Tiger Lab makes Nintendo DS emulator for Android
updated 04:00 pm EST, Fri February 4, 2011
Free proof-of-concept app posted
Tiger Lab apps by Tiger King has developed a proof-of-concept Nintendo DS emulator for Android devices. The free-app is in its early stages of development and is said to be “very very slow” at this stage, but it does allow DS games to work on a user’s smartphone. The developer anticipates that it is conceivable that fully functioning, full-speed versions of DS games will be able to run on smartphones by around 2012.
To get the emulator working at optimum efficiency a few things need to happen first. Even today’s current generation of powerful smartphones aren’t capable of fully supporting an emulator environment for DS games. Dynarec CPU simulation and GPU simulation improvements are first necessary, as is a hardware render capability.
Further, as NDS games require relatively intensive floating-point calculations, it will only be when ARM builds in FPU in future generations of its processors that a fully-fledged DS emulator will be able to get off the ground.
In the meantime, users can download the free demo to check it out. Simply place the NDS ROM files in the /roms/nds folder on the SD Card after download and then launch the app. [via Technabob]
