Of course, without being able to boot the game the anti-piracy issues are meaningless, so getting it to boot is the first and foremost issue. There are three big issues that earlier phase DS emulators face with Pokémon Black and White: getting the game to boot in the first place, overcoming the anti-piracy mechanism that prevents EXP gain, and preventing seemingly random crashes. Meanwhile, DraStic also generally runs them quite well, but the newer DS emulators still struggle. While the DeSmuME devs have been unwilling to put effort towards directly fixing these games there have been slow improvements to the point where the game is fairly playable. Or at least the buggiest games that people wanted to play. Pokémon Black and White versions are infamous for being difficult to emulate, and have historically been one of the most buggy games in DeSmuME. As such, we’ve discovered many of the same bugs, which has led us to put our heads together to figure out some of the more insidious ones. We’ve been collaborating some, but for the most part we’ve been doing independent research. There are several up-and-coming DS emulators however: melonDS from Arisotura, dasShiny from Cydrak, GBE+ from Shonumi, CorgiDS from PSISP, and medusa from myself. Yes, is a thing that the DS can do and is well-defined. DraStic’s developer Exophase provided some insight into its development, citing several problematic, bizarre behaviors including games that relied on reading unmapped memory, Art Academy relying race conditions involving waiting for IRQs, or worse: expecting proper behavior for accessing. Seemingly contradictorily however, the oft-considered best DS emulator is DraStic: it’s much faster, more accurate and less buggy, but has the limitations of being closed source and solely for Android 1, making it hard to peer into its development process. While development has slowed, DeSmuME is still the standout DS emulator for PCs. With currently only two major contenders for mature DS emulators what counts as a Holy Grail bug in DS emulation is a bit more difficult to define. There are far more than just two emulated systems out there and along with them a large share more incomprehensible issues. Of course, the previous article only covers two emulated platforms. However, none of the issues have been conclusively resolved. Lior did much more research on solving Pinball Fantasies and byuu dug up a forum post implying that there is in fact a three scanline delay when enabling background layers on the GBA. It’s been two months since first writing on Holy Grail bugs in emulation and while it did pique the interest of many emulator developers there has been little movement on solving the bugs.
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