When will DS emulators work well?

When you get off your arse and code a better emulator

Having been using emulators for about a decade, my feeling is that there is a problem with consuls and handhelds becoming more and more complex with each generation, so it is harder for one or two people to write a good emulator on their own. And, the more different the consul processor architecture is from x86, the more computing power it will take to emulate it. If you look at some of the great emulators like SNES9X, they were done by very small teams or individuals. ANother example: the first PSX emulator came out in 1996 or 1997, a year or two after the PSX was released, and ran with pretty much every game. In contrast, teams of coders are still struggling to bring a PS2 emulator up to the same level of compatibility and the PS2 has been on the market for about 10 years. So in order for a modern consul to have a good emulator, there need to be a lot of people interested in making it work (although the DS is pretty popular).

Also, we run into issues on the Mac because not only do a bunch of people need to be interested in making it work, they also have to be interested in making it work on a Mac, which is a smaller platform than Windows. This has caused me to use Wine to run Windows-based emulators in OSX. If you have been looking only at DS emulators written for the Mac, you may have more success using Wine and a Windows-based emulator.