State of the Homebrew – May 2006

It’s that time of the month again – that’s right! It’s time to address the masses about the hidden wonders of the Nintendo DS’s homebrew scene. It’s been a long time running, and finally, the DS’s homebrew has matured into a beautiful, flourishing technical scene – instead of the fringe experimental field it was back with the gigantic home-made passthru devices.

Thanks to the hard work of the scene’s programmers, with a little work, the DS can play games, check your email, listen to Internet radios, be a virtual sketchpad and even go so far as to act as a recording sample tracker!

Peep below the jump for some hot link-on-link action!

On the most promising forefront of the DS homebrew scene is, and always has been, the ubiquitary DSLinux. Now that the little OS that could can support SSL connections and WiFi, you can connect to another Linux machine and use any kind of command-line programs like you would on any machine that supports SSL. It even supports a primitive GUI, and thanks to a memory reconstruction, many more programs are on the way. Cool stuff as always.

You don’t need DSLinux to connect to IRC with SlyphIRC. Kinda buggy as of right now, but the author is steadily making it much more usable. It totally works.

The author of SlyphIRC put that project on the backburner recently, and diverted his attention to one of the DS’s hot projects right now – Internet radio. His attempt is SlyphAMP. Another attempt currently in development is Dissodence. Both are early, but both work to a degree.

Ever dream about checking your mail anywhere on the street, but don’t have the luxury of either a laptop or a hand-held PDA, you’ll love NDSMail. It’s not finished, but it’s completely and totally functional so far. You can receive mail, send mail, and admire mail from afar.

Like a black horse in the night, DSOrganize is shaping up to work incredibly well, instead of being just a novelty as it was before. Now it hosts PDA-like functions, can play music, and many more! Great if your arm is full of notes to yourself, and the other one full of your DS.

What once started as an experiment has now become a nearly full-fledged, customizable game! A great little toy to play with – MegaETk.

The incredible media application MoonShell marches on as always. A testiment to Japanese industrialism!

Do you like Yahoo! Towers? How about your DS? Well, you must not be the only one out there, because somebody totally ported that addictive game onto that crazy little grey brick. Small game, but neat style!

The French development scene returns with another incredible retro port, following on the heels of some of their early work with a duck hunt clone as well. Here comes Oil Panic DS for the palm of your hand! Relive the glory days.

DS-BLUBB, the battleship-like clone made for WiFi, and first with a server lobby! It’s a neat little game with drawing for speech! Give it a try!

Bafio works the weekends, because he’s been making some steady improvements to his online Pictochat alternative, WiFi Chat. Still completely public, but it’s working up to being a pretty cool application. Not much use, but fun to toy with.

Ever wanted to chat on MSN with your DS? That’s the one killer app we used to think about when the DS came out, right? Well, the magic of DS Homebrew starts appearing with BEUP, a prototype MSN chat program. AIM support’s comin’ down the pipeline sometime, but most likely not for this project. Keep an eye on this one. Also, pay attention to NDSIM, another competing project.

Possibly one of the coolest applications for audiophiles on the DS is NitroTracker, a fully-featured, completely functional tracker (if you don’t know, a little sample music maker. Oldschool stuff) for your DS. Gives you everything you want in normal trackers, but you get the luxury of both a touchscreen and a microphone. One of the most polished homebrew programs ever.

Davr, a developer that knows the wonders of Qtopia and other linux handhelds, ported Sketches of Q to the DS – extremely faithful, completely fully functional, and pretty neat for sketching too! Works exactly like Sketches of Q.

So, you’re a child of the 80s, and one of your first memories is programming your first game in MS-BASIC – what do you do in a modern society, with all these complicated programming languages coming from every direction? Use DS-BASIC, a faithful port of the BASIC language. It can run pretty much everything, but nothing can be edited yet.

You probably already know about the port of ScummVM to the DS. A new version supports Sam & Max, and Beneath a Steel Sky – both some of my favorite games! Cool!

No Place to Hide! One of the neatest online homebrew games out there! Give this one a try – it’s gotta be experienced, rather than looked at.

The tunneling method that 4cr buddy sgstair is working on, DSTunnel, is actually coming along. I can’t wait until you churn something out, Stephen!

Poke the Bunny. I dare you.

And that’s it! Once again, we’re not going to tell you how to run these programs – that stuff’s up to you guys to figure out! There’s plenty of tutorials out on the Internet, and as long as you have a flash card and a Pass* device, you’re good to go. The DS is suprisingly resiliant.

Have fun, as always.