I looked up Game Boy emulation and figured I'd use that as a foothold. However, being a programmer and an avid gamer, I felt I had the qualifications, so why not try at least?Įventually, what was once an idle thought in the back of my mind took greater shape. Why don't you improve it yourself or make something else?" In reality, most end-users don't have the time, energy, or necessary skills to invest in such a project. I'm going to make my own DS emulator, somehow, one day." In the emulation community, when someone complains about a particular emulator, sometimes the snide response is "Well, it's open-source. It was then that I decided "You know what, whatever. I tried ( somewhat successfully) to hack hi-res support myself, and I fiddled around with hacks to add scaling filters on the Linux version, but it wasn't quite enough for me. The only choice I had was some blurry mess called bilinear filtering, or blocky nearest-neighbor scaling.įor 2D games, I could deal with it, but 3D games looked terrible to me. In those days, rendering 3D DS games at high resolutions was not a thing, and the Linux versions of Desmume didn't have any decent scaling filters like HQx (and certainly not xBR, since that hadn't been developed yet). I found Desmume an acceptable experience, but there was something missing, namely graphical fidelity. Back then, my interest in playing emulators picked up again, and I really wanted to play some of my DS games on a bigger screen. In fact, programming my own emulator never seriously crossed my mind until around 2010 when I was finishing up college. However, until a few years ago, I had always been an end-user of emulation, a "player" rather than a programmer. In my mind, there was no doubt that it would always be a big part of my gaming lifestyle. I absolutely loved playing my favorite games on my computer. I've been into emulation for a long time now, ever since my friends introduced me to it around 2001.