Planet Dev-Scene

Here’s a little something that may be of interest to DS owners.

Yesterday I got an email from buy.com to say that the google checkout promotion is finishing at the end of the month so I had a quick look to see what it was about. Turns out that google checkout are giving new users $10 to spend on whatever they like and there happen to be some good deals on buy.con for, yes, you guessed it, $10. Here’s a link to a 2gig micro SD card you can basically get for free if you haven’t used google checkout before. By way of a little bonus, devkitPro will get a small commission if you happen to buy through this link so, if you don’t have any spare change in paypal to make a donation then you can still help out by grabbing a great deal before it ends forever at the end of the month.

Crucial 2GB MicroSD Card w/ SD Adapter - Micro SD

Some spurious version numbers from CVS testing and DOS line endings crept into the last release of the buildscripts. This has now been corrected and a fresh set of scripts uploaded.

buildscripts 20080624

I am pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to get started with coding for the Wii! As a first little project, I ported the Box2D physics engine and made a little demo app called Box2DBalls (source included).

I think the Wiimote and Box2D play together very well. There are a lot of possibilities for fun 2D physics games, so go make some! :)

Box2DBalls comes with source code. Check the Readme for instructions on compiling Box2D for Wii. It’s dead simple!

No SNEmul is not dead, it’s simply sleeping. I Hope I will have more time later to fix bugs and add improvements to the emulator, but it’s not really possible for the moment.

Due to a change in the MySql from my provider, Wordexpress was not working correctly since some months. I was hoping that the bug will get fix itself but it seems I needed to upgrade Wordexpres. Anyway it seems ok now…

The blog may be down for some time due to maintenance.

edit: should be finished now

ole has taken my KVM port to Nintendo DS and added some updates. I haven’t played with it much, but he lists the changes as follows.

R3: New features added by Ole:

• fixed the CLDC implementation (timer, memory size, system properties)
• added support for reading of the PNG images (code taken from the PhoneMe project)
• implemented native functions for rendering the basic graphics primitives on the screen
  (lines, rectangles, triangles, images)
• added support for accepting the JAD files in the application browser
• added the core part of the Pstros MIDP library
• added VideoTest example to show how to draw on the screen
• added ‘_rebuild.bat’ to show how to build and preverify the class files.
  Note WTK installation is required.

This is quite interesting if it is able to run some MIDP-compliant games, but we’ll need to do some testing to see how the speed compares to your average mobile phone. Here’s the download link: java4nds_r3.zip (335K)

June 3rd marks the day that WinterMute was born.  If you’re feeling generous, appreciate the toolchain work and would like to help the birthday beer fund then please feel free to visit the donations page.

The latest release of libogc brings vastly improved Wii support.

• Shagkur’s lwbt port and reworking of Para’s wiiuse library bring us wiimote support.
• The old sd card library has now been removed in favour of libfat.
• Extended and improved API for accessing the nand filesystem.
• Internal console now understands VT escape sequences.
• argv support for passing arguments to applications.
• Improved Video detection scheme for setting mode.

libogc 20080602

The gamecube and wii examples have been updated and improved including ports of the first 5 NeHe examples to GX.

wii examples 20080602

gamecube examples 20080602

libfat now supports SD cards on Wii and gamecube. Please note that this release is not currently suitable for GBA/NDS.

libfat 20080530

The latest edition of the gamecube/wii toolchain now uses newlib 1.16.0 with updated patches to allow libfat to be ported. As usual, windows users should grab this update through the automated updater.

devkitPPC release 15

I continue to fail to post weekly; all the fun stuff I would want to say, I don’t think I should talk about, though.

Anyway, the Opti compo is still going along, but it’s getting close to the end - right now there are 11 days before the compo ends. I’m adding this informational post to remind people and also to alert people to a new revision of the test system, better rules for whether an entry will be accepted or not, and various other things. I’ll reiterate  the important parts on the competition page.

