
Desmume vs melonds full#
: MelonDS is a more accurate emulator and fully open source, but it is much more demanding than DraStic - requiring a PC or recent high end smartphone to run all DS games full speed. Having an abandoned emulator in the Play Store removed while keeping gazillions of other Nintendo systems up there doesn't seem like the way to fight emulation.

Nintendo risks cementing the legality of emulation more by trying (and failing) to persecute emulators. In the US, there is only legal precedent that emulators are legal.
Desmume vs melonds android#
The biggest shame there is that the open source release would likely propel it to become the most versatile Nintendo DS emulator out there, but I'm afraid it's doomed to be a closed source, abandoned and outdated Android app.įinally, Nintendo has never gone after emulators. They cited technical milestones to achieve before open sourcing, which are difficult to make if you're burnt out on your software.

The remaining developer has been promising an open source release of DraStic's emulator code for a long time, but has never delivered. In contrast, other Nintendo DS emulators - most notably MelonDS and DesMuMe - barely achieve full speed on certain DS titles on modern smartphone hardware. DraStic is a very impressive piece of software from a previous age - achieving full speed Nintendo DS emulation on 2010 smartphone hardware. The entire situation around DraStic is a bit of a shame. It may not even be related to DraStic not using the right Android APIs - it may be as stupid as developer fees not being paid, or some more kafkaesque Google thing. What I think we're witnessing here is Google's extremely rough way of cleaning up (what it considers to be) abandonware. Although _some_ compatibility fixes with the Play Store have been released a few years ago, DraStic has not been updated to use e.g. As a result, nothing much has happened to this emulator for years.

The remaining developer is the emulation backend developer, but is by own admission no expert on Android, and the emulation's GUI and system integration. It had two major developers - one of whom dissappeared a long time ago, to the extent that the remaining developer has not been able to contact the former. The thing to know about DraStic is that it's not an actively maintained app. The more likely is that DraStic is abandonware, and this is Google's very Google-y way of cleaning this up. However, in the specific case of DraStic, that is not the most likely explanation. If you don't know much about DraStic, that would be a likely explanation. There's a lot of assumptions in the comments that Nintendo is behind this.
