The Nintendo DS (NDS), released in 2004, stands as one of the most successful and innovative gaming platforms in history. With over 154 million units sold and a library spanning thousands of titles, it represents a significant cultural and technical artifact of the early mobile computing era. Yet, as physical cartridges degrade, original developers disband, and source code is lost to time, a critical question emerges: How do we preserve, study, and understand the software of this platform? The answer lies in the complex and often legally ambiguous field of decompilation.
To understand what a decompiler must achieve, one must first understand the NDS architecture. At its heart, the NDS is a asymmetric multiprocessing system containing two ARM architecture CPUs: nds decompiler
Decodes the 32-bit ARM and 16-bit Thumb instruction sets used by the system. The Nintendo DS (NDS), released in 2004, stands