Firstly, the test system update: this update will probably be the final update of the test system code for this competition. Unfortunately I didn’t get all the stuff I wanted in it, I’ve been short on time and have had more than enough stress to go around :) So, this update does not contain the statistical time-sampling profiler that I wanted to add to the test app. It also doesn’t include a fractal explorer section which I had wanted to add. But on to the features that I did get around to adding: There is now a new default test set of 6 tests, they zoom in quickly on a specific point in the fractal, and are pretty complex areas to render (the number for max_iterations on the 6th image is 1400, and the horizontal and vertical steps are in units of 2^-44). I’ve included a modified example that is designed to serve as a lower bound for correctness - passing implementations should have a smaller amount of error than the lower bound. I don’t think this will be too hard, the lower bound currently exists as a modification to the multiply code that loses 3.5 bits of precision with each multiply. This actually caused less difference from the reference implementation than I had thought; currently across the 6 tests, there is a total difference of 7044 iteration counts, notably the 6 tests render a total of 147456 pixels, so this value is really barely even noticeable.

There was also a bug in the test app that caused it to only display the last test’s cycle count rather than the sum of all of them, this has also been fixed, and (in no$) the cycle count for the “lower bound” test is 0×0004CC483E1E cycles - which is 307 seconds of cputime, about 5 minutes. As the default test behavior also runs the example code alongside it, this means a test run of the lower bound takes about 10 minutes; not very good for repeated testing. I’ve added a way to start the tests without checking them, by pressing start instead of A, so the code execution time you have to sit through is purely your own fault ;) It will be pretty obvious if there are big errors, but it will still take a long time to check results against the reference function.

Ok, that’s all I have for now; I’ve been working on my own implementation just lately in assembly, but I really have no idea how well it will perform just yet. I’ll post some numbers in the comments on the Opti site once I get them.

It’s that time of year again when Sourceforge open up nominations for the community choice awards so you have a chance to show your appreciation for the devkitPro toolchains. Only registered SourceForge.net users can nominate projects and we’re not eligible for Best New Project since we’re more than a year old. Last year we made the finals for Best Tool or Utility for Developers but were beaten to the punch by the very deserving TortoiseSVN. This year sees some new categories where we might stand a better chance - I’m rather entertained by Most Likely to Get Users Sued which Sourceforge describes as “These are dark and dangerous times for hackers and users alike! The winner of this award is a project that provides freedom to those who use it - more freedom, in fact, than “the man” approves of.” Users can nominate the project for any number of categories so get clicking and show your appreciation.

This is just a minor maintenance update to fix some linking problems.

• fix rename hook for newlib file IO layer
• fix dependency filenames for special files

As usual, the binary is available through the updater for windows users. For other platforms several binaries are provided on the devkitARM release 23b SF package. The latest buildscripts are the 20080516 package.

Just a tiny update to my homebrew mandelbrot browser for Nintendo DS. This version merely adds DLDI-support, meaning you should be able to save screenshots as .PNG from pretty much any flashcart. Check the previous post for screenshots, more info, etc. To the right is an actual image saved from the program.

Download r06 .nds

• updated gdb to 6.8
• updated newlib to 1.16.0
• use static libexpat for gdb, enabling target descriptions.
• use static libgmp and libmpfr for gcc, avoiding the need for users to find their own.

There is now a linux x86_64 binary available thanks to DesktopMan for the loan of a machine to build this. Please report on the success of this binary in the forums.

Several users have been adding support requests and other toolchain related questions to the comments. Please direct these to the forums where more help will be forthcoming.

The Insight builds available for windows have now been rebuilt with a static libexpat to allow use of target descriptions.

Insight 6.8.50 20080425 release

There were a few warnings thrown up by the update to gcc 4.3.0 and the arm9 template makefile has been causing issues so a new libnds examples tarball has been made available.

nds examples 20080427

The next libnds release is still a work in progress, more news as it’s available.

