Nitro_DarkSide In-Game Preview

NDS FPGA core (100% FPGA no ARM)

For Nintendo DS, by MiSTfits, for MiSTer-FPGA.

Not playable, but in-game

Boots Squeak Squad, boots my homebrew, didn't boot Pokemon (3D menu too complex to even init yet), crashes without Direct (HLE) boot (the default for a reason)

Cart access crashes the CPUs a lot because it's too slow, is why most games stall

This is the super pipelined version on OAM, probably the most stable I've ever gotten it but still simply too slow

To get audio working I had to turn my parallelism on OAM from 16->12 to fit it.

Required firmware

Source them yourself:

93276d8629990f50a90950ea083ab348  /media/fat/games/NDS/boot0.rom  DS(lite) Firmware (either works)
df692a80a5b1bc90728bc3dfc76cd948  /media/fat/games/NDS/boot1.rom  ARM7 BIOS
a392174eb3e572fed6447e956bde4b25  /media/fat/games/NDS/boot2.rom  ARM9 BIOS

This binary contains no firmware files on its own.

Obtain BIOS/firmware legally

If you need, you can dump from your own DS at home while modding it!

See the guide:
https://dsi.cfw.guide/dumping-nand

Learn the technical details

Want to know more about how this was done? Check out this high-level and brief summary and charts of my work notes!
https://darkside.heni.lol/

Source code and provenance

Nitro_DarkSide contains Zero GPL code as the first core to use our Template_MiSTfits project (coming soon!) as a drop-in, clean-room reimplementation of the MiSTer framework written in Haskell with Clash!

For this reason, source code is not provided. If you'd like source code to the project, get involved with the MiSTfits community! <3

Teamwork makes the Dreamwork

I hope this project will empower developers to forge the best cores they can!