New devkitARM toolchain. New Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming underway.

Published: 2008-12-13
Updated: 2010-12-19
Author: Jaeden Amero

The new version (r24) of devkitARM is here. Along with it comes the highly anticipated libnds 1.3.1 release. A new libnds means a broken Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming and a lot more other broken source code.

This new release of libnds introduces more high-level APIs and some all new low level APIs. This release renames some registers, preventing the source code included with Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming from building successfully. It also changes how the interrupt system is initialized, no longer requiring (and breaking if you do use) irqInit in main. I do like the new register names, as they match the names as documented in GBATEK.

One reason I started writing the manual was because all the other tutorials (all two of them, at that time) were out of date. I feel strongly about having fresh information available to potential members of the homebrew community; an out of date tutorial is very useless and can be very frustrating. Users of such tutorials blame themselves for the failures and have no idea where to go next, as everything explaining to them where to go no longer applies. Without some positive reinforcement (in the form of a successful build and a graphic on the screen), many would be community members give up. As such, I’m working on updating the Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming source code and will have a new release out soon.