Sh4wn is running return1.net/site/pp, which is a great place for sharing your Pocket Physics productions and for browsing though what others made. Recently, the interactive flash player by emeric was included in the site so you can now play back the sketches online and even interact with them! Accuracy is not 100% but I’m quite impressed how close it is.

Even if you don’t have Pocket Physics, do check out the site. Thanks a lot to Sh4wn and emeric for their efforts!

Long time no update, but i’m still here and with a new project which i very much intend to finish, a GBA/ARM emulator, at the moment i’m just emulating the arm7 cpu but hopefully once i’ve finished that i can start slowly emulating the GBA hardware. As of this writting i’ve only got one opcode emulated and my disassembler can handle 3 opcodes. Its progressing fairly well considering I’m new to C# (which the emulator is written in) and its a major undertaking anyway you look at it. It will also be open source (it already is it you know where to look) , I haven’t thought up a name yet so if you have any suggests they are most welcome.

For easier integration with NitroTracker, libntxm now includes editing functionality under the hood. There aren’t any changes for the end-user, except for maybe one or two new supported effects, so if you use libntxm 0.1 there is little reason to upgrade, but:

libntxm is now used as part of NitroTracker instead of being just a stripped down version of the NitroTracker arm7 code. Also, libntxm is now hosted on Google Code and has an SVN repository there. So, you can now easily add new features to libntxm, and I can integrate them into NitroTracker just via a simple “svn up”.

libntxm project page on Google Code

Currently, I’m searching for someone who wants to implement support for loading / saving new file formats like .it, .s3m, etc. Also, .wav saving and .xi loading / saving would be useful. If you want to help out, please contact me!

Since I’m not going to do any further development on this (for various reasons), I have decided to release libellen - a sprite handling library for the Nintendo DS, based on libnds.

The library is released under the terms of the WTFPL.

The source and "example" are super documented, and evena  Doxyfile is attached if you want to create documentations.
The library was tested and compiled using devkitARM r21 with god-knows-what libnds version. If you find incompatibilities, I’ll be happy if YOU would fix them.

Have fun and happy coding!

For those who are intrigued by the name - lib-ell-en (L - N, my name’s initials) could also be read as libellen - dutch for "Dragonfly" which is what the logo is based on. For those who wonder, the logo is also released under the terms of the WTFPL.

Some history:
libellen was first made as the low-level library for ToD2, but was quickly got good enough to be expended. My second goal was also to get people to stop using PAlib, an old, slow and deprecated library which people insisted on using. The library was not complete, but the sprite handling was. after more then 6 months of inactivity, I have decided to release the library to just handle sprites.

Source could be downloaded from HERE.

Ok, Finally - after a lot more effort than I thought it would take - the akkit.org optimization contest (for DS) is up and running, with it’s first competition!

Although the competition technically started a day and a half ago, I haven’t posted it yet because I didn’t have the test package ready, but is ready and posted now.

So, it is with great anticipation that I submit it to you, for review: Opti’s First Competition

Anticipation like, waiting for a pie to hit me in the face, or be run over by a car, or something similar ;) I do however want to see what level of interest there is, and try to make this into something that more people will be more seriously interested in next time (I am highly curious about how many people will be interested this first time) - So, to that end I am very interested in any sort of feedback. Anyway - That’s all I want to say for now, I’ll shut up before I ramble on about it for a very long time; Thanks for looking :)

Marcan’s latest Wii hack allows you to run homebrew from a channel without running Zelda every time.

Wii Homebrew Channel - For more amazing video clips, click here

No word on when this will see a public release.

After a lot of optimization and bugfixing work, I’m releasing

Pocket Physics 0.6!

In this version I focused on speed and stability, and I think it shows. If you compare the speed to the old version, you think up to now everything was in slow motion! There are no more spontaneous explosions and no other randomness. If you restart the simulation, it will behave exactly like it did before. Also, it has become much more stable. In fact I cannot get it to crash any more! If you can, please tell me how!

