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You talk about "piracy enabling" as if, say, infringing copies of major-label GBA games were the only thing that could run on a GBA flash cart. If something has a substantial noninfringing use (Sony v. Universal City Studios) and is promoted for such uses (MGM v. Grokster), I don't see how it's any more "piracy enabling" than a CD burner, especially given what was a thriving homebrew scene on the GBA. For example, in 2004, gbadev.org ran a minigame development competition whose top 10 entries were put on a cart for sale; I have my name in the credits of Swish-It as a music composer. And early 2005, around the PSP's release, a rudimentary music player application to fit 2.5 hours of music on a 256 Mbit cart was released for GBA. And the PocketNES emulator let a GBA flash cart run not only GBA games but also NES games. Without GBA flash carts, PocketNES would have never been developed, which means NES compilations by Jaleco and Atlus on GBA and the unlockable NES games in Contra 4 for DS wouldn't have been possible.

What else was Lik Sang doing that was more clearly "piracy enabling"?

While I agree with other posters that "homebrew" carries on but just looks different on different platforms, it is disappointing to see homebrew communities for older platforms fade out of existence. I was quite involved with the GBA/DS homebrew scene, but that has mostly disappeared by now. It's a ghost town over at gbaDev these days.

There will always (hopefully!) be somewhere for hobbiest and independent game developers to show off, but homebrew console gaming as it has been defined during the last 10 years is certainly declining.

I do miss it though -- there was a certain excitement about getting something running on your GBA that isn't quite there when I write code for modern portable devices. (Although I also wonder if part of that is nostalgia).

It appears Nintendo would have a stronger legal case against makers and sellers of R4i-style cards, which require a ROM of a licensed, vulnerable game in order to function on a DSi. I've ordered an Archos 43 instead, as Android homebrew appears to be far less vulnerable to legal action than DS homebrew despite Oracle v. Google.

The floodgates are open now, and the only way to close them is by revoking the old key, which would be a financial and PR nightmare.

Not that much of a nightmare. Sign all new releases with the old and new keys. Have the new firmware use only the signature with the new key, falling back to a whitelist of SHA-* values for old releases. I suggested that Nintendo do something similar three years ago, and the DSi does precisely what I suggested.

I agree, I was hoping for a list of quality games. Here's some of my favorites for GBA and DS:

GBA:

• Blast Arena Advance
• Elements Of Darkness
• Clem the Retarded Elf
• Anguna (disclaimer: I wrote this one)

DS:

• Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp
• Twin Isles
• A touch of war
• Video games hero(guitar hero clone)
• AngunaDS (again, disclaimer, I wrote this)

Now I just need to see if I can find my list of quality homebrew NES and Dreamcast games....

The Nintendo DS is homebrew heaven. There are dozens of mod chips for the DS. And many, many forums and libraries for homebrew applications. There's several development wiki's and some must have applications.

This is not a tool for piracy. If they want to stop piracy, they need to stop the people who are dumping roms. And you won't find tools to dump roms quite so easily. Attacking the companies that make legitimate devices lazy and anti-customer.

DS Lite, bitches. When you tire of SSH (and DSLinux + Boa as wearable web server), just VNC into your box through the coffeeshop's wireless. (I think it can play games too.)

It exists. SvSIP allows to to send and receive calls with SIP on your Nintendo DS. You can download it at http://svsip.free.fr/spip.php?rubrique9. There are also a couple free places you can use with it to make free calls on your DS that you can find by looking at the accompanying gbadev forum thread at http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14121.

It's pretty cool, though, the out-going quality is sort of bad (it could just be the free service I was using), while the incoming sound to your DS sound just fine.

So, take that PSP :-P

Now that both PSP homebrew and DS homebrew have SIP, PSP homebrew users will be able to talk to DS homebrew users over the Internet. What other gaming systems have cross-platform voice chat?

I don't buy that for one second. There is no way homebrew will provide any amount of competition to professional publishing houses, with their multi-million-dollar budgets and professional artists, composers, and so forth. Hell, just look at the Linux/Windows open-source game market... oh, right, there isn't one (aside from the odd exception, like Tux Racer or Frozen Bubble).

Who said anything about open source? Homebrew doesn't have to be open source at all, and there are a number of extremely talented people working on different projects. Check out GBADev.org, for example. They released a cart full of quality homebrew titles a little while ago. Or look at what's going on with XNA development. This video is from an in-development homebrew game, built with XNA and running on an Xbox 360. Judging from the gameplay shown, I'd pay money for that.

Yes, you can emulate single-player Game Boy games on a Game Boy Advance or on a Nintendo DS in GBA mode using the Goomba Color emulator.

