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January DS Homebrew Overview

Posted by Zonk on from the non-standard-dual-screen-devices dept.

marcellizot writes "Handheld site Pocket Gamer has a new monthly DS homebrew review roundup, which kicks off today with an update on slot-1 hardware methods, plus a look at DS Motion, Lemmings on DS, Flashback DS, Tetris Attack DS and more. From the article: 'The latest hardware is the slot-1 type, which is a DS-sized card and requires no additional hardware or modifications to the DS. These are much simpler to use than slot-2 devices, but as the majority of homebrew was designed for the slot-2 hardware and it's ability to boot GBA software, there are some compatibility issues. They are thankfully being ironed out, and as slot-1 devices become the standard we fully expect that all new homebrew will be designed with them in mind.'"

4 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Homebrew... by JMZero · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think one of the things that tarnishes the "Homebrew" image is the percentage of games/content that are recycled from other games. I'm guilty of this to some extent myself in my own game dev projects: it's much easier to lift assets or ideas from completed, successful works than it is to develop everything from scratch. And this is not entirely bad - there's lots of great remakes and re-imaginings out there.

    However, it seems like - especially for consoles - there's a real dearth of quality, finished original material. If we could point to a quantity of such material then there might be a more adequate defense for hardware and efforts to allow homebrew development. Right now, there's a lot of truth to the argument that items like NDS flash cards are pretty much just channels for illegal material.

    --
    Let's not stir that bag of worms...
  2. [citation needed] by tepples · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I love how "homebrew" has become the accepted slang for "playing illegally copied ROMs".

    [citation needed]

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

  3. Yarr? by tepples · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Another disadvantage of the M3 simply, and many (all?) slot one cards is that download play (when you play locally against someone who doesn't have the game) does not work for many Nintendo games, including Mario Kart.

    Yes it does. All you have to do is turn off the DS, push on the M3 DS Simply card to eject it from SLOT-1, insert an authentic Mario Kart DS Game Card into SLOT-1, and turn on the DS. Homebrew isn't backups of commercial games.

  4. Don't get a slot-1 device if you want to run Linux by stsp · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The latest hardware is the slot-1 type, which is a DS-sized card and requires no additional hardware or modifications to the DS. These are much simpler to use than slot-2 devices, but as the majority of homebrew was designed for the slot-2 hardware and it's ability to boot GBA software, there are some compatibility issues. They are thankfully being ironed out, and as slot-1 devices become the standard we fully expect that all new homebrew will be designed with them in mind.'

    For DSLinux, the issues cannot be ironed out! So this new trend gives us headaches :(

    The DS has only 4MB of RAM. DSLinux has been using extra RAM present in add-on devices for some time now (usually an extra 32MB). But because only slot-2 is mapped into RAM, only slot-2 devices can provide additional RAM. Slot-1 devices can only be accessed via serial.

    So if you want to run DSLinux, don't get a slot-1 device, get a slot-2 device that provides additional RAM.

    See also:
    http://mailman.dslinux.in-berlin.de/pipermail/dsli nux-devel/2006-December/000379.html
    http://www.dslinux.org/wiki/Running_Homebrew#Recom mended_storage_devices