melonDS is a Nintendo DS and DSi emulator implemented in C++ with a Qt/SDL frontend. The core provides cycle-accurate emulation of the ARM9/ARM7 CPUs (with both an interpreter and JIT backends for x86_64 and AArch64), 2D/3D GPU (software and OpenGL), SPU, DMA, cartridge slot (retail, homebrew, R4), DSi-specific hardware (AES, NAND, camera, I2C, DSP), Wi-Fi with libslirp user-mode networking, and GDB remote debugging. The architecture separates platform-independent emulation logic from OS-specific frontend and audio/video output via a well-defined Platform abstraction. The codebase is large and includes vendored third-party libraries (libslirp, Teakra DSP, FatFs, tiny-AES-C, xxhash, blip-buf, toml11) and borrowed components from Dolphin and DuckStation projects. Reusable patterns include a consistent savestate serialization scheme, FIFO templates, efficient bitfield utilities, and a register cache for JIT compilation. Maintenance is active with regular commits and CI across Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD, though some areas (DSi emulation, netplay) have TODOs and commented-out code indicating ongoing development.