Possible trouble with R4...

[Chiyo18]

i just bought an R4 card a few days ago, and started setting it up to work on my DS lite.

i did what i was told to do, and copied and pasted all the files from the disc onto my microstick. then, i downloaded and added a snes emu (i think it's called SNEmulDs).

when i put the R4 card into the ds and start it up, everything works fine. it loads and goes to the R4 menu. when i click on the games icon though, there's no games listed. it shows the emulator, but none of the games i added to the Games folder i made on the stick.

at first i thought maybe it had something to do with the fact that i added all the games still in their zip folders. so i unzipped them and put just the game file on the stick. even after doing that, though, they still don't show up. even when i start up the emu.

is there some step that i missed or messed up on? am i not allowed to use roms that can be used on the pc or psp as well?

i know this probably sounds like a stupid problem, but this is my first time trying to work with something like this, and some help would be much appreciated.

thanks in advance to anyone who can help me.

[djshok]

i just bought an R4 card a few days ago, and started setting it up to work on my DS lite.

i did what i was told to do, and copied and pasted all the files from the disc onto my microstick. then, i downloaded and added a snes emu (i think it's called SNEmulDs).

when i put the R4 card into the ds and start it up, everything works fine. it loads and goes to the R4 menu. when i click on the games icon though, there's no games listed. it shows the emulator, but none of the games i added to the Games folder i made on the stick.

at first i thought maybe it had something to do with the fact that i added all the games still in their zip folders. so i unzipped them and put just the game file on the stick. even after doing that, though, they still don't show up. even when i start up the emu.

is there some step that i missed or messed up on? am i not allowed to use roms that can be used on the pc or psp as well?

i know this probably sounds like a stupid problem, but this is my first time trying to work with something like this, and some help would be much appreciated.

thanks in advance to anyone who can help me.


What sort of roms did you put on your micro SD card? Are they the SNES roms that have .smc extension, or did you put Nintendo DS roms that have a .nds extension?

If you put snes roms on there, then you have to run the SNEmulDS emulator on the ds. It will run like a game from the games menu. Once you run SNEmul, it will have it's own menu to load roms, that's where you run the SNES roms from. Keep in mind, SNEmulDS is currently unable to play every SNES game, and some of the ones it does play don't run very well. SNES emulation on the DS is not yet perfected.

If you put some DS roms on your micro SD card (ie: ones that have .nds extension) then those should run directly from your R4 menu.

[Chiyo18]

thanks for the reply, djshok.

i haven't put any ds games on yet, but i have 4 snes roms and all are .smc files. is this not a good thing?

i started up the SNEmul emulator, but, even when using that, there's no games listed. is there a specific rom type that i should be looking for?

also, is there perhaps a better emu then SNEmul?

[DanTheManMS]

You must put the games in a folder called "SNES" on the root of your card. If you want them to go in a different folder, you'll have to edit the "snemul.cfg" file accordingly (note that this file MUST be on the root of your card no matter what).

[djshok]

.smc files are fine, that's the standard extension for SNES roms, nothing wrong with that. And yes, as DanTheManMS pointed out, you'll have to make a SNES folder on your microSD card and put the files in there. Then when you launch SNEmulDS and choose to load roms, your games list should show up and you choose whatever you want to play.

There is no better SNES emulator for DS than SNEmulDS. It is currently the best one. Emulating SNES games appears to be fairly difficult and we're lucky to have something as good as this.

I suggest checking the creator's site http://www.snemul.com/ds/ and contacting him with any feedback or suggestions. There is an option to donate cash via paypal, after all he's been doing this for free, so maybe a little thank you donation might motivate him to work on a new update. ;)

[Chiyo18]

thanks for the link. i'll send an e-mail in a bit to say thank you and to ask some questions.

i know that this emu isn't 100% perfect, but there seems to be a few glitches, in the games that i put on there, that didn't show up when i played them on the psp:S hopefully it's just something i may have messed up on, and i can get them working better later on.

[DanTheManMS]

Graphical glitches are something you'll have to get used to with SNEmulDS. You see, SNEmulDS uses the DS's dedicated 2D hardware to draw to the screen and handle sprites and backgrounds and such. This allows it to run at full speed, but introduces graphical glitches since some SNES effects can't be fully replicated this way. Rendering the entire screen in software would fix this, but then games wouldn't run anywhere close to fullspeed, so this was never added as an option.

The SNES emulators for the PSP use software emulation because the PSP is much more powerful than the DS and can handle it without too much slowdown. Basically, the PSP is going to have much better SNES emulation than the DS, so if you've got a choice between the two I'd probably stick with the PSP. Just make sure you get the latest speedhack database, which allows more games to run at fullspeed (and greatly speeds up certain games like Super Mario RPG and Kirby's Dream Land 3, for instance).