Delta 1.3 betas 1 & 2

Happy December y'all, we've almost made it to the end of 2020!

Last week, I released the first beta of Delta 1.3, the next major update to Delta. Unfortunately...that beta crashed for most people (😅), so this week I released 1.3 beta 2 with several important fixes. What makes Delta 1.3 a major update though? One reason: this update will finally graduate DS emulation from a beta feature and make it available for everyone. Because of that, this update is mostly focused on polishing up DS emulation and making sure it really is ready for public launch.

So what exactly is new in these betas? Let's start with a big one: Delta now supports DSi emulation 🥳. melonDS  added support for DSi emulation with its recent 0.9 release, and Delta's own melonDS-based core now supports it as well. You'll need to obtain more DSi-specific firmware files from somewhere in order for it to work, but once you've done that you can boot into the DSi Home Screen just like you can with the regular DS Home Screen.

Another often requested feature, you can also now use your iOS device's microphone to emulate the DS microphone 🎤. Some games require you to use the microphone to continue, and previously this meant these games were effectively impossible to finish with Delta. That's no longer the case; you can now talk or blow into your real microphone and games will respond appropriately!

Then there are the less common, but still used, features. In particular, Delta now emulates closing & opening the DS lid when you sleep & wake your device 💤. Only a few games take advantage of this, but nonetheless now when you do come across one of them — such as Mario saying "Goodbye!" when you close the lid in New Super Mario Bros. — Delta has your back 👌

Last but certainly not least, Delta also now uses Just-In-Time compilation (JIT) when emulating DS games 🚀. This is thanks to Apple's changes in iOS 14.2+ which allow sideloaded apps to use JIT without workarounds, and allows for much better DS emulation performance. Unfortunately this is only supported on devices with an A12 chip or higher, but Delta will continue to emulate DS games without JIT on older devices just fine.

Besides new features, this beta also fixes some extremely annoying audio bugs 🎶, which resulted in garbled audio after playing some games for a few minutes. This pesky bug evaded my debugging attempts for far too long, so I'm beyond happy to say it is finally gone 🙏

There are of course some other non-DS changes as well — such as app-wide support for dark mode 🌚 — making this quite a big release! With your help testing, I hope to release Delta 1.3 to everyone in the next month or so, and then move on to Delta 2.0 for iPhone, iPad, and Mac 🎉