Froogle perhaps? What about gbadev.org's list of retailers?

[citation needed]

Please show me which project listed in gbadev.org - DS Misc is pirated.

The administrators of a major GBA and DS homebrew forum have a strict policy against the discussion of methods of piracy or "backups". Perhaps this has helped Nintendo decide not to waste its time on fighting homebrew.

GBA is the sweet spot

A lot of people are going "holy cow! xbox programming! yay!" and ignoring that they're giving us tools that have existed in the pc world for decades. Microsoft isn't giving anyone anything.. they're seeing how much we'll pay for what we can get for free.

There are two possible answers to this:

1. When was the last time a company gave you a very inexpensive way to develop games for a console system? The last I can think of was Sony's Net Yaroze (essentially a limited PS1 dev kit), but that was quite a bit more expensive than XNA currently is (at $100/year, it'll take 7.5 years for a Creator's Club subscription to equal the cost of a Net Yaroze). PS2 Linux doesn't count as it was seriously hindered in its capabilities, and PS3 Linux won't count until you can fully utilize the GPU. GBADev and DSDev don't count because they're not official development tools provided by Nintendo and rely on hacks to allow you to run your code on the handhelds directly.
2. What other frameworks allow you to build games for both PC (windows) and console (xbox 360) at the same time (there are a few minor differences you need to take into account, but if you write a game for Windows using XNA it's mostly trivial to re-build that for 360, with maybe a few shader tweaks here and there)? Do those frameworks allow you to load your game onto the console in a "legal" (non-modchip, non-hack) way? A framework like Torque doesn't count becase you still have to be able to get a 360 dev kit to be able to run your game (dev kits cost upwards of $10K, and getting one requires you to jump through a bunch of hoops proving that you're a competent software developer with a high likelihood of actually being able to ship your game in a timely manner among many other things).

That tools like this have existed on the PC for a while is a red herring, because tools like this for consoles generally have not. If you want to stick with PC development, that's fine, but it's orthogonal to the discussion at hand.

And the internet was definitely censored.

All blog sites were always unavailable.
Google groups was always unavailable.
Friggin gbadev.org was censored.

The funniest was the television censorship.

We were near the hong kong border, so we got 2 Hong Kong stations on our local cable. Hong Kong, which is still pretty free, would have news stories about the mainland. But as soon as they started to say ANYTHING bad about the mainland, it would cut, mid-word, to a commercial.

This was just a few months ago -- not like things have changed much.

And they claim they don't censor things.

while emulators haven't received a lot of legal attention in the past, IP holders

I am an IP holder; my IP is 69.246.213.81, leased from my ISP. If you are referring to copyright, say "copyright". And yes, I am a copyright owner as well.

may also start attacking them as "adjuncts to piracy".

Could Microsoft reasonably attack Bochs, claiming that it "enables" the use of unauthorized copies of MS-DOS? No, because FreeDOS (which recently turned 1.0) works on Bochs. Likewise, when I use VisualBoyAdvance to run my own programs and others', whose copyright am I infringing?

The cartridge is actually what _helped_ Nintendo, not hurt it. They are damn near copy proof (within reason)...

Were they really now?

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=9643

Grab that version of MoonShell, use the installer, and set up the options for your particular type of flash media.
To convert: go to "MoonShell v1.31 full\misc\Movie encoding tools" (where "MoonShell v1.31 full" is the folder you installed MoonShell to on your HD) and use dpgenc. You can fiddle with the options if you like, but the standard configuration is good if you don't know exactly what you're doing. After the conversion is finished, copy the .dpg to the flash media. If this doesn't work, you've missed a step, or you're using the wrong version of MoonShell.

The PSP's big deal is homebrew, which the DS is lacking.

That's not the impression that I get from reading dsdev.org. Just 210 USD plus shipping gets you a fully homebrew-capable DS. The PSP, on the other hand, has that firmware 2.01 through 2.60 that require a specific M-rated game (which is actually banned in a few countries) to launch homebrew, and 2.70 and later that can't run homebrew at all.

Mod parent up.

As an amateur Nintend DS developer:
In the "good old days" one could buy a device called a PassMe (a glorified device that performs a JMP into the GBA cartridge's ROM thus executing unencrypted code. They come in several variations such as the PassMe and the SuperPass). Nintendo was not happy with the PassMe and made all the recent DS systems (after and including firmware 4.0) and made the handshaking between the DS and the DS cartridge a bit more complicated and on a game-by-game basis. Now, one needs a device called a PassMe2 which essentially pretends to be a game. Beyond this, there are "NoPass" devices which don't have to do the handshaking with the DS.

