I recently did a deep dive into DS homebrew. Some cool stuff - a Yugioh calculator, mp3 player, port of Doom. In particular, I just love the hardware of the DS Lite or the DsI - it feels great in 2023, and the symmetrical screens are amazing when holding in vertical mode reading an ebook or playing Hotel Dusk. It also has one of the best pieces of software ever for learning Chinese, ‘My Chinese Coach’ - there are additionally two more (at least) homebrew software packages that focus on Chinese, such as DS Zhongwhen.
DS is very underrated - so many great games, and it’s an emulation dream. All without being too powerful, and having ‘realistic’ graphics that just drain battery life.
I was the one who ported DOOM to DS back in high school; we were all in the same DS homebrew IRC channel together. A lot of my now-closest friends worked on the other projects (including the author of DS Linux) -- incidentally we all ended up working for various tech companies in Silicon Valley and ended up reuniting in real life decades later.
DS Zhongwen, that's a name I didn't heard in a long time! I am its author :-). I also made other stuff, like Knytt Stories DS. Making homebrew for the Nintendo DS was a great experience, as the limitations (and possibilities) of the hardware gave enough space for both creativity and engineering challenges.
The most surprising thing to me about DS and Switch homebrew was how approachable they are. For some reason I always imagined building things on them would be wizardry, but it's really not.
I had a dive in to it. The docs and info is pretty accessible, the problem comes from the fact that the hardware itself is inherently pretty confusing. Having to understand all these memory banks and graphics modes, etc.
Was a lot of fun though. It's super cool how easy it is to just download libnds, compile the demos and get them running with a $9 flash cart.
There's also an entire visual novel engine called VNDS[0], with quite a few ports made for it. Afaict most "classic" VNs have ports available for it.
Also if you have a 3DS, check out the TwilightMenu project. It's a DSiMenu clone that can load homebrew titles and the like from the SD card (as well as flashcards).
Comments
I recently did a deep dive into DS homebrew. Some cool stuff - a Yugioh calculator, mp3 player, port of Doom. In particular, I just love the hardware of the DS Lite or the DsI - it feels great in 2023, and the symmetrical screens are amazing when holding in vertical mode reading an ebook or playing Hotel Dusk. It also has one of the best pieces of software ever for learning Chinese, ‘My Chinese Coach’ - there are additionally two more (at least) homebrew software packages that focus on Chinese, such as DS Zhongwhen.
DS is very underrated - so many great games, and it’s an emulation dream. All without being too powerful, and having ‘realistic’ graphics that just drain battery life.
I was the one who ported DOOM to DS back in high school; we were all in the same DS homebrew IRC channel together. A lot of my now-closest friends worked on the other projects (including the author of DS Linux) -- incidentally we all ended up working for various tech companies in Silicon Valley and ended up reuniting in real life decades later.
That's an awesome anecdote, thank you for your amazing contributions!
Great story, thanks for sharing!
DS Zhongwen, that's a name I didn't heard in a long time! I am its author :-). I also made other stuff, like Knytt Stories DS. Making homebrew for the Nintendo DS was a great experience, as the limitations (and possibilities) of the hardware gave enough space for both creativity and engineering challenges.
Thank you for your work! :)
The most surprising thing to me about DS and Switch homebrew was how approachable they are. For some reason I always imagined building things on them would be wizardry, but it's really not.
I had a dive in to it. The docs and info is pretty accessible, the problem comes from the fact that the hardware itself is inherently pretty confusing. Having to understand all these memory banks and graphics modes, etc.
Was a lot of fun though. It's super cool how easy it is to just download libnds, compile the demos and get them running with a $9 flash cart.
For the record, there are dozens of pieces of homebrew software worth mentioning.
Lemminds DS is my favorite.
http://www.mrdictionary.net/lemmings/
There's also an entire visual novel engine called VNDS[0], with quite a few ports made for it. Afaict most "classic" VNs have ports available for it.
Also if you have a 3DS, check out the TwilightMenu project. It's a DSiMenu clone that can load homebrew titles and the like from the SD card (as well as flashcards).
[0]: https://github.com/BASLQC/vnds
Is there a good source to find DS homebrew/docs on developing for the system?
Yes.
https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm