Planet Dev-Scene

Would like to welcome the three most recent drunkencoders to the site. Our community is growing!

Would like to welcome the three most recent drunkencoders to the site. Our community is growing!

Syobon action (original title しょぼんのアクション) is a 2D Japanese freeware video game notoriously known as a parody of the Nintendo classic game Super Mario Bros. but with extremely difficult levels (Wikipedia).

Scognito decided to port the game on the Wii console…

The game is played with Wiimote used in NES position, with button 2 used for jump and button Minus for suicide (yes sometimes it is needed ).

The original game let you select the starting level just pressing a keyboard key from 1 to 9 at main screen; mine has also a level select, find it out (main screen too)!

Download the game from here.

Original announce: here.

Syobon action (original title しょぼんのアクション) is a 2D Japanese freeware video game notoriously known as a parody of the Nintendo classic game Super Mario Bros. but with extremely difficult levels (Wikipedia).

Scognito decided to port the game on the Wii console…

The game is played with Wiimote used in NES position, with button 2 used for jump and button Minus for suicide (yes sometimes it is needed ).

The original game let you select the starting level just pressing a keyboard key from 1 to 9 at main screen; mine has also a level select, find it out (main screen too)!

Download the game from here.

Original announce: here.

I created a blog to talk about some of my graphics tools. The only one up at the moment is my map editor as it is the only one in a usable state.

http://pern.drunkencoders.com

I created a blog to talk about some of my graphics tools. The only one up at the moment is my map editor as it is the only one in a usable state.

http://pern.drunkencoders.com

Welcome Earboxer and Remadon to drunkencoders.com.

Earboxer has released a work in progress, a Helicopter Clone:

Helicopter Clone

Welcome Earboxer and Remadon to drunkencoders.com.

Earboxer has released a work in progress, a Helicopter Clone:

Helicopter Clone

http://www.rodrigoroman.com/rrc2soft/nds_dsknytt.html

“Knytt Stories is a freeware platform game made by Nicklas ‘Nifflas’ Nygren (http://nifflas.ni2.se/). The game include several short levels (’stories’), and there are many new stories created by the community that anyone can play.
As a tribute to this great game, we are developing a (free) DS version of it – Knytt Stories DS.”

Thanks to ndshb.com for the news.

http://www.rodrigoroman.com/rrc2soft/nds_dsknytt.html

“Knytt Stories is a freeware platform game made by Nicklas ‘Nifflas’ Nygren (http://nifflas.ni2.se/). The game include several short levels (’stories’), and there are many new stories created by the community that anyone can play.
As a tribute to this great game, we are developing a (free) DS version of it – Knytt Stories DS.”

Thanks to ndshb.com for the news.

A few new people have signed up for some blog space and it looks like WioWao is the first to get his site up and running.

Among other things he seems to be working on a 3D engine of sorts for the DS…

A few new people have signed up for some blog space and it looks like WioWao is the first to get his site up and running.

Among other things he seems to be working on a 3D engine of sorts for the DS…

If you are interested in a few MB of web space to blog about your DS or other geeky projects then you have come to the right place.

Simply create a user account and send me an email (dovoto@drunkencoders.com) with your requested domain name (blah.drunkencoders.com) and a short description of what sort of things you expect to post. Only have a few rules:

-No porn (well…maybe if its in really good taste ;)
-No roms (or links to them, or news about the latest rom rips, or links to sites that do nothing but talk about the latest roms, etc…)
-Free beer to dovoto when ever he is in your neighborhood

Other than that the space is yours to fill as you like (in other words your posts are not required to be technical in nature and you can treat it as a personal blog if you so desire).

Newcomers are encouraged…yes thats you NOOBS! (you would be surprised how interesting it is to most of us to watch a person make pong for the first time!)

Please join us all in the fight against posting demos via crappy file hosting sites!

If you are interested in a few MB of web space to blog about your DS or other geeky projects then you have come to the right place.

Simply create a user account and send me an email (dovoto@drunkencoders.com) with your requested domain name (blah.drunkencoders.com) and a short description of what sort of things you expect to post. Only have a few rules:

-No porn (well…maybe if its in really good taste ;)
-No roms (or links to them, or news about the latest rom rips, or links to sites that do nothing but talk about the latest roms, etc…)
-Free beer to dovoto when ever he is in your neighborhood

Other than that the space is yours to fill as you like (in other words your posts are not required to be technical in nature and you can treat it as a personal blog if you so desire).

