Nds

On Wednesday, I gave a talk at the Student Techmeetup here in Edinburgh on DS homebrew development. As promised, I’ve uploaded the slides from that talk as a PDF here, with links to a few tutorials and resources included in them, along with some notes.

Here is a project I’ve been working on for a few weeks to learn more about DS homebrew coding. It’s a remake of Deflektor, an old puzzle game that I played on the Amiga. I’ve tried to keep the retro feel of the original while updating it to use the touchscreen interface.

The aim is to rotate the mirrors () to reflect the laser beam from the source () to blow up all the triggers () and then enter the target (). Rotate the mirrors by tapping on them and then dragging to align the mirror at a particular angle. You start with an amount of energy which is constantly declining (the green bar). Directing the beam into a spike () or reflecting the beam back to the source will cause it to overload (represented by the red bar). If the source is overloaded too much or if you run out of energy, you lose a life. There are also rotating blocks which only allow the beam to pass at a certain angle (), teleports () which work in pairs, and blocks which randomize the beam direction (). In addition, in some levels there are gremlins which roam about the board and mess with your stuff. You can get rid of them by tapping on them repeatedly.

I’ve built a Mac (Intel) binary of DesMuME, from the latest SVN code, with a patch to enable masscat’s GDB stub. With it you can load a homebrew rom, connect to DesMuME with the copy of GDB that’s provided with devkitARM, and start debugging your homebrew code while it’s running in the emulator. For more details check out this post on the official forums.