As it stands you can't use the rumble addon like the article implies, largely because both slots on the DS are taken up with the current state of homebrew (a GBA cart containing the code you want to run and a PassMe-like device in the DS slot). The DS section of this article is misleading. For more information, I suggest DualScene.net and MaxConsole.net for information on homebrew games and programs. One can check DSLinux.org for information on, appropriately, DS Linux, and one can check GBADev.org for information on DS and GBA development.

PS: I got a DS for Christmas! And I don't know of a real way of knowing whether I've got the new firmware or not. And the emulators currently are not very good.

For more information see the forums

Those Slashdotters amongst you and those curious should check out the following sites for the latest in Nintendo DS Emulation and Homebrew news and downloads PDroms.com - Legal Rom Download and news site.
Drunken Coders - DS Homebrew News Site.
Nintendo DS Emulation News - Nintendo DS Emulation and Homebrew News and Downloads Site/Archive.
DS Development Forums - The Hub of the DS Development Scene.
All those sites provide you with everything you need to know about the Nintendo DS and its Legal Homebrew Community.

Finally a decent screen to play Thrust on.

I'm seriously waiting for the first hentai game for the DS, it could be so perfect!

Here are some links to just a few examples of GBA homebrew games.

http://www.gbadev.org/compo2003.php
http://www.gbadev.org/compo2002hearts.php
http://www.gbadev.org/compo2002.php
http://2004mbit.gbadev.org/
http://www.mrdictionary.net/blastarenaa.php
http://www.websamba.com/gamecircle/index.html
or browse through the archives at gbadev.org and see all sorts of homebrew games that aren't emulators.

Or go here for some Nintendo DS homebrew
http://www.neoflash.com/forum/index.php?topic=654. 0

I agree with what you are saying though. I don't buy flash carts or mod chips to play homebrew stuff. I might be buying a PSP very soon now as well.

Here are some links to just a few examples of GBA homebrew games.

http://www.gbadev.org/compo2003.php
http://www.gbadev.org/compo2002hearts.php
http://www.gbadev.org/compo2002.php
http://2004mbit.gbadev.org/
http://www.mrdictionary.net/blastarenaa.php
http://www.websamba.com/gamecircle/index.html
or browse through the archives at gbadev.org and see all sorts of homebrew games that aren't emulators.

Or go here for some Nintendo DS homebrew
http://www.neoflash.com/forum/index.php?topic=654. 0

I agree with what you are saying though. I don't buy flash carts or mod chips to play homebrew stuff. I might be buying a PSP very soon now as well.

Here are some links to just a few examples of GBA homebrew games.

http://www.gbadev.org/compo2003.php
http://www.gbadev.org/compo2002hearts.php
http://www.gbadev.org/compo2002.php
http://2004mbit.gbadev.org/
http://www.mrdictionary.net/blastarenaa.php
http://www.websamba.com/gamecircle/index.html
or browse through the archives at gbadev.org and see all sorts of homebrew games that aren't emulators.

Or go here for some Nintendo DS homebrew
http://www.neoflash.com/forum/index.php?topic=654. 0

I agree with what you are saying though. I don't buy flash carts or mod chips to play homebrew stuff. I might be buying a PSP very soon now as well.

Here are some links to just a few examples of GBA homebrew games.

http://www.gbadev.org/compo2003.php
http://www.gbadev.org/compo2002hearts.php
http://www.gbadev.org/compo2002.php
http://2004mbit.gbadev.org/
http://www.mrdictionary.net/blastarenaa.php
http://www.websamba.com/gamecircle/index.html
or browse through the archives at gbadev.org and see all sorts of homebrew games that aren't emulators.

Or go here for some Nintendo DS homebrew
http://www.neoflash.com/forum/index.php?topic=654. 0

I agree with what you are saying though. I don't buy flash carts or mod chips to play homebrew stuff. I might be buying a PSP very soon now as well.

Check out the GBA dev scene. All sorts of stuff being made recently. Of course, some of it better than others. (yeah, there's a whole lot of tetris clones, but there's a few real gems in there too).

Maybe some people want to pirate games, but some of us just get a big kick out of seeing our games run on actual console hardware.

It's also a bit silly to assert you can't have a pet game for the PSP simply because you don't have two LCDs.

It's not the second screen as much as the fact that it is touch sensitive. Nintendogs could have been done without the top screen, but if you don't have a touch screen, how can you touch your dog in pleasant ways?

Yes, a few of these games are sequels or have related series.