Check it out! Although I didn’t add any new major features, I think this is a huge improvement!

And if you haven’t already, check out these sites for some great examples of what people are doing with Pocket Physics like the ones above:
http://pp.mnfu.com/
http://www.return1.net/site/pp

I’m happy to announce that fixed point math and the DS target are now officially supported in Box2D! So if you were using the fixed point patches before, you can now just check out the latest SVN version of Box2D. Check this thread for further updates! Huge thanks to Kavaler for his help with the fixed point port!

More info at gc-linux.org.

Sometimes when I added a new feature to Pocket Physics, I thought “This is actually quite fun!” In this version, I added the moving tool, and I must say: This is seriously an awful lot of fun! You can now directly interact with your sketches by grabbing and throwing objects with the stylus! Also, editing has become a lot easier because you don’t have to delete and re-draw objects to reposition them. Try it out, it’s really cool!

Get it from the project homepage!

Again, a big thank you to Erin Catto for making the amazing Box2D library!

A note on stability:
Pocket Physics uses a modified version of Box2D that uses fixed point math instead of floating point. Due to this conversion, a lot of unexpected things (spontaneous explosions, freezes, etc) can occur. I’m working on improving stability of Box2D, but it takes time to track down and fix these bugs, so please bear with me.

This might become interesting.

Big thanks to bushing, segher, tmbinc, wintermute and everyone else working hard to make Wii homebrew possible!

Version 0.4 is out and adds saving and loading! Never lose your work again, and share your creations with others!

Get it from the project homepage!

I want to highlight a really fun music application called MIDI Jammer by Andrew Buch, which uses DSMI for sending MIDI events. The touch screen is divided into horizontal/vertical bars which are mapped to notes of a scale that can be configured by the user. You can jam around just by sliding the stylus over the bars. The fun thing is that it’s pressure sensitive, so the volume depends on the pressure you apply. In another mode the program can also be used as a Kaoss Pad (which is more flexible than KaossDS). Andrew is planning on a standalone mode that uses the PSG for live chip-style jamming!

Here’s a new version with a larger drawing area, dual screen support, updated physics and more!

The top screen displays an overview and the bottom screen shows a zoomed in view.

Here’s a contraption in which a car hits some dominoes, the last domino falls on a seesaw and makes a ball fall into a shopping cart.

Get it at the project homepage!

For those of you wondering what is the latest
system software that can be run on Mini vMac:

You can run up to System 7.5.5, but don’t.

It’s very slow at 1X speed on the PC version, the DS
port which runs at 1/2 to 1/4 speed is just unbearable.

Not to mention that if you use the 2.5MB build you will only
have 1MB of free memory once the OS has finished loading.

So basically, stick with 6.0.8.

If you are on a real Mac this is easy but unfortunately for PC
users this can be quite difficult.

This mini tutorial will show you how to download Macintosh
files on a PC and extract them under Mini vMac.

Before you begin you must have:

1) PC Version of Mini vMac
2) HFV Explorer
2) Bootable system disk
3) Stuffit Expander installed on your system disk

Here we go:

Step 1) Download your application
Step 2) Open your disk image in HFV Explorer
Step 3)
Drag your application onto your mac hard disk.
When the “Select copy mode” dialog comes up select
“Raw copy, data fork” from the drop-down list and press ok.

Step 4) Run Mini vMac and boot with your system disk.
Step 5) Run Stuffit Expander, select your archive and extract it.

There is a lot of confusion on how to do this as it is fairly difficult to do
unless you have been playing around with Macintosh emulation for a while.

It also doesn’t help that some of the utilities used are becoming more and more rare.

This mini tutorial assumes that you have a bootable hard disk image already prepared and have the PC version of Mini vMac ready to go.

1) Get HFV Explorer (Click Mac EMU Tools link)
2) Get and extract binUnpk
3) Get stuffit_expander_40.bin

4) Run HFV Explorer and open up your hard disk image.
Next, browse to where you downloaded stuffit_expander_40.bin.