Newcomers are encouraged…yes thats you NOOBS! (you would be surprised how interesting it is to most of us to watch a person make pong for the first time!)

Please join us all in the fight against posting demos via crappy file hosting sites!

Compo prize pool has grown to $115, I dont think it will hit the nearly $1000 we got lost year but you never know till you start donating!

Winter 2009 Competition

Compo prize pool has grown to $115, I dont think it will hit the nearly $1000 we got lost year but you never know till you start donating!

Winter 2009 Competition

Now you can have a lack of updates in a twitter feed! Just follow drunkencoders

Now you can have a lack of updates in a twitter feed! Just follow drunkencoders

Welcome b12core and his new blog b12core’s blog

“Operation Libra” is an “escape the room game”,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_the_room

“Escape the room is a subgenre of adventure game,[1] usually created as a browser game for the Adobe Flash platform, that utilizes a point-and-click style of play. The object of the game is to find a way to escape from a mysterious room. The room usually consists of a locked door, several objects to manipulate as well as hidden clues or secret compartments.[2] The player must use the objects to interact with other items in the room to reveal a way to escape.[3]”

For more details see b12core’s blog

Welcome b12core and his new blog b12core’s blog

“Operation Libra” is an “escape the room game”,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_the_room

“Escape the room is a subgenre of adventure game,[1] usually created as a browser game for the Adobe Flash platform, that utilizes a point-and-click style of play. The object of the game is to find a way to escape from a mysterious room. The room usually consists of a locked door, several objects to manipulate as well as hidden clues or secret compartments.[2] The player must use the objects to interact with other items in the room to reveal a way to escape.[3]”

For more details see b12core’s blog

The final build of devkitARM release 27 and associated libraries were uploaded to SF recently. These are now available through the windows installer. For the download links for other platforms see the getting started section of the wiki.

For problems, comments and support please use the forums and not the post comments.

devkitARM release 27

• Update binutils to 2.20
• Update gcc to 4.4.2
• Update to gdb 7.0
• filesystem IO now defaults to unbuffered meaning that the full length requested on read/write is passed to the devoptab pseudo device drivers.
• ds crt0 will now detect an 8meg debug system and adjust memory accordingly
• ds mpu setup has been moved to libnds for easier maintenance
• ndstool can now read ELF files directly without intermediate binary stage

libnds 1.4.0

• Bugfixes in fifo layer
• The deprecated IPC struct has now been removed
• added memCached & memUncached functions to convert pointers between those regions
• memory rearrangement to support 8meg setup
• guruMeditationDump function exposed for user code
• set correct palette on guruMeditationDump
• DS mpu setup moved from ds crt0 for ease of maintenance

dswifi 0.3.11

• use memUncached function for uncached memory.

libfat 1.0.6

• Implement read ahead cache
• Fix issues with short aliases
• Fix timestamps
• Set access and modify times on directory creation
• correct problems with overallocation of clusters.

default arm7 0.5.8

• recompiled and linked against new libraries.

libfilesystem 0.9.4

• recompiled with new headers

libogc 1.8.1 is now available.

• Improved smb speed.
• Increased default tcp window size to improve speed over internet.
• remove casts from time conversion macros.

The provided examples for wii have also been updated with mp3 and ogg playback examples.

As usual these releases are available through the windows installer/updater. For other platforms see the getting started section of the wiki.

devkitPPC release 19 has just been uploaded to SF along with a bugfix release for libfat. Both updates are now available through the windows installer. For the download links for other platforms see the getting started section of the wiki. The 32bit linux binaries have not yet been built but will follow shortly.

devkitPPC release 19

• Update gcc to 4.4.2
• Update binutils to 2.20
• fix minor issue with chdir in newlib

libfat 1.0.6

• fix latent bug exposed by unbuffered IO

The final build of devkitPPC release 18 and associated libraries were uploaded to SF yesterday. These are now available through the windows installer. For the download links for other platforms see the getting started section of the wiki.

