Avoid public NANDs. They are a legal gray area, often unreliable, and may be bundled with malware. Always dump your own.
You primarily need nand.bin if you want to use in melonDS. Without it, the emulator defaults to regular DS mode, which lacks: nand.bin melonds
To emulate the DSi accurately, melonDS cannot simply simulate the hardware; it needs the actual software that ran on that hardware. The nand.bin provides: Avoid public NANDs
When you play a standard DS game in melonDS with “DSi mode” disabled, the emulator only needs a basic firmware dump ( bios7.bin , bios9.bin , and firmware.bin ). But when you enable (required for DSi-exclusive games or enhanced features like the faster CPU), melonDS becomes a full DSi emulator. It expects to boot from a copy of the DSi’s NAND. That copy is nand.bin . You primarily need nand
Without a valid nand.bin , melonDS will fall back to (NDS firmware emulation), which is fine for standard DS games but lacks DSi features.