And a lot of the DS games aren't. Feel the Magic, Meteos, Polarium, and the like are brand new franchises. There are borderline cases: Pac-Pix and Kirby Canvas Curse play nothing like other games in their franchises to the point where the franchise is nearly irrelevant, unlike the racing games (Wipeout, MC, NFS, RR) whose gameplay is just like that of their predecessors. There certainly aren't enough original franchises on the PSP to justify the $120 difference in purchase price.

Also, the PSP doesn't really have something to be backward-compatible with, yet

PS1 games through a Walkman-shaped accessory analogous to a GameCube Game Boy Player perhaps?

but that is a nice feature of the DS. (Although why they elected to disallow multiplayer link games is boggling.)

Probably because a link port would have taken up extra space on the console that is otherwise used for the real headphone jack, and because they wanted to prevent people from using flash card kits based on a GBA link cable.

where can I download Nintendo's hobbiest SDK?

A hobbyist SDK compatible with GBA and Nintendo DS is available here, and the forum is here.

You think they weren't entrenched after the SNES?

Because the Sonic the Hedgehog series and a more accurate port of Mortal Kombat 1 sold a lot of Sega Genesis systems, the Super NES wasn't entrenched nearly as much as the NES was.

Developers may also like the fact they can throw 1.8G on a PSP disc

How long does it take a UMD drive to read 1800 MB of data? Translate that into a temptation to drop to a NOW LOADING screen and you see what makes PSP not the best choice for playing five minutes at a time.

At the moment, I'm in my apartment in Shenzhen, using skype. No problems.

Of course, that might mean they haven't gotten around to blocking it, or just that I'm now on their bad list.

In response to a lot of other posts, though, the articles indicates that just the one major telecom plans to block it. It doesn't say that it's going to be blocked at the great firewall level. (like google groups, blogspot, and even gbadev.org).

There is plenty of stuff coming out of the DS homebrew community too - and of course DS users may also be eyeing up a certain OS port from afar...

I agree that both systems really do need more games - but the DS does already have some fun titles: Electroplankton, Zookeeper, Warioware.

Admittedly they aren't quite up to the grandeur of Rockstar's opus, but not all games need to be in that vein, especially on a handheld device.

You say PocketNES works great, but can I fit 900 games on the EZCart?

I don't think 900 NES games were ever commercially released in North America or in Europe. But if you get a 1 Gbit (128 MB) or larger flash card, or you get a SuperCard (adapter for CompactFlash or SD memory), then yes you can fit hundreds of NES ROMs and/or GBA multiboot games (such as Tetanus On Drugs) on one cart.

Is there a GBA SNES emulator? If so, how do I use the X and Y buttons?

SNES Advance has been ported with sound to the Nintendo DS. Details are in parallel threads at pocketheaven.com and gbadev.org.

Also, I can't say I've ever seen any lumines clones.

There's Luminesweeper for GBA, and that page lists four other Lumines clones (but only Kaikai's is any good).

Maybe you're one of those people that sees a game that involves blocks and thinks every one is tetris.

Can you name them all?

I guess you're forgetting that nintendo is re-releasing all of their old games in the NES classics series

Well at least the GBA SP and Nintendo DS can emulate Nintendo's classic systems. The same can't be said of the PSP to the PS1.

There's already a port of Angband being developed (not on Linux, though):

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=5911&start =45

I think supporting consoles is as dangerous as supporting Windows, because I want PCs to win.

So do you suggest that developers of homebrew GBA games should switch to supporting Palm OS or the J2ME platform or something? What decent handheld game system is there that's not locked down?

So what advantage is there in hacking a Juice Box over hacking a Game Boy Advance SP, which has a similarly sized screen and is better understood, other than possibly clearance prices for the Juice Box?

PSP MIPS R4000 : http://www.comms.scitech.susx.ac.uk/fft/programmin g/R4400_Uman_book_Ed2.pdf

IPOD ARM7TDMI : http://www.gbadev.org/download.php?section=docs&fi lename=ARM7TDMI_Data_Sheet_'ARM_DDI_0029E'.zip

the cpu's these devices use are not all that special... it's the custom hardware that is around them that is undocumented... and it seems to me people have been quiet successful in figuring out many of the systems people actually care about.

Where did you pick up these flash cables and such?

Lik Sang no longer carries GBA flash equipment due to an injunction, but these shops that do are reviewed.

Software piracy is awesome!

Ignorance is awesome!
http://www.gbadev.org/index.php
http://www.gameboy-advance-roms.com/

Theres a start to the couple thousand community developed games for the gb/gba. Here's a $1, buy a clue or a bullet.
I recommend the bullet, it's quicker.

