05.16.07

Amoebax on Nintendo DS

Posted in Amoebax, Projects at 12:12 pm by Jordi Fita

I’ve been playing with the devkitPro’s devkitARM toolchain for the last couple of days, just out of curiosity to see if I could do something that could run on the Nintendo DS. It’s not that I own a Nintendo DS, but a friend of mine does and he always asked if I could be able to build a port of Amoebax for him

Since I’m not new to cross-compilers (I’m not an expert either) I had little problems installing an running the devkitARM toolchain on my GNU/Linux box, although I presume it’s more for the fact that the guys at devkitPro did a wonderful job putting together a binary tarball that just works out of the box. Then I found a port of the SDL for the Nintendo DS created by Troy Davis, and that gave me that feeling that Amoebax could be compiled for a Nintendo DS.

Of course, just having the SDL libraries available doesn’t mean that Amoebax could be compiled and run as easily as it can be done with the other supported platforms. I had to learn how the sample Makefile works, how to put the graphics inside the DS rom, and which emulator to use

At last I was able to do it, but there’s a lot of missing “features” that renders the game unplayable, yet, on a real DS: no joystick support, no sound, no music, and it’s really slooooww.

Anyway, here are a couple of screenshots take with no$gmb emulator just to prove that I was once able to run Amoebax on a Nintendo DS:

I’m pretty sure that the Nintendo DS version of Amoebax (if we actually make the port) won’t be the most downloaded version, but for sure I’m taking a lot of fun with it.

I was also thinking about a PocketPC version of Amoebax, but I’m having problem building the toolchain. I’ve tried with the cegcc and mingwce version, but then I wasn’t able to compile the SDL library. I also tried Microsoft’s embedded Visual C++ 4.0 but I had the same results as with the GNU/Linux toolchain. I’ll keep trying, though

Oh by the way we are going to release the next version of Amoebax, version 0.1.2, Sunday 20th May. For more information about this version, see the milestone page on our Trac.

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