Drag stuffit_expander_40.bin onto your disk. (on the left)
A window will appear titled “Select copy mode”.

From the drop-down list select “Raw copy, data fork” and press OK.
Exit HFV Explorer.

5) Run the PC version of Mini vMac and start up using your bootable
hard disk image.

Now, drag binunpk-1.0.1.dsk into the Mini vMac window.
Run the binunpk application and select File->Open from the menu.

Click the “Drive” button until your hard drive shows up above the
“Eject” button.

Double-click stuffit_expander_40.bin and extract it anywhere on
your system drive.
Exit binunpk.

You will notice a new application called “Stuffit Expander 401 Installer”,
double click the installer application and follow it’s instructions.

6) Installation complete!
Delete the installation files and shut down Mini vMac.

Here it is, the DLDI compatible version of Mini vMac for the DS:
Mini vMac DS-R3.zip

Source code available on request.

This should work with most homebrew devices, I cannot guarantee
all of them since a few have broken DLDI drivers.

You can test your driver by following the instructions here:
http://dldi.drunkencoders.com/index.php?title=Testing_instructions

Thanks to everyone who helped me out with this, it’s been such
a long time though I don’t remember everyone.

If you did help out in some way please comment or email me
so I can update the post/zip with a list of credits.

About documentation:
If you sent in documentation but it’s not in the zip there
is a good chance I lost it.

Please re-send it so I can update the zip file.

Thanks to: (List incomplete)
Tripsk8er333 (Mac6onDS)

PSP Linux has been released.
There are no screenshots, but the kernel patch looks genuine.

I don’t know what I’d do with this, but I want one.

Tux Droid ONLY works on systems running Linux, NOT Windows PCs or Macintoshes.

Seems like Nintendo is developing an open source (?) operating system for Intel based PCs called ES (Which resolves to Nintendo ES - or NES).

The project is hosted on the Japanese Source forge and bottom of the page says "Copyright © 2006, 2007 Nintendo Co,. Ltd.", although the license are fully free to change/distribute…

“We propose an extensible component operating system architecture in which an operating system kernel uses reflection to process C++ pure virtual function based system calls and upcalls to provide a unified programming environment for application, server, and kernel development. We found that we could even develop file subsystems and a TCP/IP protocol stack on an existing operating system based on this architecture.”

ES seem to use Squeak and SmallTalk as environment. The page and documentations (PDF) are in Japanese, which I cannot read.

I hope this will be more then just "Research" operating system and Nintendo might give opportunity to homebrew developers like Sony is
(kinda) doing with the "Install OS" on the PS3.

The ES Operating system (Google Translated version)

Edit: The page is now hosted on GoogleCode, and there isn’t any mention of Nintendo…
For those who are interested, the new page is http://code.google.com/p/es-operating-system/

Ok, so the optimization contest thing didn’t make it this last weekend :( sorry about that, I’m overly optimistic and didn’t have time to work on it enough to get it ready.

Now, I’ll take a few moments to relate some of the things that are going on in my life at the moment; as you might have noticed my online presence has been rather very thin, and my projects have been crawling along, if that - and this isn’t just for the projects that are public, even the private ones are not moving much… The culprit I’ve decided is stress, it’s the only logical cause I can come up with.

To that end, I’ve decided to quit my current job - I’ll be working for the next 2 weeks and then I’ve arranged to quit. At that point I’ll probably get some rest for a week or 2, I’m planning to visit some relatives and then I’ll devote some time to getting my currently idling projects done.

I hope I can get the optimisation contest site running in the next week or 2. January though will bring work on the nds_test_apps, probably dstunnel (due to popular demand), and some other things I haven’t figured out the order of yet. So, onwards! We will see what the future brings.

