A new project showing a way to play Nintendo DS games in augmented reality has got a lot of people online excited.
DSReality is a new proof-of-concept from the developer Zhouwei Zhang, which aims to rip sprites in realtime from titles emulated through MelonDS (using MelonRipper & @rileytestut MelonDS iOS core), before rebuilding them as holographic 3D models that you can view with RealityKit for iOS.
Zhang recently showed a demo of this in action on Twitter, testing it with a few games including Pokémon Black, Pokémon HeartGold, and Mario Kart DS, and the clip has been getting a lot of buzz online with people sharing their excitement about how the project might progress in the future.
As Zhang states on the GitHub page, this is currently only a prototype version of the AR solution, which explains why there are still some kinks that you can clearly see in the video. The converter, for instance, that translates assets from MelonRipper to RealityKit doesn't handle transparency very well at the moment and it has only been tested extensively with the camera position used in Mario Kart DS, meaning Zhang had to remove the shader that crops the model in either Pokémon game.
There's also currently a known memory leak, which causes the setup to crash, and no way either to select a ROM or provide any touchscreen input.
Nevertheless, it's still early days, and we're interested to see where this project goes!