Funny you should mention this. A set of homebrew GBA games are being released on cartridges as we speak. 2004Mbit Development Competition. I don't know if it's legal, but I think it's pretty cool.

The DS also has a growing development community, and most likely, it'll be the more fruitful, at least in the short term. For one, we can already run our own code on the DS - and who knows when that'll be possible on the PSP?

I hope cool things do turn up on the PSP, but if you're interested in DS hacking, check out these:

• http://www.dsdev.org/
• DS Dev Forum
• http://www.dslinux.org/
• http://www.dspassme.com/

The DS has a whole community of home-brew developers. Most of the peeps that were developing for the GBA have jumped to the DS.

http://dsdev.org/

http://www.gbadev.org/

With my DS I can run Linux now, GBA games and SNES, Genisis game to name a few. Nintendo has already licensed the PalmOS and they have have "market dominance." BTW, the DS has sold about a million more units then the PSP. Were you saying something about "even playing fields." The PSP is still the underdog, it's just a pretty one.

And just admit it, you really don't give a rats arse about the DS? You just wanted to call attention to the PSP... This is a "Look at me post!!!" :p

Well, so far the guys at DSDev have managed to get the DS's "Play Downloaded Game" feature to display a title and icon of their choosing. I'm not aware of the particulars, try joining the forum and going along.

They claim interoperability with all routers and cards when in reality the ds's nifi can only talk with certain hacked wireless cards.

for a more reputable site go to http://forum.gbadev.org/viewforum.php?f=18

No offense, but I say screw that -- get a GBA emulator and development environment at GBA dev , and you can work cross-platform with all F/OSS on some hardware that has lots of easy graphic capabilities and input methods built in. Plus there are tons of well commented demo apps that will get you up and started in a flash. PCs are too complex for a first project -- GBAs are more limited and easier to get your head around.

In the back of the ZX Spectrum manual was an ASCII chart/instruction set dump. Strange terms like EB-extended and DD-extended. No idea what they meant. Then Electronics & Computing Monthly started a series on Z80 programming. I was hooked. I bought the HiSoft assembler and dove straight into it (at 15 yrs old). All of a sudden those slow BASIC functions became ultra-fast. I was hooked.

The next year, at 16, I bought an Atari 800XL. Wanted a C64, but that was more expensive. I bought the Atari Assembler/Editor cartridge and starting writing 6502. I couldn't have written more than 100 lines of Atari BASIC in the 3 years I owned that machine.

In 1986 I bought an Atari ST (wanted an Amiga500, but it was more expensive). It came with a book (the title of which I can't remember) but it covered 68000 assembly. Oh my God! So many registers, instructions and addressing modes. First order of business was buying HiSoft's Atari ST assembler "DevpacST" (Andy Pennel, the author of DevPac for the ZX Spectrum and Atari ST now works on developer tools at Microsoft, I think). It didn't take me long to learn 68000 and pretty soon I had software sprites flying around on the screen. Big fun.

In '87 I started University, which gave me my first introduction to UNIX. All the Computer Science machines were UNIX. Over time we did 'C', and I got into UNIX systems programming, sockets, networking, etc. In '88 I used my first X Window System machine on a Digital DECStation 3100 and was appauled by the size of the binaries.

One summer vacation I bought a Tandy TRS80 (I think) which had a 6809. Just for fun I learned it and wrote a few little programs.

My work since I graduated (1990) has been mainly networking embedded systems. It has been mostly 'C', occaisionally C++, a couple of times a little 68K, and when I have managed to swing it, a little micontroller work in assembly (just because I love doing things the hard way).

A couple of years ago I discovered the Gameboy Advance development group GBADEV and for the first time in a long time the childhood itch to program a new platform really hit hard. I bought a FLASH cart, downloaded the GCC port for the ARM, bought the ARM book and taught myself ARM assembly and got to work on a couple of projects.

The GBA is really quite retro. It's pretty much impossible for a solo developer to write anything really interesting for the PC. The bar is just too high, with art especially. The GBA, being a relatively trivial system allows hobbyists to get to a level on par with professionals... or at least to be able to see the bar from where they're standing.

Programming is what I do for a living. It's my job, and as such it doesn't give me the pleasure it used to. Protocols and systems programming isn't fun. Send a message from A to B, do shit, send a reply. Nothing visual. It has its challenges, especially making things scale and be performant within the constraints of the protocol and/or the system, but really... yawn... been there, done that, and I can do it again and again (which is why God invented 30yr mortgages). I dabbled with Wind