DS emulation

          Hi!!! I've never made a blog post here before so forgive me if this is formatted weird. I wanted to make a post about ds emulation and how it's reinvigorated my love of technology. When I was a kid I always had my DS. I had a pink DS lite and a black DSi which I cherished! I was always on my DS or Wii and at the time all technology felt so new and exciting, especially handheld gaming.  I eventually lost them and moved on to newer consoles, but I never forgot how much fun I had and I've been wanting to explore my old favorite games for years! I knew emulators existed but I always thought it would be difficult to set up. Just for those who don't know: emulators are programs that can mimic video game consoles and allow you to play their games on other devices.  If you were nervous about it being too much work to set up, I promise it's not, it's a couple button presses on your phone [or computer if you want to play the games there]

         It's actually incredibly easy to set up and use emulators. I saw a post on reddit about playing DS games on your phone and I downloaded 3 or four emulators from the playstore [I'm on android, although I'm pretty sure that you can get these as on IOS too]. My number one suggestion to download is MelonDS, so far I've found that it can run the games the best with the least audio and lag issues. I  also recommend Lemuroid because it can run many DS games and it runs gameboy advance games perfectly! personally my first choice for a game to play on MelonDS is Hello Kitty Big City Dream!!!! It's a minigame based game where hello kitty moves to the city and you earn money to upgrade her apartment to the penthouse. It has very cute 3d animation, a fishing minigame, a restaurant minigame, dance/rythym etc. It's very cute and cozy. It's one of the things that made me love hello kitty so much! Getting that game on Christmas as a kid is one of my core memories. Replaying it as an adult was so surreal and nostalgic. I highly suggest everyone replay their first DS game!

         To set it up: download the app or program, find and download the roms for the games you want [i suggest looking on reddit for where to find these], make a file in your internal storage and name it  DS roms, put all the games there, when you open the emulator it'll ask to scan the game directory, open that roms file and allow the emulator access to it, pick a game to play and voila!!! If you run into any issues reddit is a really good place to troubleshoot as well! I've been playing my sims, coraline, monster high new ghoul in school, monster high skulltimate roller maze, mario kart and more. My number one suggestion to play, especially if you love fashion games or dress to impress, is style savvy!!! You play as a fashion boutique owner and you have to pick outfits for each customer based on their taste and budget. It flows really well and it's easy to play for hours straight.

       for 3DS emulation, you can play the games on your phone through Lime3DS or 33DDSS, although I can't speak much to how they play because my phone's cpu isn't powerful enough to run 3ds games properly. Instead, I downloaded an open source 3DS emulator for my laptop called Citra, most of the mobile 3ds emus are arms of citra! I downloaded it to play the style savvy sequel style savvy trendsetters [which I reccomend highlyyy]. 

        If this interests you, there are emulators for many different old consoles! Soon after I started using DS emus I fell into a rabbithole!!! I use dolphin for Wii, PCSX2 for PS2, Citra for 3DS, and RPS3 for PS3! There's a LOTTTT more. 

Happy DS emulation!!! :]

If you try this let me know what games you're gonna play