How to port an emulator to NDS or Wii

[valguerra]

I know the basic in programing. Is there a turtorial to port an emualtor to the NDS and Wii. I want to know what are the step, were to get source codes. I want to port N64 for the Wii. Xbox has a good one N64, call surreal64. that use 3 different emulator to play games. Works real good.

thanks

[dopefish]

Frankly, you should start out with something simple, and work your way up. You're not going to be able to go straight from knowing the basics, to working on an N64 emulator. Especially since emulators tend to be pretty complex, not to mention platform-specific (for performance reasons).

[josergc]

Hi dopefish,

As valguerra says, porting an emulator is not a easy task. Think it has several parts, a machine-independent part, another more dependent to give more speed to the execution and finally the drivers (the peripherals).

You will need to find in the code the "machine dependent code" and create the code for the target platform, because if the XBox 360 is a PPC and the XBox is an x86, the NDS uses ARM and Wii also another PPC. The Xbox has more speed and more memory than the NDS. Finally, the N64 uses MIPS processors.

After that, you will need to be an expert in the development of the peripherals of the targeted platform because if the current code need to be changed to use the specific functions, you will need to design the changes to do.

That does not mean you are not going to make the port, but being a beginner in programing, be sure you can dominate each part of the target platform as well as platform from it is coming. One thing more, if you finally success porting the code, remember that it could work slower than in the original platform, but it will not mean your code is bad, it also could mean that the targeted platform is not powerful at all for emulate a N64.

Greetings,