Someone was having trouble compiling it, so I threw this together real quick.
See FreeType’s official site for more info on it, but basically it’s a library for rendering nice ttf fonts, and it’s been compiled so that it can run on Nintendo DS. It wont do anything on its own, this is really only useful for homebrew developers who want to include some sort of nice font rendering.

freetype-2.3.5-nds-dka-r21.zip (1.2MB)

It’s been compiled with devKitARM r21, no guarantees it will work with any later/earlier version. In fact, no guarantees it will work at all, I haven’t actually tested it…but it compiles without any errors. I had to disable two checks in in the configure script, because it kept getting confused when I told it to compile for arm-eabi.

If anyone uses this, would be nice to know, drop me a line in the comment section.

I’ve uploaded a new batch of DS demos that are free to download. I’ve put them on a new page, separate from the old one, so it’s easy to see the new ones. There are a bunch of fun looking ones, be sure to check them out!

New Demos Page
Previous Demo Collection

My host has been having problems with its servers recently so my site has been down for the last couple of weeks but because its now back online i’m going to release a public alpha of my build of desmume.

The change log is as follows:

general:
-Fixed possible segfault in ROMReader on ia64 and amd64. [evilynux]
-Fixed a crash bug with 2D background corrupting memory [shash]
-Flag check optimization [carlo_bramini]

windows port:
-DirectInput control interface with joystick support [CrazyMax aka mtabachenko]
-Matrix and Light viewer [Acid Burn]
-Cheat finder and basic cheat support [Normmatt]
-Menu reorganization [Normmatt]
-More Languages supported [Normmatt]
-Added OAM layer toggle [Normmatt]
-Misc bug fixes in the windows port [Normmatt]

Download (NOTE: this is an alpha and there will be bugs)
Source code

Cheat support is very basic it only supports single line cheats and only those which are ether 8bit/16bit/32bit writes but it can be helpful in some case.

An example of an acceptable cheat is:
description = 999 Coins
code = 021336FC:0000270F
both sides of the code must be 32bit or else it wont work and might crash the program

Hello everyone, a tiny and “unofficial” update for slot 2 device users. The 0.6 alpha didn’t work well, so i tried to fix most issues in this release.

Other people can check this release too, it reduces the battery consumption and includes a button to hide the GUI.

http://snemul.com/ds/SNEmulDS06-WIP2.zip

Off-topic :

I want to wish luck for a new project made by friends : a new way of paying for creators, PEPITA !

A digital store where you can sell your music, artworks, pictures and software. You can even include creations of others!

Take a look here :

http://www.pepitastore.com/

I included my store here, and you can donate for SNEmulDS this way instead of paypal

I threw this in today, should be toggled with a tap of the touch screen.
It will only show areas you have been and only enemies that you can see.

Sorry to do this yet again but a few more things need to be done in the registered builds first.

I’m releasing this test build of the Spear of Destiny demo mainly test MP3 playback and find some hidden bugs that may be lurking around somewhere.

Known issues:
1) Scaled screens flicker every second or so
2) Saving/loading large files will cause MP3 playback to break up
3) Demos do not play properly
4) Keys are not yet configurable

Don’t worry about #2, if you save and the mp3 playback starts to break up just go back into your game and it should restart normally.

Keys:

Turn left: DPAD Left
Turn right: DPAD Right
Forward: DPAD Up
Backward: DPAD Down
Strafe Left: L Shoulder
Strafe Right: R Shoulder
Shoot: A
Use: B
Next Weapon: X
Run: Y

Installation:
Copy the wolf3d folder into the root of your media card, run.

Unfortunately there will be no source release until everything is ready.
However, the ARM7 MP3 player source is available. I’m not 100% happy with how I did things but it seems to work fine.

NOTICE:
This game WILL FAIL if your DS homebrew device does not support unaligned reads!

