Posts with tag homebrew
Posted Mar 26th 2007 2:00PM by Eric Caoili
Filed under: Homebrew
Why haven't we seen more rhythm platformers since
Donkey Kong Jungle Beat? And while we're at it, how come there aren't more games that feature primates? We were
on the verge of sending out subpoenas and demanding answers from the video game industry's "top people," but then we stumbled upon
Everlasting Love, a charming, monochrome game from
homebrew developer Mia (
Ninja & Zarbi,
Oil Panic DS).
Following the single-song
soundtrack (from
We Love Katamari) and the monkey protagonist's head movements, players tap the A button to the beat. Just hitting the A button at all makes the simian character bounce around, but he jumps higher depending on how rhythmically accurate you are. You can use the directional pad to face which direction you want to pounce, but all movement is limited to hopping around.
While there's a lot of emphasis on staying with the
rhythm, jumping as high as possible isn't the goal of the game -- you're actually meant to complete the levels with as few measured hops as possible. Some of the portions actually require you to jump off-beat, keeping your head down to avoid low-hanging spikes.
Everlasting Love can get pretty frustrating at times, but we're not sure if it's the fault of the game's or our own lacking abilities. Clearing the first pit took us a few tries before we could put it behind us, and the obstacles get exponentially harder after that. At version 0.1 though,
Everlasting Love has a lot of potential to be the rhythm platformer we've been waiting for all these years.
[Via DCEmu]
Posted Mar 21st 2007 1:00PM by Eric Caoili
Filed under: Homebrew, Nintendo Wi-Fi
We've always equated
PictoChat with the banana peel in
Mario Kart DS. It might be better than nothing, but we were really hoping for something a little more useful when we opened up that item box. Despite its polished interface and availability with every Nintendo DS system, hardly anyone uses
PictoChat regularly. This can be attributed to the application's limited functionality and lack of online support. Unless you're sending phallic doodles to a nearby friend, there's really no reason for using the communication utility.
Thankfully, there are several
homebrew projects that better realize the DS' potential as an instant messenger or a canvas for digital artists.
Pictoblog is another application that extends the system's capabilities, enabling users to sketch something out on the handheld's touchscreen, and upload the picture to a post on their blog.
Pictoblog works with a number of CMSs like WordPress, Movable Type, and many others.
Developer 0xtob has set up a test blog for users to experiment with, but it probably won't be long before the site is flooded with crude illustrations of the male anatomy.
Posted Mar 20th 2007 5:38PM by JC Fletcher
Filed under: Homebrew
A homebrew gamer named GPF ported the GP2X version of 3D Realms'
Duke Nukem 3D to the DS as an entry in a coding contest, and released it to the public yesterday. So, in the time since the announcement of
Duke Nukem Forever, the following events have occurred (developments not directly related to this port, like the Saturn
Duke and the N64 spinoffs, have been left off).
- The Game Boy Color was released.
- The Game Boy Advance was released as a followup to the Game Boy Color.
- The Game Park GP32 was released.
- The followup to the GP32, the GP2X, was released.
- The Nintendo DS was released as a followup to the GBA and GBC.
- Duke Nukem 3D was ported to the GP2X.
- The GP2X version of Duke Nukem 3D was ported to the DS.
See you in 20 years, when
Duke Nukem Forever shows up on the Hyper QS (Quad Screen)!
[Via DCEmu, thanks Wraggster!]
Posted Mar 14th 2007 5:40PM by JC Fletcher
Filed under: Fan stuff, Homebrew
We can't tell you to download them (in fact, we'll tell you
not to), but we can definitely applaud the technical achievement. A
homebrew genius called papafuji has ported a massive selection of classic
text adventures and early graphic adventure games to the DS, including
all of Infocom's text adventures and
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams' interactive fiction.
These aren't just barebones ports, either: you can save games, and you can choose to enter text via an onscreen keyboard or handwriting input! And the game engine contains shorthand functionality for common commands like cardinal directions and "get".
Some of the games are public domain, but most aren't, and we aren't sure which games fall in which category. Therefore, we're officially warning you: if you download these games, there's a good chance that you are a pirate.
