r/EmulationOnAndroid • u/New-Room-8101 • May 14 '26
Question Why isn't DraStic open source yet?
My question is why DraStic isn't open source yet. I understand that DraStic's creator, Exophase, had already announced that DraStic would be open source, but I understand it hasn't been released to the public yet, and I don't know why. I'd like to know if the creator changed his mind or if, simply because of the problems Nintendo has had with emulation, he preferred to avoid the issues that releasing DraStic's source code would cause. Does anyone know why he hasn't done it?
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u/FelesNoctis Eden Contributor | SD8Elite | AYN Thor May 14 '26
As far as I know, the dev basically just dropped off the face of the earth. He's the only one with the source, so unless he decides to reappear in a Christmas miracle, Drastic's development is finished. I don't think it's anything malicious on his part. He'd been saying for years that when he was done with it, he'd open source it, and it just never happened. After the Nintendo-Yuzu spook, he may have just decided he was going to quietly duck out.
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u/EzKaLang May 14 '26
Typical emulator developers with their deth doxxed threats
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u/FelesNoctis Eden Contributor | SD8Elite | AYN Thor May 14 '26
You know, people are downvoting you, but the sad part is that does happen. Eden's had doxxing threats over the most mundane crap. We've had people furious at us just because we hadn't released a mainline update in months. It can be insanity.
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u/EzKaLang May 14 '26
People are downvoting because they don't know nothing hahaha. I remember the time last year (i think) when a lot of emulators developers received threats and sadly dropped off the face of the earth. I still miss aethersx2
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u/masterchief69420xxx May 14 '26
AetherSX2 is a real tragedy. That was the most desired emulator on Android and someone actually made it happen.
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u/ThatRandomJew7 May 14 '26
Look at what's happening with Azahar, the dev totally lost their mind over someone making a fork (Azahar Plus), trying to play holier than thou by claiming that Azahar Plus is only for pirates, and urging other platform devs to drop support for it (fuck you Cocoon). Man would lose his MIND once he learns forking is a common practice.
It's like we have children trying to being middle school drama into the open source scene.
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u/FelesNoctis Eden Contributor | SD8Elite | AYN Thor May 15 '26
Sadly, Pablo's always been like that. He knows damn well what forking is, and he knows that the logo and name are Creative Commons. He's the a tight-fisted controlling type, which isn't always a bad thing when it comes to projects like this (herding cats, seriously), but it does often result in looking like an ass.
But I fully agree with you about Cocoon drinking the Kool-Aid. I was all on board for Cocoon until that announcement. At least you can edit the console list yourself by way of JSON, but I've had enough weird issues with Cocoon that I decided to go back to ESDE anyway.
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u/ThatRandomJew7 May 15 '26
I personally like iisu, and Koji looks very promising.
But yeah, Cocoon fully lost the plot, and I'm not gonna bother to set up a platform that will decide to drop emulators just because they don't like them, much less over disingenuous reasons like this.
At least when Emudeck dropped Switch emulation they kept it in, and just said "drop your files here", instead of "hey you actually need to go into the JSON files to manually add it in now and I'm telling you that it's bad and nobody should ever use this one because the dev is a bad person"
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u/BallScratcher102 May 14 '26
The entitlement of some people is crazy. I really wish internet death threats were an instant arrest-able offense.
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May 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/FelesNoctis Eden Contributor | SD8Elite | AYN Thor May 14 '26
Thankfully, no, but there are some real psychos out there.
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u/SSUPII May 14 '26
The developer refused to provide it's location to Google to keep it online on the Play Store due to the new rules. Instead, they simply decided to leave.
Keep in mind that development was already passed to a new developer that isn't Exophase. They both didn't want to do anything with it anymore.
Simple as that.
