soundtrack releases contain the buzz :)

There's some other fun facts about the DS (its 3D hardware is scan line based, not frame buffer based! Which means you can't do post processing on it without some hacky tricks... can you tell it was from the team that made the PPU, rather than a modern GPU or even an SGI-derived one?), but that one is my favorite.

Edit: minor correction, the N64 supported AA, which is another reason jagged polygons are less common.

archseer• 6 years ago

Interesting! Do you have any examples or further reading links about the buzz? I skimmed through the audio samples on the page but I couldn't quite hear it.

Jasper_4• 6 years ago

It's probably most notable in Mario Kart DS's bassline. I'll see about getting a comparison with what it should sound like later today.

TazeTSchnitzel• 6 years ago

Edit: minor correction, the N64 supported AA

So did the DS: http://melonds.kuribo64.net/comments.php?id=32

Jasper_4• 6 years ago

To begin with, antialiasing is applied to polygon edges based on their slopes, in order to make the edges look smoother. There is no antialiasing applied inside polygons or at intersections between two polygons

Oh my. You really can tell this GPU was done by a 2D PPU team.

mrguyorama• 6 years ago

You say in the article that the 3D engine can only display to one screen at a time, but some games definitely play 3D content on both screens (like Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass). How do you think these games are accomplishing this?

Jasper_4• 6 years ago

I didn't write the article, and I'm not much of an expert on DS graphics (it's too surreal for me). But you can copy 3D content to 2D images and then display it using the 2D engine, I believe, and then use 3D on the other screen through the direct method. Pretty much everything on the DS is a bizarre special case, and Nintendo's in-house staff is very good at exploiting every last trick in the book.

Asooka2• 6 years ago

From what I remember playing with the homebrew devkit, there is a hardware flag saying which screen the 3d engine writes to. So you will flip that flag every frame and have 30fps per screen.

someperson9• 6 years ago

I have always wondered if it's possible to run Gameboy Advance games in DS Mode (and thus access the DS mode hardware) and patch the GBA Link Cable serial comms to instead use the Nintendo DS's Wi-Fi connection.

Conventional wisdom says it's impossible to run in AGB Compatibility Mode and retain DS functionality, but I still wonder if it could be done.

Also given the ancient cryptography, I wonder if it's possible to crack DS Download Play and introduce a new "Wireless Multiboot" exploit that uses real DS hardware similar to the early exploratory attempts using "NDS WifiMe" before flashcards become commonplace. The hardware only has ~256 kilobytes of RAM (and doesn't even use a standard Wi-Fi stack if I recall correctly), but it would be SUPER COOL from the perspective of getting hardware to do something never thought possible.

One use-case for this hack I imagine is playing Zelda Four Swords Adventure played on a Wii / Wii U (via "Nintendont"), with the game patched to use Wi-Fi for the communication to the Gameboy Advance controllers rather than a Link Cable. The players won't need to have a flash card each, but could boot up the payload using DS Download Play on any DS variant (including DSi and 3DS).

pkamb• 6 years ago

GameCube BBA emulation via the Wii's stock networking was recently added to Nintendont:

https://github.com/FIX94/Nintendont/issues/144

simlevesque• 6 years ago

It works for the Wii U too. Note the "(v)Wii", vWii is the Wii inside the Wii U.

DCKing4• 6 years ago

I have always wondered if it's possible to run Gameboy Advance games in DS Mode (and thus access the DS mode hardware)

It is! GBARunner2 is a DS homebrew hypervisor that can run (a lot of) GBA games in DS mode [1]. It can e.g. be used to run GBA games on the Nintendo DSi, which lacked the GBA slot and AGB mode, or run GBA games directly from a DS flashcard.

and patch the GBA Link Cable serial comms to instead use the Nintendo DS's Wi-Fi connection.