devkitPPC release 18

• Update gcc to 4.4.1
• Update newlib to 1.17.1 – please note this is not an official newlib release, just a snapshot we used to obtain some requested functions.
• Update to gdb 7.0
• wiiload is now version 0.5, this will require the latest version of the homebrew channel in order to upload code.
• filesystem IO now defaults to unbuffered meaning that the full length requested on read/write is passed to the devoptab pseudo device drivers.
• The powerpc-gekko prefix has now been replaced with the more standard powerpc-eabi, this will allow portable autotools based libraries to build OOB for devkitPPC. Users of the template projects will be unaffected.

libogc 1.8.0

• Fixed AA video mode support
• DI bugfixes
• SDHC fix for IOS 60 and greater
• tinysmb – added keepalive, automatic SMB reconnection, non-blocking sockets, DNS lookup, port 139 support,anonymous passwords and share-level security support
• USB storage bug fixes
• MEM2 sbrk patch (extends memory into MEM2 when MEM1 exhausted)
• Added ISO 9660 DVD devoptab
• Added Wiimote battery level support to WPAD
• Basic Wiimote speaker support
• Added USB HID support
• Added USB keyboard & mouse support
• Added SD Gecko SDHC support
• Fixed TLUT loading
• IOS no longer reloaded on start, this should be done by the loader (HBC does this already)
• Quit back to Wii menu on exit() if HBC reload stub signature not found.

libfat 1.0.5

• Implement read ahead cache
• Fix issues with short aliases
• Fix timestamps
• Set access and modify times on directory creation

With thanks to Tantric, Dhewg, Rodries and Shagkur for their contributions to these releases.

r4revolutionds.co.uk ran a poll peoples’ favorite DS homebrew, and I’m very happy that both NitroTracker and Pocket Physics scored Top-10 positions! A big thanks to everyone who voted for my stuff!

It’s really worth checking out the top-20 list! There’s some great stuff in there:

• Places 20-19
• Places 10-1

Dans ma chambre, dans un placard, il y a tout un tas de vieux matériel électronique : des morceaux de cartes mères, des radios-réveils désossés, des vieilles consoles en morceaux, des bouts de vieilles caisses-enregistreuses, et encore un paquet de choses dont je serai incapable de dire d’où elles proviennent. L’explication est la même pour toutes ces inutiles débris : “ça pourra toujours servir ! je pourrai toujours en déssouder un composant utile !”. Seulement voilà : je ne sais pas faire d’électronique, et ça ne sert à rien.

Passons.Il y a peut être un an, j’ai découvert les FPGA, grâce notamment à Pitt et Refix sur les forums Dev-FR et PlayerAdvance (sujet). Il s’agit (en gros) de “puces programmables”, mais pas au sens habituel : c’est à dire que ce ne sont pas des microprocesseurs : ce sont vraiment de gros circuits intégrés dont on peut programmer via ordinateur le comportement : cela permet de concevoir des circuits logiques. Bref, cela m’a paru comme un étage intermédiaire entre l’informatique (programmation, interface avec le PC) et l’électronique (circuit logique, etc). De plus, j’apprends qu’une boîte américaine, Digilent, en vend à prix plutôt bas par rapport au prix habituel de ces bestioles. Après avoir longuement hésité, je décide donc d’acheter une carte Nexys 2.

Je reçois la fameuse carte, je la branche, le “programme” de test préinstallé se lance, et tout fonctionne bien. Je reboote sous Windows, afin d’installer l’environnement de développement. Il s’agit en l’occurence du ISE de Xilinx. Après avoir durement combattu avec le site de Xilinx et le système de licenses (gratuites pourtant…) du logiciel, je réussis à télécharger un installateur. Lequel m’annonce qu’il y a un peu plus d’un gigaoctet de données à télécharger. Soit. Une fois le logiciel installé, je le démarre (c’est lent, mais mon ordinateur n’y est pas pour rien).

