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Emulating the DS has proven to be a pain for emulator authors due to its rather unusual hardware, although in some cases bugs that occur in emulators are due to the games being poorly-optimized or programmed.
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[[File:Nintendo_ds.jpg|thumb|The Nintendo DS handheld console]]The '''[[gametech:Nintendo DS|Nintendo DS]]''' is a handheld console produced by Nintendo in 2004/2005. The main selling point was the use of dual screens for gameplay, with one being a touchscreen. It is the only console to have come close to the [[PlayStation 2 emulators|PlayStation 2]] in lifetime sales, as a result of attracting a large amount of casual players, and even non-gamers, into the gaming community.
==Emulators==
==DSi==
Nintendo released the DSi in 2009, doing away with Slot-2 (used by GBA cartridges and Guitar Hero games) but also adding new lighting effects, a camera, more RAM, and downloadable titles called DSiWare though those were capped to 16MB because they were installed to the very small internal NAND memory. The Nintendo 3DS is also compatible with those games and offers a way to back them up to an SD card. There's three types of games using DSi hardware enhancements: * '''DSi-enhanced retail cartridges:''' Regular DS retail cartridges compatible with the older DS models, but unlocking more RAM and features when used on the DSi, similar to some late GBC games on the GBA. A couple of dozen games from Japan and US/EUR relied on this method. Those games will still boot on DS emulators but without the DSi enhancements.* '''DSi-exclusive retail cartridges:''' Retail cartridges relying heavily on the DSi hardware features. A boot-up error screen will show when attempting to load those on regular DS models (and by extension, emulators for those). Only four games were released this way, either launch games or because they were too big to fit in 16MB.* '''DSiWare:''' Downloadable titles downloaded only through the DSi eShop (discontinued), or the Nintendo 3DS eShop (though it uses a different file packaging format). They have a 16MB size limitation and there's lots of interesting exclusives for the system released that way. Nintendo 3DS users can still buy (or install .cia dumps from elsewhere) DSiWare titles specifically. So far, no flashcart or emulator (save for NO$GBA, more on that later) can play dumps from the first two types in DSi mode. DSi used an encryption system for the game dumps that went on to be enhanced and used for the 3DS. This encryption is checked at start-up, hence why DS emulators don't even manage to boot DSiWare dumps. That aside, compared to regular DS games, DSi games had some additional header information that wasn't even correctly dumped in the earlier broken dumps. The 2017 set has updated many of those, though it's still severely lacking in DSiWare exclusives. DSiWare dumps exist in both NDS format, or CIA format (for the ones who want to boot in on their 3DS). No$GBA added support for DSi games starting with version 2.8, although some games wont boot and others have graphical glitches. You'll need to enable "DSi/retail" under the settings. DSi emulation requires a copy of the lower 32K-halves of the ARM7/ARM9 BIOSes (BIOSDSI7.ROM and BIOSDSI9.ROM), which are different from the regular DS BIOS files and needed for the decryption, though nobody on the internet bothered to upload those from their old useless permanently-offline DSi (they contain system specific info). Emulation is very iffy due to a so-so DS emulation foundation in NO$GBA, and the camera is just spoofed as a static image, meaning games that use it may boot but it won't be very playable. It's very unlikely DSiWare emulation is ever going to be implemented in Desmume due to various factors unique to that project.
==Special Hardware==
