Potentially dumb question

[kevhamster]

I'm getting a DS soon, and I can see that you can get a NES emulator for it, which is fantastic.

I've looked at the slot-1 cards you can get on supercardstore.com (as linked from this site) and if it says the following-

Direct play in SLOT1 of the DS without any passcard, flashMe or WifiMe needed

Can I safely assume that I don't need anything else to get the emu working? Just drag the emu and roms onto the card via USB?

Thanks in advance for replies.

[WhizzBang]

I doubt it. Slot 1 cards are not so good for homebrew.

Most homebrew uses a system called DLDI these days. You download the emulator, patch to the DLDI for your storage device (see a full list of available DLDI'd here) and then copy the emulator and roms to your card. You may have to put the roms in a special place on your card (e.g. a folder called 'NES') so you should read the accompanying text file called 'readme.txt' if there is one.

[kevhamster]

Do you have any suggestions for a decent and cost effective storage media to put DS emulators on?

Sorry, I'm new to this as you can tell! PC emulators I'm fine with, but console emulators is a completely different story.

[DanTheManMS]

Slot-1 devices will work for emulation, but certain emulators require slot-2 devices to work. It depends on what you want to emulate. For NES, any device will be fine.

[kevhamster]

That's great to hear, thanks for the response.

The main thing was the NES as I really want to play Elite again (I see the Elite ROM is freely distributable these days, which is also good).

I was also looking at Mega Drive and Master System as well, but NES is the main priority.

[DanTheManMS]

Genesis/Megadrive: jEnesisDS and PicoDriveDS will run games up to 3 MB on any device. PicoDriveDS will run games larger than 3 MB using a slot-2 device only.

SMS: I know there's an SMS emulator that's DLDI capable, but I don't know how good it is. You could check out SMSAdvance to see if it's any good, but that would require GBA compatibility.

What you could do is get a slot-1 device for ease of use and then get the slot-2 EZ-V 3in1 expansion pack for the times when you need GBA support.

[kevhamster]

Thanks again for the very helpful reply.

I'd also be interested in SNES as well, but I imagine that might not work so well on the DS. Would I be right in saying that SNES emu would definitely require slot 2?

[DanTheManMS]

SNEmulDS, the main SNES emulator, will run on any device, really. It can use slot-2 RAM to hold larger games, but apparently a bug makes this only work when you launch games from slot-1 and use slot-2 solely for RAM.

SnezziDS will only run on slot-2 devices however. Since SNEmulDS incorporated the SnezziDS core, this probably won't be too big of a deal.

[kevhamster]

Thanks again. You've been really helpful.