It isn't - practically at least. There have been attempts and it works as a proof of concept with special builds of GBARunner2 [2]. Sadly the game logic in almost all GBA games does not appear to accept the huge added latency for wireless connections, compared to the almost nonexisting latency for a serial cable. This is also a problem for GBA emulators like mGBA, which only support game linking on the same computer and not e.g. on the network [3]. Games made only for the Link Cable (and not the niche Wireless Adapter) just can't deal with network latency.

[1] https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/GBARunner2 and https://github.com/Gericom/GBARunner2

[2] https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/GBARunner2/Link

[3] https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/blob/0.8/README.md

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

Ooh, very cool! I remember using a very experimental emulator at some point a couple years back and it was sadly too broken to be usable (likely resource constraints?). Will have to dig up the old DS Lite and a flashcart to try this one out.

someperson9• 6 years ago

Very cool, thanks for the links!

Sounds like the easiest way to solve the problem you describe and play multiplayer Zelda Four Swords Adventure over the internet (without modifying the code itself) is for the "server" (Gamecube game) and the client (the Gameboy Advance console) to be physically closeby and then stream the (emulated) GBA and (emulated) Gamecube video output framebuffer across the internet using something like the SteamLink so that the 100ms of latency would not cause the Link Cable to timeout.

johnwalkr3• 6 years ago

Considering the new developments in the ARM world, why did Nintendo ultimately choose an awfully slow ARM9 combined by an even slower ARM7, instead of a faster ARM9 (or even a StrongARM)?

Nintendo's core philosophy for hardware has always been to use old hardware and develop one really unique feature with it, especially for its handhelds. N64 is an exception to this. The also tend to hold on to something from the previous generation, leading to some pretty strange architectures. They are fun to read about though, and there's something about this formula that seems to hold up over time better than the other consoles.

The switch, using an Nvidia SOC is a real departure from this, since it's using very standard hardware and its main new feature is a kind of convergance of the Wii U's components. It's a bit sad in a way, but at least Switch gets a lot more ports than previous generations.

christkv2• 6 years ago

I would argue that the Gamecube was pretty state of the art when it came out and in some ways ahead of its competition at the time.

XMPPwocky• 6 years ago

And it was the worst-selling of the Big 3 consoles that generation.

DCKing4• 6 years ago

Nintendo has been state of the art with the Nintendo 64 and GameCube and probably the Game Boy Advance in the same era. It was an era where - with clever engineering - you could be on the cutting edge and still sell your consoles for cheap. With Nintendo, it's always about cost control.

They learned that being on the cutting edge does not help them sell more hardware or games, as the N64 and especially GameCube sold below expectations. They have not been on the cutting edge since then - nor were they really before. The Switch is pretty great because although it was not really on the cutting edge it had relatively up to date hardware at launch "for Nintendo" - especially compared to its 3DS and Wii U predecessors.

wk_end2• 6 years ago

The Famicom and SFC were both the most powerful consoles on the market in most regards when they came out, too. I'd say that rather than the N64 being an exception, this strategy only really solidified after the back-to-back quasi-failures of the N64 and the GC.

klelatti• 6 years ago

It's become known as a "Blue Ocean" strategy - effectively find a part of the market where you are not competing directly with other players on their terms (i.e. cpu and graphics power).

https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/nintend...

Polylactic_acid3• 6 years ago

You also can't compete on speed anymore. Both Sony and Microsoft are buying the best parts available from AMD for the price so the only way to win this battle is to buy more expensive parts or to design your own that beat what AMD can make.

SarikayaKomzin• 6 years ago

It’s a remnant of Gunpei Yokoi’s philosophy: lateral thinking with withered technology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi

I find it refreshing that Nintendo has such strong opinions about these types of things, even when it’s to their detriment.

This philosophy is a part of why their products always feel like “toys” and inspire all the feelings that come along with that.

ricksl• 6 years ago

Wow this blog has an entire article series in this format with more than a dozen write-ups. Incredible that I haven't found this site sooner, what a gem!

someperson9• 6 years ago

Hopefully the author receives ample support through his Patreon link!

someperson9• 6 years ago

If you're reading this you may be interested in Wiimmfi [1], which is a re-implementation of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection (WFC) online gaming service that discontinued on May 20th, 2014. It was the online service used to play games like Mario Kart DS online.