C’est parti ! Je recherche donc un cours sur le VHDL, puisqu’il s’agit du “langage” qui permet de spécifier le comportement d’un circuit logique. Le code écrit sera ensuite “compilé” (on dit “synthétisé” ici) puis transcrit en un fichier binaire qu’il suffira d’envoyer sur le FPGA (via le logiciel Windows “Impact” fourni par Digilent, j’y reviendrai après). Je ne raconterai pas tous les déboires qui s’ensuivirent. En effet, en vrac :

• Si le langage paraît simple vu de loin, il est en fait semé d’embûches, et ne s’apprend sûrement pas en quelques heures comme certains langage de programmation.
• Ce N’EST PAS un langage de programmation. Et c’est ce qui m’a causé le plus d’ennui. En effet, je suis habitué à ma bonne vieille programmation séquentielle : mes petite variables dans la mémoire, mes petites boucles, mes fonctions, et derrière tout ça, le compilateur dont je comprends le rôle, et à peu près le fonctionnement. Or, c’est ici un langage de spécification : on spécifie ce que fera la puce : tous les idiomes habituels de programmation sont à revoir.
• Le processus de synthèse est extremmement long. J’ai l’habitude de tester souvent mes modifications, cela m’a donc largement ralenti et découragé. De plus, les messages d’erreur du synthésiteur sont incompréhensibles (pour un débutant), très mal documentés sur le site officiel, et souvent insoluble par la “méthode Google”. Bref : s’il y a une erreur, on sait à quelle ligne, mais on ne sait pas ce que sait… il n’y a plus qu’à supprimmer la ligne et à la réécrire autrement.
• J’ai très peu de notion de logique et de combinatoire. À ce propos, il semble que le langage possède véritablement “deux niveaux”. On peut effectivement décrire le fonctionnement interne du circuit via la combinatoire (portes logiques en tous genres), mais on peut aussi utiliser des structures de plus haut niveau. Ainsi, si la plupart des cours proposent de réaliser (wow!) un additionneur en décrivant toute la logique sous-jacente, il est tout simplement possible d’utiliser le symbole “+” : ce qui est nettemment plus naturel pour moi. J’ai donc très peu suivi les cours que j’ai trouvé, puisqu’ils ne correspondaient pas à ce que je voulais faire. Bref, il y a quelque chose qui m’échappe : c’est comme si on écrivait un cours de C++ en ne parlant que d’assembleur… enfin je crois.
• Le jonglage permanent entre ces deux “niveaux” de langage (combinatoire et séquentiel, je crois) est à l’origine d’un nombre affreux d’erreurs.

Je finis quand même par réussir à piloter les LEDs et l’afficheur 7-segments grâce aux boutons et aux interrupteurs. Youpi !

Après un long séjour dans le placard, je décide un jour de ressortir mon FPGA, et je me dis : “je vais voir si je peux le programmer avec Linux !” Quelle idée malheureux !

L’environnement de développement ISE est disponible pour Linux, mais évidemment, il faudra pour ça que j’affronte à nouveau le site de Xilinx (qui a bien sûr été modifié depuis !), et que je recharge le gigaoctet de logiciels. Bien. En tout cas, ISE fonctionne bien sous Linux, je peux synthétiser mon code et obtenir le fichier de programmation du FPGA. Reste le vrai problème : envoyer le programme sur le FPGA, via le port USB. En effet : le logiciel Impact de Digilent et propriétaire, et seulement pour Windows. Je me jette sur Google, et me voilà parti pour des heures à errer sur des forums, à lire des messages remplis de termes que je ne comprends pas, mais qui semblent parler du même matériel que moi. Je fini par abandonner, puis je réessaie quelques mois plus tard et … enfin je le trouve. Ce message. Le message du type génial qui dit à peu près cela : “Salut ! J’ai acheté ce matériel là l’autre jour, et ça ne marche pas sous Linux, alors j’ai vite fait bricolé un outil qui permet de le faire marcher, et je vous le file.” Vraiment, c’est pour ça que j’adore le monde du libre. Bref, le message est ici, et l’outil en question est là. Comme je suis content de l’avoir trouvé, je le mets en gros, voilà.

nexys2prog, l’outil pour prog la nexys2

Et ca marche diablement bien. Relativement simple à mettre en place (un petit paquet à installer, une lib à compiler, et puis il faut aussi s’autoriser un certain accès au périphérique USB), il est en tout cas très simple à utiliser : on lui file le fichier “.bit” à envoyer, et il programme le FPGA en quelques secondes !

Me revoilà donc aussi bien installé que sous Windows pour bricoler mon jouet. Je décide au passage de changer de langage pour programmer mon FPGA, et de passer à Verilog. Ce dernier, concurrent du VHDL, me semblait avoir une syntaxe plus claire, plus proche du C, et plus adapté à un débutant en provenance du monde de la programmation. J’ai bien fait, ce langage a jusqu’à maintenant été bien plus clément avec moi que VHDL. Peut-être parce que les cours qu’on trouve le concernant sont plus abordables (notamment celui-ci qui m’a bien aidé).

