low nds4droid

[zxcvbad]

I was looking for the answer myself - why it's so hard to emulate ds? Looks like the best explanation comes from user TnA on nds4droid forums:

"I think the emulator could be quite fast already, but actually there are atleast 2 main-problems remaining.
One problems is syncing the emulated hardware, so one thread must wait for another, until it is ready…
Another problem is, that NDS4Droid is PORTED.
Portable applications are not as efficiently using the hardware as native applications due to multiple reasons.

One of them is, that it doesn’t call the hardware directly thus going through a lot abstraction-layers (DirectX-HAL is an example for a “hardware-abstraction-layer”, but an AL is everywhere where a Programm calls a function instead of directly instructing the Hardware).

On an OperationSystem a call goes through atleast 5-6ALs.

The other is, that you can’t optimize a portable app to the hardware. Well you can, but not to the extend of a native app and also there is the fact that optimizations are possibly not “back-portable”, or the optimized ported app looses capability to sync source with the main fork (original app, where the optimized app is based on).

For example: An N64-Emulator is technically possible on a PS2(!), but a ported emulator would not be possible on that hardware.
Either just with a shit-load of optimisations, or with many drawbacks.
Now since the Homebrew-SDK for PS2 barely deserves (don’t get me wrong… You can do stuff with it, but even after 11-12years it is not that good…) the name and since there are only very few skilled devs available for PS2, you see why there is no N64-Emu for PS2, but a ported emulator for XBOX(1)."

Me personally waiting for Jeff will continue to work on Exophase jit, and mainly for Exophase will release he's drastic by the end of the year, that's what means to be native.