melonDS v0.6 is released. melonDS is an open source Nintendo DS(NDS) emulator. melonDS is part of a second wave of DS emulators. There are a few other emulator projects that are part of it, which you might have already heard of. Either way, check them out!

melonDS Features:
* almost-complete 2D graphics
* 3D graphics (software renderer) with texturing, alphablending, lighting
* input: keyboard and joystick, touchscreen
* backup memory
* booting from the BIOS
* resizable video output window, preserving aspect ratio of individual screens

melonDS Changelog:
So what's new in melonDS 0.6? Little emulation wise, a bit more UI wise.


First of all, I want to thank the artists who have been (and are still) drawing all sorts of rad icons for melonDS. For 0.7, I will pick the one I like the best (and it won't be easy, heh). Thing is, I want to put the icon in the melonDS windows, and I will need to add support to libui. Which also means embedding the icons in some portable format, because each OS does its own thing when it comes to window icons.


Emulation wise, the big thing is the sound fix I talked about in a previous blog post. I already went in detail over this, but, long story short, surround works now. And sound emulation is more accurate, that can only be good.

There. The rest is meaningless shenanigans.


UI wise, you get fancy display modes now. Those were also discussed in a previous blog post, so no big surprise there.

The only thing that was added is a toggle for linear filtering, for those who like pixels.

The rest is, well, little bug fixes. Under Windows, you can now load ROMs with non-ASCII characters in their paths. As a side note, under Linux and OSX, fopen() can take UTF8 paths, but Windows requires a separate codepath because herpderp. fopen() can only take ASCII, for anything outside of that you need to use the Windows-only _wfopen() which takes wide-char strings. In the end, the code is a bit ugly, but it works.


That's about it for this release. But stay tuned, 0.7 should bring in some Christmas fun.

How to use
melonDS requires BIOS/firmware dumps from a DS. You can dump them with the following dumper.
The files must be placed in the same directory as the melonDS executable, as follows:
* bios7.bin -- ARM7 BIOS, 16KB
* bios9.bin -- ARM9 BIOS, 4KB
* firmware.bin -- firmware, 256KB or 512KB

Note: the DS-mode firmware in the 3DS isn't bootable. It only contains the bare minimum required to run DS games. Be sure to enable direct game boot when using a firmware dump from a 3DS.

Settings
Emulation: settings related to emulation. For now it lets you enable direct game boot (directly runs the game instead of going through the firmware).
Input: allows you to configure keyboard and joystick input. You can change a mapping by clicking the corresponding entry, then pressing a keyboard key or joystick button. For now, joystick input uses the first joystick available if multiple joysticks are plugged.

Download: melonDS v0.6
Source:Here