Pour l’occasion, je décide de fouiller dans mon tiroir à vieux composant, et j’exhume ainsi une vieille mémoire SRAM, qui devait servir pour le BIOS d’un bien vieux PC. Je trouve sur internet le “datasheet” associé (un pdf avec toutes les informations techniques), et je sors mon fer à souder. Quelques heures plus tard, tout fonctionnait : je pouvais lire et écrire dans la vénérable mémoire avec mon FPGA ! J’avais enfin fait “revivre” un de ces vieux composant électronique de mon tiroir.

Enfin, après un nouveau grand séjour au tiroir, j’ai ressorti mon FPGA avant-hier pour compenser une lacune de mon installation. En effet, sous Windows, je bénéficiai du logiciel “Export” de Digilent qui permettait de communiquer avec le FPGA via l’USB (et un peu plus, m’enfin bon). Rien de tel sous Linux. Comme j’ai un peu peur des interfaces USB, j’ai décidé de fouiller mon tiroire (encore lui !) pour trouver un bon vieux cable série (Null-Modem comme on disait dans le temps !) et connecter la carte à mon ordinateur. J’ai ensuite programmé en Verilog une interface permettant de gérer le port série (réception et émission), et voilà mon ordinateur et mon FPGA qui, après quelques couacs, se parlent ! C’est beau la technologie, et utile, en plus ! ^^ Enfin, maintenant, je peux envisager d’interfacer mon ordi avec tout un tas de trucs, via ce port série et le FPGA.

mon code verilog pour gérer le port série (il est sûrement affreux, et si vous vous y connaissez, dîtes-moi pourquoi !)

Voilà voilà… C’était mon article le plus long. Peut-être trop long d’ailleurs ?

Apologies for the direct links to archives in this post, the new SF system doesn’t seem to allow linking to the actual release package. These files are available from the devkitPro updater for windows users and we’ll be attempting to do some more work on the cross platform installer in the very near future.

libnds 1.3.7

• add command for PSG Wave duty, courtesy of chee
• correct extended palette macros

dswifi 0.3.10

• Corrected issue with nested interrupts
• set errno to EINPROGRESS on non blocking socket connection

default arm7 0.5.7

• Rebuilt with latest libraries

For comments on these releases please visit the forum announcement thread.

I’m still alive I’m planning to use this blog a little more than i have done in the past.

With that out of the way the new DS/DSi flashcart iPlayer will be released worldwide on july 1st for more information visit the launch site to celebrat I’ve upped a very preliminary review of it so check that out here.

The forthcoming devkitPPC release 18 is now entering the home straight so, rather than put up with the usual post release “did you fix X” mails & IRC messages, we’re asking you to file bug reports and feature requests. These should be added to the appropriate sourceforge tracker ideally with a small testcase illustrating the issue.

Right now it’s impossible to give you an ETA on devkitPPC r18 but it should be quite soon.

libnds 1.3.6 and default arm7 0.5.5 are now available through the devkitPro updater.

See the forum announcement for more details.

One of the things we love to see is homebrewers using the skills they’ve honed with devkitPro toolchains to enter the commercial market. The most recent programmer to take the next step is Lacey who you might know if you visit the Blitzed dev channels on a regular basis.

His company, Tin Man Games, has just released their first iPhone/iPod Touch title so why not help him make his mark in the industry by grabbing Frootrees from the iTunes store now? It looks like a great little game and the £0.59/$0.99 price point is an absolute steal.

The latest versions of libnds, dswifi and the corresponding default arm7 binary are now available on sourceforge and through the devkitPro updater. See the forum announcement for further details.

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 use the chipin at the top right of the page.

Looking for some reasons to donate? Check out the Support devkitPro page

I’m posting a sort of test release of my re-port of Wolfenstein 3D.

It’s only a few days old so it’s missing a few things but hopefully it should be playable.

- Registered Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny builds are available

- Status bar on bottom screen

- (Hopefully) All 320×200 screens should be drawn properly rather than hacked into 256×192

- Basic sound effects, no music or item pickup sounds yet. I wasn’t happy using an opl emulator for those so I’ll use a more suitable format later.

