Taking the Seeds Out: Inside SeedlessDS and Its Quest for Better DS Emulation on Handhelds

The name SeedlessDS is wonderfully literal. SapphireRhodonite already has WatermelonDS, his longer-term Nintendo DS emulator built around melonDS, so when he began working on a smaller, lighter alternative, the joke more or less wrote itself. Take the watermelon, remove the seeds, and you have SeedlessDS!The joke stuck, but the reason for the emulator existing is considerably more practical. Android retro handhelds have become faster at an astonishing pace, but not every interesting device is built around a top-end Snapdragon chip, nor does it need to be. Some of the most charming machines are still relatively modest pieces of hardware, and Nintendo DS emulation presents its own particular collection of problems once you start adding two physical screens, touch input, scaling, frame pacing and controllers into the mix.That is where SapphireRhodonite (the sole developer behind SeedlessDS) saw room for something different. Rather than replace WatermelonDS, SeedlessDS would sit alongside…