EDIT:
By unaligned reads I mean a broken DLDI driver, to test your driver check out this site: http://dldi.drunkencoders.com/index.php?title=Testing_instructions

Game files:
http://rapidshare.com/files/67764655/speardemo-mp3testrelease.zip.html

ARM7 Binary source:
http://rapidshare.com/files/67935995/7mp3play-src.tar.bz2.html

Please report any bugs to: the_lazy_one_09[__at__]hotmail.com

So, things have been getting pretty stagnant lately - I’d really prefer to have more visible progress, I really would - reality is not always kind to me. Either way however, I will try to pick up the pace a bit and get more done on my more public projects… I reiterate that if you would like to help on any of these projects, feel free to contact me.

The project du jour is, however, the NDS test apps project. It is a prerequisite for some other fun things I’d like to do, and it’s also very useful to the community (if I do say so myself) - I’ve set up a new IRC channel for it - on irc.blitzed.org channel #nds_test_apps - feel free to join if you’re interested, have suggestions, want to code for the project, etc. I’m still not entirely sure where these projects are really going to go, but I’d like to get a few of them done if possible, and I really don’t mind the help from interested parties!

The preview-alpha version of SNEmulDS 0.6 is now available for all the brave testers around the world!

The GUI artworks are not ready, so you have a “naked” and not very pretty GUI, but at least, you have the multi languages support!

You can check if your language is correct.
You can choose one of the language in the firmware or some language by editing the snemul.cfg :
# Language of GUI
# -1 -> Use firmware settings
Firmware languages:
# 0 -> Japanese (Katakana only)
# 1 -> English
# 2 -> French
# 3 -> German
# 4 -> Italian
# 5 -> Spanish
Non firmware languages:
# 106 -> Portuguese
# 107 -> Catalan
# 108 -> Polish
# 109 -> Dutch
# 110 -> Danish

Various External RAM packages can be used to improve large rom emulation, see snemul.cfg for more informations.

Scaling support has three modes :
- Full screen : nearly like snezzids
- Half scaling : “smart” scaling, only reduce half the backgrounds, and doesn’t squish sprites. It looks quite fine in games.
- No scaling : no scaling at all, classic SNEmulDS mode, still default

Here is the complete list of changes compated to 0.5 beta:

- New GUI using framebuffer for sub screen
- Better human interface, improved file selector (alphabetical sorted), buttons, check boxes, multi choose zones, etc.
- New GUI supports joypad (joypad is not supported when emulator is running however).
- Multi language support (more than 10 supported, including katakan japanese !)
- Memory pak support (Opera RAM, Slot 2 card reader, etc. using libram) with paging or with large ROM mapping
- Scaling with pseudo bi-linear filtering and sprites squishing : full screen scaling (like snezzids), half scaling (half scaled and without sprites squishing), and no scaling (classic snemulds mode)
- Autiomatic SRAM saving when needed
- Some other bugfixes and improvements in GUI

http://snemul.com/ds/SNEmulDSv06.zip

I can now 100% confirm that the next release will support the original music in MP3 format!

The tools to extract and convert the music will be released very shortly, there is one bug on PowerPC platforms that is causing the delay though.

There are a few more glitches for me to work out but soon I will release a test mp3 player and one track from the shareware wolf3d for people to test out.

I just want to make sure there will be no problems with playback on most devices.

Keep in mind that there is a lot more work to do on the port itself since a lot of changes were lost in the weird project folder disappearance incident.
Once I can verify that MP3 will work for everyone you can be assured that work on this port will go VERY fast.

Salut !

Après avoir essayé de programmer NES, j’ai trouvé que c’était pénible, principalement à cause du processeur 8 bits et du PPU (Processeur d’image) limité et difficile à manipuler.

