The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

i just bought one of these. it's a flash card for the ds. so tell me what ds homebrew will be worth checking out on this thing.

there's dscrawl, which will probably get the most play out of anything. and there's scummvm, which i don't really care about. and an xm tracker?

someone give me the poop on ds homebrew.
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[Shapermc]

NitroTracker caught my attention a long time back.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[internisus]

[Shapermc]

Well, the item in question is a fully new card from M3 for slot 1 (which they haven't done before). Anyways... hell I don't know. I kind of want one but not for things unrelated to yarr.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dessgeega]

oh yeah, that's what i kindof forgot to mention. i can probably only run homebrew that's in a tidy .nds format.
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[Shapermc]

damn!
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Six]

I got a slot-2 cart last month, but I've actually been mostly using it for GBA homebrew. There are a few interesting DS ports, though.

DSDoom is pretty great, if still a bit rough. The bottom screen only displays the console (you can also use it for movement, though you'll have to fool around with key bindings if you're not a lefty.) Also I haven't been able to get Chex Quest running on it.

Lemmings? I haven't tried it yet, but it looks pretty slick. There's also a port of Flashback, if that's your thing.

There doesn't seem to be very much on the original homebrew front. No Place to Hide is cute for a few minutes. I haven't tried Spout, but it looks kind of neat too.


There's always rfk!

[Six]

Also can we talk about GBA homebrew? I'm a little overwhelmed at the volume of stuff available, but most of it seems to be demos (not that that's entirely a bad thing) or simply not worth playing.

[Ethoscapade]

dess didn't i tell you and everybody else to buy an ez4 lite enough times?

oh well.

so you can only play nds homebrew, and not gba? that's really too bad.. there's a half-decent every extend port, a very well done amplitude port with smb music, a lemmings port with an extensive level editor, and... not a whole lot of great original stuff. on the ds end, anyway. on the gba there's blast arena, vulkanon, lumines, the stretchy arm guy game...

[dessgeega]

i've had a gba flash cart for like, years, you know.
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[Ethoscapade]

well yeah but i assume by "flash cart" you actually mean "flash cart," which makes a hell of a lot of difference.

[dessgeega]

oh.

[dongle]

[Shapermc]

[Ethoscapade]

shaper, can you link to this? can't seem to find it.

[Shapermc]

[dmauro]

If we're going to talk about gba demos, there should definitely be mention of the Nights demo.

[FortNinety]

dmauro had a DS flash cart that I was going to buy off of him, till I found out that it didn't support GBA, which was what I'm most interested in (especially after seeing the aforementioned NiGHTS demo). I know there's one that does both, but its for the DS Lite, and I wanted to have something both for the DS Fat and GBA Micro.

Anyway, nullsleep recommended Flash2Advance or something for the GBA, since that's what I'm most interested in. My biggest problem is that I'm on a Mac, and that cart seems to be compatible, which is a rarity.

[dessgeega]

i've got a flash2advance. it's good, though i use my old, non-xp computer to write to it, because it wouldn't save when i used this one.
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[Ethoscapade]

do not buy a regular "flashcart." seriously. they are so obsolete, and you can do much much much much better especially seeing as how the price of those never really came down.

fort - download this and tell me if you can run it in virtual pc or wine or whatever the hell it is you use. if so, and if, as you said, you want something that won't only work in a ds lite, i am prepared to spend hours and hours convincing you to buy one of these.

[dongle]

is it FUD that it takes a long time to load 32mb ROMs on it?

[Ethoscapade]

no, because:

a) i only have one 32mb rom, mother 3 (and i can't even play that yet!).
b) the 32mb section is, essentially, the entirety of what would've been sold as a 32mb flashcart two years ago, and the novelty of this is just striking.
c) once you "flash" a 32mb rom into that part of the memory it stays there for as long as you like, as opposed to the sixteen megs of ram it copies every other gba binary into as part of normal usage, which take a good ten seconds or so at worst to get fired up.

[the drunken samurai]

hey dess have you checked this out yet?