- Saving/loading should be working properly now

Bugs and incomplete things:

- No left handed mode yet

- No automap

- On screen keyboard does not allow capital letters for some reason

- Demos do not play properly

Keys:

Move forward: Up arrow

Move back: Down arrow

Move left: Left arrow

Move right: Right arrow

Strafe left: L shoulder button

Strafe right: R shoulder button

Fire: A

Use: B

Run: Y

Change weapon: X

Pause: Start

Back to menu: Select

Menu OK/Y: A

Menu Cancel/N: B

Installation:

Put your data files in /data/wolf3d, it doesn’t matter where you put the executables though.

DLDI Patch for your device if you need to.

Wolfenstein 3D Binaries

Wolfenstein 3D DS Source

Notice:

The zip file contains 4 nds binaries:

wolf3d-ds_sdm.nds : Spear of Destiny demo

wolf3d-ds_sod.nds: Spear of Destiny registered

wolf3d-ds_wl1.nds: Wolfenstein 3D shareware

wolf3d-ds_wl6.nds: Wolfenstein 3D registered

Another way of looking at it is the _xxx binary goes with the extension of your data files.

TheRain has released the first version of the DSMI library for the iPhone! This library enables iPhone developers to create wireless MIDI controllers like xy-controllers, drum pads or keyboards! The iPhone applications can talk to any MIDI software on your computer through the DSMI server, making your iPhone a full-blown MIDI instrument! libDSMI for iPhone is available from the downloads page.

MIDI Motion Machine

TheRain has also released an exciting new app called MIDI Motion Machine, a tilt-based MIDI controller including 16 note trigger pads. The source code of a reduced free version of this app is available from the DSMI SVN. This should help you get started writing your own iPhone MIDI apps in no time!
You can get the commercial full application and the reduced free version (out soon) form the Apple AppStore. For more information on MIDI Motion Machine, check out the official site.

That’s right, a lot is happening with DSMI lately! I’ve ported libdsmi, KaosDS, PulseDS and DSMIDIKeyboard to the new libnds v1.3.1. This library introduces a lot of simplifications, making the code shorter and more readable. For developers, the libdsmi API has stayed the same, except that dsmi_setup_wifi_support is no longer necessary and has thus been removed. For end-users, nothing has changed.

To make collaboration easier, I set up a Google Code project for DSMI, which is now the official place to download the library and applications. Google Code features a nice source browser so you can check out the source code more easily. Also, there is an issue tracker that you can use to inform us of bugs.

One more thing: Collin Meyer has ported DSMI to the iPhone and released the first DSMI-enabled iPhone application! iXY is a Kaoss Pad style MIDI controller that lets you control your synth parameters or light effects with the touch of your fingers. iXY is available from the App Store for 99US cent / 79EUR cent. The library itself is work in progress and will be released soon, so everyone can write MIDI-enabled iPhone apps!

It turns out DSMI keeps facing trouble regarding its name. It first started off as DSMIDIWiFi. After I added hardware MIDI support through the DSerial, the “WiFi” part of the name was no longer appropriate, so I changed the name to DSMI. I didn’t call it DSMIDI in order to avoid the name collision with Collin’s DSMIDI hardware hack. It turned out this was the right choice, because fishuyo came along and added OSC support which would have made the MIDI part of the name inappropriate anyway. Now that Collin has ported DSMI to the iPhone, the DS part of the name would have to go. Nevertheless, we decided on keeping the name in order to avoid confusion. If anyone has an idea for a new meaning of the DSMI acronym, please let us know :-)

Thanks to Tim Wood (fishuyo) DSMI now supports the OpenSound Control (OSC) protocol!

OSC is an emerging standard for exchanging music control signals that is much more flexible and modern than MIDI. For example, OSC can directly communicate via network, so the PC-side DSMI server is not required.

fishuyo also made a nice demo of the new OSC capabilities with a Kaoss pad and sliders. It comes with a pd patch that is a nice little synth. Check out the demo’s source code! OSC is really easy to add to your application. And it’s the future! So, get libdsmi v3.0 now!

End of Blog.

