New Hardware, New DS, New Tutorial

I've got a new Nintendo DS Lite, since my nephew seems to have taken ownership of my old one. I also got an R4DS card so I can get back into writing stuff for the DS. Hopefully this will mean some new tutorials coming.

Tutorial One Updated

I've updated Tutorial One to work with the latest devkitPro. The example runs on the Dualis emulator as well as hardware. I'm working on updating the remaining tutorials.

GBA Movie Player for Homebrew

I recently got a Gameboy Advance Movie Player to use on the Nintendo DS for homebrew development.

Out of the box a GBAMP allows a compact flash card to be used to store movies, music and games to be run on the Gameboy Advance. With a third party firmware update it can also be used on the Nintendo DS to run homebrew games.

A big reason for me getting the GBAMP was that some recent homebrew titles require devices like it so they can read and write files to the compact flash card. With a standard GBA flash cartridge you don't get much storage capacity. With a GBAMP you are only limited by the size of the CF card. DSLinux for example can use the card for storage and run other linux programs from it.

Note that you still need a means of allow the Nintendo DS homebrew on the CF card to run on the DS. Either a passme, flashme or wifime. I recently used 'flashme' to update the firmware of my Nintendo DS so I no longer need a passme or wifime.

Updating the GBAMP firmware was easy. I downloaded the 2.11 version from chism's site and copied the ndsmp.gba file onto the CF card. I Put the CF card in the GBAMP and used the 'Game' menu option from the GBAMP. Following the on screen instructions I flashed the new firmware. It took only a few seconds.

Once that's done you can then copy any homebrew Nintendo DS program (the .NDS file) onto the CF card and call it _BOOT_MP.NDS. With the CF card in the GBAMP and that in the DS, turning the DS on will immediately run the homebrew program.

If you want to not run it, or use the standard GBAMP programs, hold 'select' down while turning on the DS. You can then then choose the 'Start GBA Game' option in the Nintendo DS firmware and use the GBAMP as normal.

The GBAMP is slightly different to a GBA flash cartridge so won't run all homebrew. It doesn't have SRAM for example so can't run any homebrew that reads or writes to SRAM. But supported homebrew can read and write to the CF card which makes up for it.

Categories: nintendods, gbamp

DSemu-ng

Imran has announced that he is stopping work on DSemu-ng. This was Imran's efforts to rewrite DSEmu from the ground up using a new plug-in architecture and making it cross platform.

I'll be continuing to work on DSEmu and will look at integrating some of the work Imran has done into the codebase. Hopefully this will help towards getting DSEmu cross platform and easier to maintain and extend.

Categories: nintendods, dsemu

Opera Web Browser for the Nintendo DS

Wow, Opera are going to release their web browser for the Nintendo DS.

"Opera exceeded our expectations with its user friendly interface, quick access to all your favorite sites, ease of use and, most importantly, in making the best use of the Nintendo DS system's unique double screens and touch screen features. Opera is an important partner for Nintendo in our efforts to further expand the users of the Nintendo DS."

Link originally from 4 color rebellion and Russell Beattie.

What would be neat is if they could do something like their Opera Mobile platform and provide javascript functions and objects for accessing Nintendo DS hardware. This would then allow mini-games and applications to be written in Javascript and HTML that use Nintendo DS features and store data on the network.

Categories: nintendods

Dragon's Lair on DSEmu 0.4.10

DSLair, a Nintendo DS port of Dragon's Lair, runs on DSEmu 0.4.10, but at about 20 frames per second (60fps is normal).

The other Caimans video code samples also work, again slowly.

Does anyone know of a good up to date resource of Nintendo DS homebrew applications? Something easy to download from and get information as to whether special hardware is needed (supercard, etc)?

Categories: nintendods, emulator, dsemu

DSEmu 0.4.10 is out!

I've done a new build of DSEmu, the open source Nintendo DS and Gameboy Advance emulator. This version, 0.4.10, has sprite support which increases the number of homebrew demos it can run quite a bit.

I added three new working homebrew as starting examples which demonstrate this. The first is the devkit pro example displaying three rotating sprites. The other two are playable games. The latter are older versions of the games I use for testing.

Also new is support for some 8 bit graphics modes. The console text in DSLinux now displays correctly with this fix. So do a few other homebrews.

A few bug fixes to correct crashes and one ugly workaround for a ARM/Thumb emulation bug that appears when emulating some devkitpro r17 compilde programs. This workaround will hopefully corrected in a future release. The actual bug is the main reason why a number of demo's 'black screen' or crash. If the demo's are recompiled without thumb then they sometimes work.

I fixed things out of order from what I mentioned in my last post mainly because I was already in the graphics mindset I was able to get sprite support up relatively quickly.

I haven't implemented everything the DS can do with sprites or graphics yet but it's slowly getting there.

Categories: nintendods, emulator, dsemu

DSEmu bug fixes

I've pushed some patches through to the DSEmu Nintendo DS emulator source code repository to fix some graphics bugs reported here.

The patches fix the following problems:

• 256 colour mode 5 now works. Previously the bitmaps displayed incorrectly.
• 16 bit mode 5 now works. This was broken in 0.4.9.
• A crash when scrolling beyond the bounds of a bitmap in mode 5 has been corrected.

Unfortunately I had to roll back the thumb emulation fix from 0.4.9 as it caused problems with mode5 rendering in some demos. This has the effect of making some other demos crash that use thumb at various points. I'll have this fixed before the release of 0.4.10 in about a week.

I've also started working on getting the other graphics modes and sprites working. Although that is likely to be 0.4.11.

Categories: nintendods, emulator, dsemu