[Six]

[dmauro]

I don't have a link to the NIghts rom, but I do have the rom on my hard drive. email at dmauro dot com.

[dessgeega]

ds crawl runs on my flashcard, but it won't save data or load anything i change in the init file. i get a "no FAT filesystem detected" error. huh?
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[Ethoscapade]

yeah, that's why you shouldn't have bought a slot-1 card.

slot-1 cards use DLDI, rather than standard FAT libs.

homebrew devs are slowly changing their standards to reflect this.

[dessgeega]

oh snap.
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[dessgeega]

so i've played smiley and his shooty adventure. its greatest problem is the eye enemies. these are enemies who bounce slowly around the screen, opening and closing their lid at random. they can bring the game to a crawl; most of the earlier stages end with the player following an eye slowly across the screen, waiting for it to open. you need to shuffle through a bunch of eye-themed stages at the beginning before any more interesting enemies are introduced.

there's also some control glitches. the touchscreen is used to control smiley's movement, but it isn't mapped one-to-one - frequently you'll hit the end of the touchscreen and have to lift the stylus and set it down elsewhere, like a mouse on a mousepad. sometimes this causes smiley to jerk across the screen and - usually - into an enemy.

the implementation of robotron dual sticks-style control with the touchscreen as movement and d-pad / face buttons as firing is smart, though, and i would like to see more along these lines.
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[Nana Komatsu]

[Six]

[Mike]

[ApM]

Never played with LSDJ, but NitroTracker is great fun. There's not really a lot available to you in terms of effects -- I don't think even sample looping has been implemented -- but the sample recording and editing tools are solid. If you're used to tweaking low-level synthchip registers, you're gonna be disappointed, but if you want to record yourself beatboxing on the bus, it's fantastic.

[dmauro]

Here's a link to Nullsleep's GSW review.

[Six]

So dess did you try that DLDI patcher on Crawl?

[dessgeega]

yes.

there is no dldi sector in crawl.
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[Cycle]

it's probably your sd card.

also have you sent my flash card yet.
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[Six]

Great Giana Sisters DS!

Also, NitroTracker is hilarious.

[Ethoscapade]

apparently there's a new best snes emulator? it was snesDS for awhile (done by the author of, among other things, flashme and pocketnes), then snezziDS, and now, evidently, SNEmulDS, which is unique in that it got with the program and incorporated FAT/DLDI/whathaveyou; dess, in spite of your hatred of the console, you might be so inclined to check it out now that you can.

EDIT: no, wait, take it back, i just tried that emulator and it's in no way there yet. afaik, as it stands all three of these use more or less the same asm CPU core and SPC emulator, but each use different rendering engines - in my experience, snesDS is good for umihara or kirby's dream course, snezzi is good for everything else, and snemul is.. uh.. for slot-1 cards?

[Shapermc]

Now she can play all those RPGs that she's been missing out on!

;)
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dessgeega]

frodo ds refuses to read disk images from my roms directory. i assume this is because of the same issue as crawl.

also my game doctor supercedes all snes emulation.
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[Six]

Now this is an interesting idea. An IF player that uses handwriting recognition - stuff like this is why homebrew was invented, right?

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work very well. It might just be that I'm not familiar enough with Graffiti yet, though the shortcuts don't seem especially useful either. I'll give it another go this evening.

[ApM]

As someone who has played a not-insignificant amount of interactive fiction on his Palm, I can tell you right now that I would miss being able to tap words in the output. Autocomplete is a poor substitute.

Also holy God what kind of crazy person rolls every decent early 80s single-screen puzzle platformer into one DS game?

God, I wish someone would bring back the single-screen puzzle platformer.

[Shapermc]

[Ethoscapade]

holy man, that has to get released.

[dessgeega]

[Six]

[Cycle]

http://distractionandnonsense.com/draw-stereo/

make your own stereograms from the comfort of your DS!
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[Six]

Oh, neat. I was actually thinking last week about how the DS might make a good stereoscope!


Hey if someone wants to do a DS Virtual Boy emulator I'll totally rig up a wicked cool headset

[FortNinety]