Monday 12th May 2008, 7:29 EDT

The Moon Books Project Review Contest!
Posted by btmullins on 2008-05-01
The Moon Books Project is  pleased to announce the May Moon Books Review Contest. We will be giving away 8 iTouchDS cards on May 31st to the winners. Review categories include DS games, DS hardware, DS homebrew, movies and books.
http://moonbooks.net/moonbooks/page.php?105

Bitsweeper! - Release 2
Posted by Izhido on 2008-04-29
A new version of Bitsweeper! has been released. Changes include the following: Built using devkitARM r23 (lots of improvements in the code) Added the much-needed DLDI support for saving scores in your card. If no media is present, an existing slot-2 card can be used too to save best scores. (This was already present in release 1, but, because of a hideous bug in the code, it didn't work as expected.) Board cells are truly random now thanks to improvements in current libnds. Many, many bugs fixed! As of this release, there are no known bugs in the game. Slight, but noticeable, visual improvements. If you've seen the first release, they will be immediately apparent. The game can be downloaded from the new site (see below for details). Big thanks to dovoto for providing the web hosting for this project!
http://dsotaku.drunkencoders.com/

DeSmuME 0.8 released
Posted by liranuna on 2008-04-27
The DeSmuME team have released a new version of the emulator based on yopyop's work. This new release fixes a number of bugs in the emulation core. The Mac port got a lot of new features, including sound, preferences, screenshots and japanese translation. The Windows port has some updates as well with a new core supporting joystick.
http://desmume.org/2008/04/22/desmume-08-released/

The Moon Books Project Update for 04-26-2008
Posted by btmullins on 2008-04-26
The Moon Books Project, your premiere source for (legal) comics, books and movies on the Nintendo DS! First off we have caught up on the releases of Heroes Comics. We now are current and up to date with issues #1 to #80. Next, we have to offer three movies for your viewing displeasure this time. The Devil's Messenger In this feature version of the Swedish TV series "13 Demon Street," a 50,000-year-old woman is found frozen in an ice field, and a man's death is foretold in dreams. There is at least one redeeming thing about this film: It stars Lon Chaney Jr. The Gorgon A Monster With the Power to Turn Living Screaming Flesh Into Stone! What more needs to be said? It stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Black Samurai The Cool Master of Kung-Fu and Karate! ... erm...
http://moonbooks.net

New Section: Hardware Reviews
Posted by Dovoto on 2008-04-21
Added a new section to attempt to keep track of all the interesting hardware floating around.  If anyone is interested in posting a review of their particular gear let me know.
http://www.drunkencoders.com/reviews.php

DevkitArm r22
Posted by Dovoto on 2008-04-21
WinterMute: The latest release of the ARM toolchain is now available. There are a number of improvements binutils updated to 2.18.50 gcc updated to 4.3.0 grit updated to 0.8 ndstool now uses default.arm7 from libnds directory newlib multibyte code enabled with C-UTF8 locale devkitPro Updater 1.4.6 now downloads and installs the default.arm7 file used for arm9 only projects separately from libnds. This will allow us to maintain a much improved default arm7 core which will later include built in wifi support. As usual, windows users should run the updater which will update itself, make sure you add the new default arm7 when shown the update list. For other platforms where automatic update is not available here are the links to the SF releases. devkitARM release 22 default arm7 20080416 The donations page has been fixed, thanks to those who told me the donation buttons were broken. Your support is much appreciated. A porting guide for 4.3.0 is available on the main gnu.org site, there are a number of new features and better conformance to C++ standards
http://devkitpro.org

Tiles for sale
Posted by Dovoto on 2008-04-12
Tayoko has recently had a project discontinued and as a result has some graphics resources for sale cheap. If you are in the market for a few bits of pixel art Tayoko has an outdoor tile set and full sprite sheet available.
http://www.drunkencoders.com/tayoko/bundle.htm

The Moon Books Project Update for 04-11-2008
Posted by btmullins on 2008-04-11
For the fourth week in a row we are giving away a DS Lite skin, courtesy of Game Face Graphics. This week we are giving away their 'Snake' skin, which is one of their new additions. Other than that we have added a couple new movies this week, and completed a classic series of Sonny Chiba martial arts films. Below is a list of what's new: First off, we have a Moon Shell theme created by one of our users, made specifically for ease of use while reading books on the DS. Secondly, The film They Came From Beyond Space. The plot goes as follows: Scientists investigating an unusual meteor shower in a rural field are possessed by an alien force bent on an ulterior purpose. Last, and my personal favorite is the release of The Street Fighters Final Revenge. This Sonny Chiba film completes the series of Street Fighter martial arts films. Note, this has nothing to do with the Capcom series of games, and is not for the squemish.
http://moonbooks.net

akkit optimisation competition
Posted by WinterMute on 2008-04-01
The first of many akkit.org programming competitions has been recently announced so, if you're a budding hacker keen to show off your optimisation skills then head over to the akkit competition page. This first event is all about generating a mandlebrot set on the DS as quickly as possible.