Blogging continues at http://malcolmparsons.blogspot.com/

If you haven’t noticed by now, other commitments have reduced the time I have to work on projects like PicoDriveDS. My original intent was just to show that DS was capable of Genesis emulation at >1fps (and learn a bit about the DS hardware in the process of porting), and I think in that I succeeded. The PicoDriveDS files will stay up here, but I don’t plan on working on it again anytime soon. The source is as always still available for anyone who wants to look at it or fork it.

jEnesisDS is a more recently updated Genesis emulator for the DS, with sound emulation and other features.

Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg (GCN)
Eledees/Elebits (Wii)
Kororinpa: Marble Mania (Wii)
The Simpson’s Game (Wii)

I do not get motion sickness in cars, trains, buses, planes, pirate ships, waltzers or roller coasters.

I do get motion sickness on boats.

Je me suis enfin décidé à finaliser cette nouvelle version de Lapinou. Amusez-vous bien (ou pas), et n’hésitez pas à me rapporter tous les bugs que vous pourriez trouver, à me faire part de vos impressions, et à me proposer des améliorations. Vous pouvez dès maintenant télécharger Lapinou !

Site officiel de Lapinou:  http://thoduv.drunkencoders.com/lapinou

Nouveautés:

- 21 Juillet 2008:
[VERSION 1.2] Un gros gros paquet de nouveautés, de nettoyages de code, de correction de bugs ! Le nouveau Lapinou est là ! Maheureusement, il faudra surement attendre pas mal de temps la prochaine, si jamais il y en a une.
* Ajout d’un bloc aide, placé au début du jeu, pour expliquer un peu ce qu’il faut faire (pour les gens qui n’auraient pas envie de lire le LISEZMOI !)
* Ajout d’un bloc secret, qui coûte très cher, mais qui permet d’obtenir… un secret !
* Meilleure protection contre la triche !
* Petite musique (héhé) et animation pour ceux qui arrivent à finir le jeu !
* Menu permettant d’acheter des blocs. Début d’intégration d’un système “modulaire” pour la boucle principale.
* Modification du tri des polygones translucides pour corriger des bugs de transparence.
* Mode veille quand on ferme la DS.
* Passage à ASlib pour le son, ca m’évite tout plein d’ennuis avec mon propre lecteur MP3 qui n’en fait qu’à sa tête.
* Grosse modification du menu principal. Le code est toujours crade, mais c’est plus joli !
* Modification de la force de gravité (plus “réelle” et avec un “flottement” pour les objets très légers)… … En fait non, ca a l’air de casser le gameplay…
* Système de sauvegardes qui fonctionne (bloc “nds”). Fichier de scores/sauvegarde renommé en “lapinou.sav”.
* Envoi des scores sur internet direct de la DS.
* Ajout bloc “slide” et “nds”.
* Blocs qui tombent sont solides, et se brisent à l’atterissage.
* Ajout d’un petit système de particules (moches pour l’instant).
* Petites améliorations au système de vthreads: possibilité d’arrêter un thread gentiment, et de lancer des threads en cascade (à l’intérieur d’autres threads). Ajout de plein d’effets sur les menus.
* Support ADPCM, et passage de tous les sons en ADPCM = gain de place dans la ROM (200ko gagnés).
* Fond moins monotone (change selon la hauteur).
* Système plus solide d’IPC (InterProcessor Communication) “lapinou-ipc”.
* Système d’abstraction “lapinou-io” pour les fichiers.
* Collisions objets-objets.
* Nettoyage du code (particulièrement boucle principale).

Note to english peoples: The site and the game are in french only, but I think it’s playable even without understanding what is written. If you don’t understand how something works, you can contact me for an explanation.

Ladies and Gentlemen!

NitroTracker v0.4 is finally here!

The main new features are:

• Looping

• Volume Envelopes
• Loops
• Multi-Sample Instruments
• Looping

Minor improvements:

• wav saving

• free ram indicator
• sample preview
• the file browser remembers recent folders and files
• improved xm player
• volume column editing
• sample panning
• improved left handed mode

Read the full story here!

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.

UPDATE: He’s made a few more updates since I originally made this post. Be sure to check out ole’s site for the latest info and download links.

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.

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

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.

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

My little sister didn’t believe that the earth was round, so I decided to launch a helium balloon to an altitude of 30km and shoot pictures and videos. I have posted a write-up with selected pictures and videos here. A launch and retrieval video is also available.

Just a change from DS projects

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!