Compatibility

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Games that don't work at all:

  • Clone Wars
    • Timing Bug. If you can bypass affected parts of the game, you may play with caution. This bug will probably never get fixed.
      • This game uses a circular buffer to track the uploading of textures. When the management is interrupted unexpectedly by a vblank (due to wrong timing in desmume) its data structure gets trashed, and the game freezes.
  • Puppy Palace (U) / My Puppy Shop (E)
    • game crashes in menus No recourse for user. Will possibly be fixed one day.
      • We think this is due to behaviours in the backup memory reset command. Something about when CS is low, writes are disabled. Desmume doesnt emulate some of this. a hack "if (cmd != 0x05) cmd=0;" is alleged to fix it.

Slow games:

  • Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
    • extreme slowness in host emulation. (as of 0.9.7). No recourse for the user. Maybe will be fixed one day.
      • I think this game pressures the emulator's texture management by constantly uploading textures (sprite anim frames)
  • Yoshi Touch & Go
    • unusual slowness from 99% arm9 time. (as of 0.9.7). No recourse for the user. Not unlikely to be fixed one day.
      • This game goes into an idle loop for no apparent reason and uses 99% of the ARM9. It has been alleged that there may be an emulation bug involved, but it is unclear.
  • Golden Sun: Dark Dawn
    • unusual slowness from 99% arm9 time. (as of 0.9.7). No recourse for the user. Not unlikely to be fixed one day.
      • This game goes into a loop doing some home-made thread dispatching. When there is no activity going on, it still repeatedly polls for an active thread.
    • very bad sound effects
      • This game mixes its own SFX, presumably to leave more channels for music? As a consequence, slow emulation will make the SFX noisy as they can't be mixed fast enough. This is exceedingly unusual behaviour, the only known case.
      • This game also runs display capture and a software blur filter when opening a menu, also contributing to it being one of the heaviest games.

Games that Freeze or crash DURING the game:

  • Pokemon HG & SS
    • Occasional freezes. You may work around this by using savefiles and saving frequently
      • Some research has been done into this. It can be reproduced, and seems to be associated with texture tracking getting lost and clobbered (the game develops graphical glitches with textures before it crashes) but it has not been debugged yet.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP 2010 (J)
    • Suspected timing bug - unpredictable crashes during battles. Not likely to be fixed any time soon
      • This bug appeared when we changed some timing parameters. The exact cause is not known.
  • Rune Factory (U) / Rune Factory 2 (U)
    • mysterious and surprising crash Can be worked around by using savefiles and saving frequently.
      • We need a dedicated gamer to reproduce this error from a save file. The real root of the problem happens long before the crash, and we've only found savestates where the real root of the problem has already happened. Several times, we have tried to walk around and play the game and watch memory for the corruption, but its very hard and the game is very boring.

Games with obvious bugs, that you can't do anything about, documented here for your convenience:

  • Hotel Dusk
    • Graphical glitch "scanlines" in some screens
      • This is caused by a timing error, a race between some capture and some memcpy. This can't get fixed directly, and is unlikely to get improved one day, but there is always a chance.

General notes: Anything marked as slow due to 99% arm9 time can be improved by disabling 'advanced bus-level emulation'. Anything marked as slow can be improved by upgrading your CPU. Nothing can be improved substantially by upgrading your ram or video card.

Timing bugs may not work on any particular version of desmume as timing changes are made. Changing 'advanced bus-level emulation' has a slim chance of affecting the bug.

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