The Moon Books Project gives away DS Lite skins!
Posted by btmullins on 2008-03-24
The Moon Books Project and Game Face Graphics are proud to announce 4 weeks of free Nintendo DS skins! The next four Fridays we will be giving away a free skin for the Nintendo DS. This week we will be giving away the Solar Flare skin.
http://moonbooks.net/moonbooks/news.php?item.273.4

Xroar 0.20 released
Posted by pas on 2008-03-24
Dragon and Tandy CoCo emulator Here is an excerpt from the change log: Changed from v0.19 to v0.20 * Don't show artifacted colours for CSS=0. * Better emulation of undocumented 6809 behaviour. * New joystick axis and button mapping options. * Add GTK+-2 file requester. * Mid-instruction peripheral state sync. * Restructure CPU core to more accurately reflect data sheet. * PIA code not so intimately tied to emulator code. * New 5-bit NTSC cross-colour renderer. * NTSC cross-colour phase saved with snapshots.
http://www.6809.org.uk/dragon/xroar.shtml#download

Homewbrew Wii Channel!
Posted by Dovoto on 2008-03-17
Bushing has done it again!.  He has managed to load a homewbrew channel into the Wii menu which means you can launch your homebrew without the zelda disk (you still need the zelda to run the hack in the firstplace though).    Wii Homebrew Channel - For more funny videos, click here
http://wiibrew.org

Pocket Physics v0.6 released
Posted by oblachubs on 2008-03-17
Download: http://tobw.net/ds/pocketphysics.zip   v0.6 (2008-03-15) Massive speed optimizations! Fixed the "explosion" bug As a side effect of this fix, results are now 100% reproducible Moved to Box2D 2.0 (Box2D now has official DS support!) Deleting sketches in the loading dialog Objects that fall out of the world are no longer simulated .PP files now have a single root elemnt => XML compliance An author tag is added to the .PP files Pins now snap to the center of gravity of shapes There iss a separate version that doesn not save screenshots for people with saving problems with the SuperCard Lite I tried it myself and I can say that it runs more smoothy, the lock up has been fixed and the physics have been slightly change.  That being said the existing PP files still work.  Great work _0xtob !
http://tobw.net/index.php?cat_id=3&project=Pocket+Physics

Geckoload updated
Posted by Dovoto on 2008-03-10
This makes me wish i could afford a second wii to keep close to my puter.  v0.0.3 a gamecube pad isn't required anymore, the wii reset button is used to confirm the flash process the loader code is executed straight away if it has been flashed before (no interaction required) .elf file support thanks to tmbinc the stub doesn't overwrite the globals anymore, fixed by WinterMute a received binary is now written to MEM2 before relocating ported the client to win32 (binary included) the client now uses default device names on linux and os x the audio and dsp subsystems are initialized on reloading (no more annoying noise)
http://wiibrew.org/index.php?title=Geckoloader

Plan9 project Summer of Code
Posted by WinterMute on 2008-03-10
The Plan 9 community is recruiting student ds developers for google summer of code 2008. If anyone is interested you can make contact on the plan9 irc channel on freenode or through the plan9 google group. The  group also has a project page found at code.google.com/p/inferno-ds/ This should be a great opportunity to combine your studies with DS homebrew.
http://code.google.com/p/inferno-ds/

Blender Export Script
Posted by Dovoto on 2008-03-09
A python script which exports vertex and normal data as DS display list data in c source file format. Excerpt from site: Use the export script to save your model to a C file. Keep in mind that the DS will not handle high-polygon meshes well. Place this file inside your "source" directory. Then create a .h file that looks like this: const extern u32 Suzanne[];  where "Suzanne" is the name of your mesh. Check the .c file to make sure they match. Then, inside of your code, you can just call glCallList((u32*)Suzanne); to display the model. (Again being sure to replace "Suzanne" with the actual name of your mesh)
http://hackerpilot.org/dsblender.php

Artwork by Rat