La semaine dernière, j’ai donc voulu essayer de programmer sur cette console de légende qu’est la Super Nintendo. Les spécifications techniques (voir article Wikipedia) m’avaient toujours donné envie, mais j’avais été rebuté par le fait qu’il faille programmer en assembleur, et par la réputation qu’a la SNES d’une console difficile à programmer. Et quelle bonne surprise ! La Super Nintendo (SNES) est vraiment une console sympa à programmer:

• Processeur 16bit 65816. C’est une évolution 16 bits du 6502 de la NES, avec quelques opcodes en plus. C’est donc très semblable, et quand on connait le 6502, c’est facile d’apprendre à maitriser les quelques nouvelles instruction et modes d’adressage, et c’est très agréable d’utiliser (enfin !) du 16 bit. En effet, le 16 bit permet de manipuler des nombres jusqu’à 65355, contre 255 pour le 8 bits: c’est une nette amélioration pour l’adressage de la mémoire, et les opérations arithmétiques.
• 128k de mémoire vive.
• Le PPU n’a rien à voir avec celui de la NES. On passe ici à une profondeur de 16 bits, avec au maximum 256 couleurs simultanément. Les sprites peuvent maintenant faire de 8×8 à 64×64 pixels, et utiliser 16 couleurs chacun. La taille de la VRAM a été aussi démultiplié, puisqu’on arrive à 128Ko (c’est même plus que la GBA!). On apprécie les différents modes proposés (plusieurs BG à différentes profondeur). De nombreuses possibilités sympathiques sont présentes, comme le HDMA ou la fusion de plans.
• De nombreux programmes sonores disponibles sur internet.
• Un style de gestion du hardware qui se rapproche de la GBA, et qui est bien plus “programmer-friendly” que la NES.

Il s’agit donc véritablement d’une bonne console, et après m’être amusé avec, je comprends mieux pourquoi on y trouve d’aussi nombreux jeux, et pourquoi certains se sont hissé au rang de légende.

Néanmoins, il reste des points négatifs, qui ralentissent nettement le développement:

• Programmation uniquement en assembleur. Il n’existe pas de compilateur supportant toutes les possibilités du CPU de la SNES.
• Système de switch 16bit/8bit plutôt pénible. En effet, il est souvent nécessaire d’accéder à des registres en mode 8 bits, tout en manipulant des données 16 bits, ce qui conduit à une utilisation assez intensive de la stack.
• Toujours un seul registre supportant les opérations arithmétique (A).
• Organisation de la mémoire compliquée, et assez mal gérée par l’assembleur (WLA DX).
• VRAM/CGRAM/OAM non mappés au bus principal: on doit passer par des registres pour y écrire.

Si vous aimez programmer en assembleur, sur de “vieux” systèmes, je vous conseille vraiment la Super Nintendo.

Liens dont je me suis servi (tout est en anglais):

• Assembleur: WLA DX
• Apprendre le 6502 (il faut ensuite lire des compléments d’informations précisant les ajouts du 65816): 6502 opcodes
• Petit tutoriel: Super NES Programming - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks
• Très bon lecteur sonore, facile à intégrer, et utilisant les formats MOD, XM et S3M: XMSNES
• Petit Wiki qui contient quelques infos: Main Page - snesdev.net Wiki
• Pleins d’infos sur le CPU, mais connaissance du 6502 nécessaire: 65816info.txt
• De très très bons tutos, à suivre absolument: :: Vintage Dev :: SNES Programming Tutorials
• Très bonne liste de documents techniques: Zophar’s Domain: SNES Technical
• Référence de l’assembleur WLA DX: Documentswla.txt
• Encore une liste de très bons documents: Romhacking.net

Voilà voilà !

Hi folks,

The new version of SNEmulDS 0.6 comes closer… The new GUI is nearly finished and is being integrated to the main core. I’m waiting for artworks from my friend to complete the GUI design.

A new feature of the next release will be multi-language support. For the moment, the language setting is read from the DS firmware, and the charset used is ANSI Western occidental (Windows-1252) so the translation is limited to : English, French, German, Spanish, and Italiano. But in future, Japanese and other language will be included.

TRANSLATION PROCESS CLOSED!

TRANSLATION PROCESS CLOSED!

All language has been translated already ! Thanks to all who contributed!