Nintendo DS Emulator Review and How To: the NO$GBA Emulator

The NO$GBA emulator is one of the most mature, and one of the most popular Nintendo DS emulators at the moment. It was originally created as an emulator for the Game Boy Advance (and still runs GBA games easily). Nintendo DS emulation was added later.

It is a breeze to install and setup.

The Official NO$GBA website shows that there hasn't been a significant update to the emulator since January 2008, but the NO$GBA discussion forums are very busy and have posts every day. The community is active so you should have no trouble finding answers to questions you may have once you begin dabbling with emulation.

NOTE: it is illegal to download ROM images.

Console emulators live and die by the amount of games that can run on them.

There is a huge catalogue of games for the DS with more coming all the time (not to mention the similarly huge catalogue of games for the GBA) and the NO$GBA can handle a significant number of them.

There is no compatibility list on the main website (not surprising since we've had no update since January 2008). The community however, does maintain a compatibility list on the NO$GBA ngemu forum. There are many more 'green' fully playable games on that list than 'yellow' and 'red' put together. This is a good sign.

Everything worked correctly as soon as I had the NO$GBA emulator on my hard drive. The configuration is easy.

You should have a Nintendo DS game prepared for when you first run the emulator, as it asks for the game image file immediately. You can also get some homebrew games to test the installation on if you haven't got any backed up ROM files from your games collection.

Press 'F11' when the NO$GBA emulator is running to access the configuration interface. You will see two tabs: one for emulation settings and one for configuring your control settings.

You should only need to change these if you have a particular game that doesn't work, or a game that needs a particular emulated setup to work correctly.

I used this interface to tweak my sound sample rate and output mode to try to fix some of the garbled sound issues I was having - and it seemed to help a bit. I also used it to change the save game type to ensure I could save my progress and in-game settings - but more on this later.