NDS Dev in 202x

Back in february, 19-yo Violet! posted an animated version of the low-poly DS collected 167K likes and over 380 comments, most of which going towards "my childhood" nostalgia. Clearly, the NDS is now a retro console. That may not bring a wave of NDS development the same way we saw people starting to do SNES development a decade ago, but that's enough to push some 23-y-o 3D artist to convert their model into a .nds just to check what it'd look like and animate their hair with more code.

I've been surpised to hear the snes-lady Skwirl reporting that she had first wanted to write homebrew herself back in the days but dropped it because it was "too complicated". (she started some 3DS port of tilemap town, btw)

There are some ongoing NDS projects on github. I spotted one that pushes the 'reimplement X on NDS' to the extreme, bringing support for GBA pokemons, no less. Codestudy started. Probably tricky to get into it. And given how 'mature' the device is now, chances are that we find more ambitious projects like this (or a minecraft clone or cave story port) than the tiny one-screen flash/arcade-inspired titles of the neocompo years.

Curieusement, on dirait que ça ce ravive un peu, du côté du dévelopement amateur NDS, ces derniers temps. On est encore loin de l'age d'or, mais voir une Violet de 19 ans poster un modèle 3D de DS lite et récolter 380 commentaires parlant de "c'est toute mon enfance" et 167 mille likes, ça pourrait bien indiquer que la console est finalement devenue rétro, après tout. Un autre, de 23 ans, à carrément décider d'exporter le modèle 3D de son personnage fétiche en une ROM pour animer sa chevelure. Tout ça m'a remis en mémoire un commentaire plus ancien qui demandait "comment on fait un homebrew NDS, au fait". Et je dois reconnaître qu'une grande partie des tutos et ressources de l'époque ne sont plus à jour: les procédures ont évolué, les bibliothèques aussi ...

Resources
It reminded me of a series of tweet where someone was wondering how to get into NDS development. I have a tutorial git of my own, where each commit presents a part of what I use to build games on NDS, but that's teaching you to use libgeds, not libnds. There are devkitpro examples, too. I can't really recall whether their coverage is convincing for someone who wants to kick in. I myself have learnt with a mix of that and open-sourced projects from fellow homebrewers, but these are likely obsolete and wouldn't build against recent devkit versions.

The closest I've found is magusti tutorials. Most 'readmes' are in spanish, unfortunately and the directory structure is a bit confusing. It uses modern libraries, including maxmod. It uses 'all your data are belong to 4MB of RAM' approach, though.

Mais quelque petites recherches github ont quand même donné quelques résultats intéressants. Si la plupart des projets actifs utilisant libnds sont des portages plutôt ambitieux (et trop gros pour pouvoir servir de tutoriels), si la NFlib a le défaut de contenir encore pas mal de commentaires en Espagnol, on trouve quand-même deux ou trois choses directement exploitable, comme la balle-qui-rebondit de Magusti ou une adaptation de '2048'.

Maybe the best way would be to use NFLib ? Like in 2048-nds, a small puzzle game with a codestudy-firendly size ? It does restrict what you can do but usually in ways that won't hurt your project (like assume you don't want to use 16-colors layers), it has understandable wrapper functions and meaningful abstractions like auto-adjust position of sprites when scrolling background planes or delay OAM updates until vertical blanking happens. It let you chose between "my files are in fat:/SOME_DIR" or "my fat are in magical NitroFS (within the .nds, but requires compatible loader).

If that's fine for you, the projects Snake-DS seems like a nice thing to check first.

Getting Started

The windows installer 3.0.3 is still there, and it seemed to install things properly on a Windows 10 machine. Or so it seemed. Likely the Antivirus quarantining 'padbin.exe' during the installation process did no good, but all I actually get (apparently) is an msys2 install in C:\devkitpro\msys2 (which hasn't messed with the other msys2 pre-installed on that system. yahoo!) and that's it.

I did get a 'choose your packages' box, but it did not produce anything apparently. Well, pacman -Sl dkp-libs did indeed report what's available and pacman -S libfat-nds libnds nds-examples was all I needed to get the devkitarm (now r59) and the make rules as well. Some dependencies were still missing to build NDS examples though, namely ndstool (and I also missed dswifi because it's not named ndswifi ^^"). That's not yet enough. I'm still missing 'default.elf' from the default-arm7 pacakge :-/

So make your life simpler than mine: read the doc to the bottom and pacman -S nds-dev to install the pre-selection instead ^^"

Pour la forme, j'ai même voulu vérifier que tout ça compilait bien avec la version la plus récente des outils devkitpro. Eh bien, ça marche, et contrairement à ce que j'avais cru plus tôt dans l'année, il y a toujours bien un installateur pour windows (version 3.0.3). Bon, on ne s'emballe pas, il se contente essentiellement de nous filer un msys avec un gestionnaire de packages modifié. Je découvre d'ailleurs en fin de parcours la présence d'un méta-package 'nds-dev' qui pré-sélectionne tout ce que j'ai personnellement téléchargé à la main ^^"

Edit: looks like there's even someone who's busy designing a R4 substitute based on dual-core Raspberry Pico ...