I have some experience with emulation as I have modded my wii, but the ds seems much more confusing. I want to buy a ds lite, and I want to be able to emulate Gameboy, GBA, DS games and maybe SNES games. I have been researching this for a few days and am still fairly confused as to what exactly I need to do this. something to note is that I want to be able to have real time saves and not mess around with an ez flash cart for the gba slot. I would ideally like to have my ds lite perform similarly to my modded wii with homebrew, in that its super easy to navigate around as well as add new emulators and roms to the sd card. So basically my question is what do I need to buy to make this happen? thanks in advance
GB/GBC, NES, SMS, and SNES, etc. there are emulator that can be added like game rom to the SD Micro and run. Piece of cake there. GBA, you'll need SuperCard DSTwo flash cartridge. They got an on board emulator in it. Downside, it drains the console battery faster than regular cart & is more expensive. You need to buy the handheld + flash cart + sd micro.
@Prectorian thanks for the reply. when you say it drains the battery life, does it only do that when playing a gba game? or does it just drain it faster in general. also, you mentioned that everything except gba roms are easy to run. do I still need a special flash cart for these? or can I just use any SD micro? you never mentioned ds roms too and are these in the same boat as the others (easy to figure out/run)?
you still need a flash cart, but any flashcart can run those emulators. GBA is the difficult one because the DS hardware isnt powerful enough to emulate GBA , and the internal GBA hardware cannot be accessed in DS mode, therefore the flashcard itself has to supplement the DS hardware. With DS roms, compatibility varies wildly between flashcarts.
@Looneylion thanks for the info. is a 3ds powerful enough to properly emulate gba games? should I maybe buy a 3ds instead to mod rather than a ds lite? if so what is a good card I should get
there is a wip emulator for gba called CitrAGB. a way to inject roms into the inbuilt emulator was recently released
SuperCard DSTwo got its own processor chip inside, it uses the console's battery to run it. Not sure if it just apply when emulating GBA rom or also during use on NDS rom. As for the rest, it is as Loonylion had mentioned. But if a cartridge's own kernel/firmware can't play all NDS rom collection, then a third party kernel/firmware might help make it playable, again that depends on what flash cart been purchased. I can't give brand recommendation. Actually there are several, just not sure how far into its development they all are, e.g. blargSNES, 3DNES, FCEUMM3DS, mGBA, etc. Somehow I think they all are still to premature to expect proper functioning, since even running 3DS rom was only recently improving with the introduction of Sky3DS+. I'd say, if you guys want to play old school games, use an emulator for PC. Wasn't that emu been abandoned? Was dev in 2014-2015, I think. And not many games run on it well at current.
it looks you may be right. after doing a bit more looking around it looks like there is a 3ds port of retroarch (gbatemp post link)