Wiimmfi is similar to Xbox Live Project Insignia [2], and to a much lesser extent XLink Kai tunneling for local System Link over the internet. What a wonderful age we live in!

[1] https://wiimmfi.de/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DVKwTtJtS8

beefhash• 6 years ago

Wiimmfi is closed source software, however. If you actually want to look at how the internals worked, the independent altwfc project[1] may be much more interesting.

[1] https://github.com/barronwaffles/dwc_network_server_emulator...

tech234a• 6 years ago

Connecting to Wiimmfi on the DS is surprisingly simple. Thanks to a mistake in the SSL certificate verification code on the DS [1], all that is needed is specifying a custom DNS server (164.132.44.106 [2]). The hardest part is finding an open or WEP hotspot, as most DS games aren't compatible with newer Wi-Fi security types [3].

[1] https://github.com/KaeruTeam/nds-constraint

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh0AZR-tKwM

[3] https://wii.guide/wiimmfi.html

yc-kraln• 6 years ago

One of my first hardware projects was homebrew related for the DS: http://kraln.com/passme/

dylan-m• 6 years ago

I got one of those! Kudos for making them - it got me started on a lot of things (including reflashing a CPLD with a parallel cable, come to think of it, although I can't remember why). I ended up flashing my DS's firmware later on, but I think I still have my PassMe floating around - it's a fun little memento :)

corysama• 6 years ago

Note that this article is one in a series: https://www.copetti.org/projects/consoles/

godot• 6 years ago

This is a bit tangential, but the format of the article as well as the visual, are really pleasant. It's a great combination of font, color, line heights, text widths, the use of tabbed widgets for specific sections, etc. It's just a great example of an article on a web site that takes advantage of the media (being a web site, that can be interactive) but not overdoing it.

Also another tangent, the game showcased in multiple photos there, Hotel Dusk Room 215, was one of my favorite DS games. I would've thought no one has heard about it, but here it is in an article about DS architecture. :)

roryokane• 6 years ago

This was really cool to read, but I’m disappointed that the section on the touchscreen didn’t answer something I’ve long wondered about the Nintendo DS: what was the extent of the touch screen’s multi-touch capability?

My first encounter with the DS’s multi-touch capability was in a homebrew drawing program, Colors! (https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/Colors%21): I noticed that if I touched the screen with my finger at the same time as the stylus, the brush drew at the midpoint between my finger and the stylus. My second and last encounter with multi-touch was in the published game Hotel Dusk: Room 215. It had a puzzle where two switches were displayed on the touch screen, and the solution was to put two fingers on the touch screen and pull the switches at the same time. I tried dragging with just the stylus at the midpoint between the switches, and that didn’t activate it: I truly had to put both fingers on the screen for it to work.

My question: why wasn’t this capability of the Nintendo DS more widely used or advertised? Was there some technical limitation on the multi-touch feature that made it only work under certain conditions? Did it require some private API (that was somehow figured out by a third-party game developer and approved by Nintendo nonetheless)? Or was the only reason that most players didn’t have two styli, and developers didn’t want to encourage players to put their dirty fingers on the touch screen (which was, admittedly, prone to scratching)?

Polylactic_acid3• 6 years ago

Thats actually a super interesting question and something that should not be impossible to work out. The touchscreen is connected to the mobo with a 4 pin connector. I don't see an IC on it so I assume it must be analogue signals coming out. I might see if I can work out the way to read data off it and see if there is an observable difference for multitouch

SomeoneFromCA• 6 years ago

He uses the dated phrase "master-slave" in his post. He should change it to "leader-follower" /s.

But quite honestly, I think that "leader-follower", politics aside, is plainly a better term to describe these kinds of configurations.

Architecture of the Nintendo DS

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