Stevens Programming Site Blog

Current status: On Hold

I’ve put this little project on hold for the time being as I am unable to actually do it with my current coding style – hack at the code, what design document???

So I’ve put the project on hold while I actually sit down and design the project correctly – unfortunately this will mean that it may never be done as I can not design anything without wanting to code something, and I also suffer from a mental issue which I like to call “Oh shiny, shiny lets do that”, in other words I get distracted way too easy from projects unless I’m enjoying doing it.  I will return to the unified console project once I get something major done on the design document – I will actually get something done on it, it will just take a little while longer than I originally wanted.

Anyway the shiny that’s caught my eye today was a document I wrote a while back for a game I wanted to write – and yes I did write it as if I can remember correctly at the time I was working and had a lot of free time at work, and without access to a game or development environment I started to type up this game idea, and I want to actually work on it – but the problem there is that the document is not all there, some of the pages are missing, and it looks like I spilt coffee on it at some point XD.  Anyway it got me thinking the background of the game, where it came from etc, and I started to write down a couple of idea’s for me to pursue – one is a game, the other is something to do with my current console code, and if anyone knows me on the #DSDEV IRC channel they may have spotted me taking to WinterMute about UTF-16 / UCS-2 and UTF-8 encoding standards.  Well I’ve decided to head back to my Homebrew Menu interface and this time do something other than the original plan of DSi like menu system.

I’m going to use my graphics console but I need to find some good fonts that are UTF-16/UCS-2 compatible for the end product, but for now I’m going to use simple ascii file names.

While attempting to code a homebrew menu graphical interface I started to see that the way I’ve coded the graphical console technical demo’s and code could not actually be transferred onto the sprite system easily, so I’ve had to do a little bit of thinking about a unified console system that works on all 3 modes that the DS has:

• Tile
• Bitmap
• Sprite

To enable a console output in the tile or sprite modes would mean a totally separate console sub-system, which would mean having 3 or 4 different ways to output a character glyph onto the different modes, so I’ve started to break down a console system into a very simple framework that will contain just one set of code that will work in all screen modes.

Other things that I will have to take into account would be the screen colours – 4/8/15 bit modes – that require their own output code.  This little project will take a while to do but it will be the first real project I do for the DS, and the homebrew menu interface will be the example project for it.

The current devkitPro contains a hidden gem of an application a Homebrew Menu application that allows some of the newer features to be used correctly (nitrofs file system compatibility one of them that I am aware of), and while it’s nice it’s not the best looking application to show off the features of the DS.  I’d put a screen shot here to show you what it looks like as there is no emulators that emulate FAT SD cards correctly at the moment, so the following is what it sort of looks like (it is in text mode on the DS.)

fat:/
------------------------------
*App1.nds
 App2.nds

So yeah it’s crappy XD.  Anyway what I’m hopefully going to do is a nice GUI for it, something along the lines of the DSi’s new interface.  I’ve already got the basic sprites designed, and a quick test with the sprites put at static positions looks ok, so far.  I’ve still got some work to do on getting the application to work correctly.  Since the bottom screen is used only for the application the top screen can be used for other things, at the moment I’m looking at putting a calendar on there along with some of the features of the old DS firmware (Profile name, time, etc).

Since the current version is very limited (it’s static information at the moment) a working version may possibly take a few days to get right before I have something that works.