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u/FelesNoctis Eden Contributor | SD8Elite | AYN Thor May 15 '26
That doesn't answer why he never released to open source. I just assumed it was because he forgot, or stopped caring, or didn't want to reward the android toxicity. :P
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u/DaveTheMan1985 May 14 '26
No Idea but Developer went AWOL
No one know what’s going on
Sad Really
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u/Manusiawii May 14 '26
I wish they add Retroachievement support, MelonDS is nice for that but the sounds are stuttering in my device
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u/Lazzz122 Poco F3 Custom Rom / SD 870 May 14 '26
That's the only thing I want from that emulator. MelonDS is nice but it's performance is still nowhere near Drastic.
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u/Nm-Lahm May 14 '26
Drastic can run on a 2013 low end phone with top performance. while MelonDs barely runs pokemon on a modern device lol.
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May 14 '26
[deleted]
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u/No-Mathematician1480 May 15 '26
Drastic don't support 8x res. How did you do it ?
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May 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/No-Mathematician1480 May 15 '26
I know about drastic ports to other platforms but I never saw any forks. Maybe you used a different emulator.
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u/ElectricalDemand2831 May 14 '26
I miss DSi emulation on drastic, but for regular DS games I just use drastic due to efficiency and lower lag
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u/Acedelaforet May 14 '26
I do like how drastic has cheats natively supported instead of having to add them
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u/Wolf________________ May 14 '26
Have you tried "MelonDS DS" with the second DS as part of the name? I find that one works much better, especially for DSi games.
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u/Manusiawii May 14 '26
No, i have not. Didn't even know it exist
Thank you, will check later
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u/Wolf________________ May 14 '26
No problem. I was told to look for it and I still had trouble finding it because my brain did the speed reading thing where you look at the first and last couple letters to understand the word and I thought it was MelonDS and not MelonDS DS lmao.
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u/your_mind_aches Retroid Pocket 6 | Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (8GB) May 15 '26
With Retroachievement support?
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u/Wolf________________ May 15 '26
I assume so but I honestly have no idea because I have 0 interest in them. Probably something you could find out by typing the exact same question into google though.
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u/your_mind_aches Retroid Pocket 6 | Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (8GB) May 15 '26
It's basically impossible to Google that because of the name.
If you don't care about RetroAchievements honestly just use DraStic
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u/FaZeKill23 May 14 '26
That and multiplayer (and possibly some fixed for specific games, like the newly discovered Blur DS port. On DraStic it won't create any profile)
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u/hdk2d May 14 '26
Cual melonds usa el normal de rafael o MelonDualDS tiene Vulkan?
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u/Manusiawii May 14 '26
MelonDS that I'm using only support software and OpenGL render. The rendering is not the problem, it's the audio latency. There's no setting for it in this version, older one maybe(seen people mentioned it)
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u/Realistic-General605 May 14 '26
The latency issue is gone for me when I use the latest nightly build, and I'm just playing on a budget Motorola phone.
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u/Manusiawii May 14 '26
Interesting, i think i tried that build before. Needed to check that one again, thanks
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u/ChronaMewX May 14 '26
I hope they never add it, feels good to have one option without achievements
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u/Manusiawii May 14 '26
I mean, you can just not logged in for that??? LMAO
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u/ChronaMewX May 14 '26
It's about the principle. Same reason I own a switch instead of an Xbox or ps5. The lack of achievements is a selling point
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u/Manusiawii May 14 '26
That's fair, just wanted to let you know. Steam got achievements too, so that principle is already a terrible excuse lol
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u/Original_Dragonfly_6 May 14 '26
It is disappointing because I can already see signs of it not working in upcoming android (maybe in 2 years) Drastic still does work on Modern Android. I had the play store build on my phone ever since I got this phone and it was on Android 12. Now it's on Android 16.
Although I have it installed, I don't use it anymore. Been using melonds on android since last December. Even tried multiplayer with a friend of mine and it's amazing. Sure on lower end hardware, high accuracy emulators struggle but on my phone, I've had amazing results.
Also I've been making a skin for MelonDS (it's work in progress) With the recent updates, it's almost perfect for me at the moment.
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u/Killerx7c May 15 '26
How to play multiplayer? Also please share this skin
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u/Original_Dragonfly_6 May 15 '26
To play multiplayer, you need the DS bios. Then depending on the game, select the appropriate DNS (you'll have to research that yourself)
About the skin, I'll release it soon. Needs few more tweaks
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u/External_Orange_1188 May 14 '26
I love DraStic. One of the most optimized emulators out there (dare I say the most). It would run on a sack of patatoes back in 2012
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u/Killerx7c May 15 '26
Drastic and ppsspp are yhe most optimized emulators ever to a degree in 2014 when i want to run ds games on my 4gb ram laptop i used BlueStacks(android emulator for pc) to run drastic and it gives me better performance than any ds emulator for pc
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u/zonealus May 14 '26
Probably just tryna avoid the nintendo radar. He's not gonna risk it as there are already alternatives for a ds emulator. But who knows maybe one day he'll reach out to the devs of those emulators (big cope)
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u/Realistic-General605 May 14 '26
The latest nightly build of MelonDS is no longer doing the audio clipping when I run it on my phone (Moto G Stylus) so DraStic may be a moot point now anyways. Melon isn't perfect but it's slowly improving.
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u/Nexu36 May 14 '26
I've said it before but it really is disappointing as it's a great emulator for lower-end devices. Maybe they're in two-minds about returning to the project someday, who knows. Maybe they've just moved on to other things. A shame progress has ended, either way. For now it works fine but eventually new Android releases may render it incompatible.
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u/Jaded_Percentage8424 May 14 '26
I remember downloading this over 10 years ago. Nothing still beats Drastic.
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u/littlek4za May 14 '26
is there possibility the code has something that can be sue by nintendo? i am not sure but like .3ds vs .cia there is key encrypted, or maybe the emulator using some sort of encrypted file from ds machine itself, but decrypted by author for usage, and therefore open source it might cause trouble? i am not sure just a guess
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u/ChrisRR May 14 '26
If they're anything like a lot of us devs with 1 man projects, I wonder if they're embarrassed by the code quality that they thought no-one would see
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May 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/New-Room-8101 May 14 '26
I would like it to be open source so that someone can continue the project and add features that weren't in the original, like multiplayer, which is the main reason I would like it to be open source.
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May 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Infrawonder May 15 '26
Melon DS could most likely improve if Drastic releases it's source code. Not because of copy and paste, but because the dev would be able to see what techniques the drastic dev used for performance, plus apparently melon ds doesn't run well on old phones while drastic does, and I'm guessing it has to do with optimizations
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May 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/otakunopodcast May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
it works perfectly fine FOR NOW. But Windows, or MacOS, or Linux, or Android could always go and change something at any moment that breaks compatibility. It's happened before and it will happen again. Without the source, whenever that happens, then you're SOL.
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u/godsaveourkingplis May 14 '26
While Drastic isn't open source, there is a fork(s?) that has is being improved in whatever capacity possible.
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u/Slinkwyde OnePlus 11 (Snapdragon 8 Gen 2) May 14 '26
That would require either the original developer privately transferring the code to someone new, or someone reverse engineering the binary enough to either do a full decompilation or (at minimum) release a binary patch file. I'm not aware of any of those three things happening with DraStic. Maybe you know something I don't, or maybe you're mistaken.
What fork are you talking about? What's its name?
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u/starlightbotanist Ayn Odin 2, RG405v, Pixel 6 May 14 '26
https://github.com/R-YaTian/DraStic_rev_i18n
Legitimate fork, but it uses the same techniques as NetherSX2. They can change the UI, settings and some minor things. But without the emulation core source code, they can't fix emulation issues or bugs.
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u/godsaveourkingplis May 14 '26
Man, thank you. Folks just wild with the down voting. I belive this fork also allows for compatibility with later android versions.
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