WASM4DS is a project that aims to run games made for the WASM-4 fantasy console on the NDS. It is based on the WASM-4 native runtime, the WASM3 interpreter and libnds.
- Framebuffer
- Gamepad
- Loading ROMs from a filesystem
- Audio
- Save states
- Netplay
- WASM4DS is technically able to run every game as it uses the standard WASM-4 runtime. However, CPU performance on the NDS is limited and more complex games will not run at 60Hz.
- Audio is not enabled at the moment due to the lack of an FPU. A future implementation would have to adapt the DSP code to use fixed point calculations.
- Game ROMs can be loaded from a FAT filesystem on the cartridge. Note that this will not work on most emulators.
You need to have devkitARM installed in order to compile WASM4DS. The compile.sh script will compile WASM3 and the WASM-4 runtime and build the .nds rom file. It also fetches the platformer test game and converts it to a C header file.
Alternatively, the devkitPro Docker image can be used to build the ROM:
docker pull devkitpro/devkitarm:latest
docker run -it -v $(pwd):/wasm4ds devkitpro/devkitarm bash -c 'apt update; apt install -y xxd; cd /wasm4ds; ./compile.sh'
A build is also available on the GitHub actions page.
On a real console, WASM4DS can load games from a FAT filesystem. The .wasm cartridges have to be placed in a /wasm directory at the root of the filesystem.
The filesystem is usually not available when using an emulator. In this case, WASM4DS has to be recompiled with a different ROM. The platformer test game is included by default. Edit the relevant line in compile.sh to change this.
WASM4DS uses the MIT license.