[Thanks, Joq!]
Posted Mar 12th 2007 6:00PM by Eric Caoili
Filed under: News, Homebrew
Having created
Rotoshop, the software behind uniquely-animated films like
Waking Life and
A Scanner Darkly, Bob Sabiston is no stranger to new ways of manipulating media. His latest project,
Fatbits Pocket Painter, takes advantage of the Nintendo DS' hardware features to create both pixel-based and vector-based illustrations.
The DS' top screen shows the entire canvas while the
touchscreen displays a close-up view for editing.
Fatbits won't replace your copy of
Adobe Photoshop, but with features like color palette mixing, variable thickness paintbrushes, and opacity sliders, the program is a lot more sophisticated than
MS Paint. The application even supports an animation mode and playback for recorded sound effects (via DS mic) just like
Mario Paint. Users will be able to share their complete creations or works-in-progress by uploading them to a web server with the DS' WiFi feature.
While Nintendo is aware of the project, there are no cemented plans for a commercial release. Sabistan admits that he might eventually cast the program loose for the homebrew community to play with if he is not able to find a publisher. For now, a brief user manual and a gallery of images created with
Fatbits are available.
Posted Mar 12th 2007 12:00PM by Eric Caoili
Filed under: Homebrew
We are sure that Natrium42 had the best of intentions when he put together
RoboDS, an open robot platform that uses a Nintendo DS as an electric brain to receive commands via its Wi-Fi Connection, but we fear his creation might be what eventually spells mankind's doom. The
homebrew superstar has not only brought this mechanical monstrosity to life, but he has ensured the
robot army's dominance over earth and the enslavement of the human race by allowing curious tinkerers everywhere to pre-order their own
RoboDS war machines.
Natrium42 has a prototype
RoboDS in his basement that you can watch and control from your internet browser. With the three-camera setup, you can either view snapshots of the wheeled handheld's movements or watch streaming video from its two affixed webcams when it's your turn to navigate the futuristic beast. There is even an attached laser that would be perfect for PowerPoint presentations or tearing down our cities.
At this early stage, the prototype
RoboDS is prone to malfunctions which can leave the platform moving in circles or completely unresponsive. While we would like to attribute these glitches to coding errors, our distrust of technology has convinced us that
RoboDS is actually reprogramming its AI ... for murder!
[Via Drunken Coders]
Posted Mar 6th 2007 2:12PM by Alisha Karabinus
Filed under: Homebrew
It's been a while since we heard anything about the homebrew
OKiwi browser, but developer
Pedro J. Estébanez announced yesterday that the alpha is "imminent." While this will truly be a test version, Estébanez wants to be able to demonstrate how the various parts of the browser will come together to utilize the DS. It's not available yet, but we'll let you know the moment it's ready. We can all wade in together to see what we can break ... er, we mean test the alpha release.
Posted Mar 6th 2007 12:45PM by David Hinkle
Filed under: Fan stuff, Homebrew, Nintendo Wi-Fi
The tech experts over at Engadget have got something very cool to present. In the above picture, you can see the DS Lite using WiFi triangulation (rather than GPS) to determine geoposition and relay the data to the user. Being a lone snapshot sent in to the blog, we cannot comment on any plans for a commercial application allowing users to ... well,
use this. Instead, we'll quietly pine for such a thing and leave the rest of the commenting in your wonderful hands.
Seriously, those hands are immaculate. What kind of hand soap are you using? They
smell nice too ...
Posted Feb 28th 2007 9:00AM by Alisha Karabinus
Filed under: Homebrew, Features
We've had a few discussions about homebrew in the course of our
daily topics, but there's something we haven't asked that we're curious about. What do you go for? Are you interested in homebrew games? We're not talking pirated games here, but original material created by armchair developers. Or are you more about using homebrew to expand your DS beyond the limits of gaming? We suspect that more of you are into the latter, but we've been wrong before!
Posted Feb 19th 2007 11:35AM by JC Fletcher
Filed under: News, Fan stuff, Hacks, Homebrew
It's been a while since we heard about the
homebrew DS port of Quake. But now the coder, Simon Hall, has emerged from his Tower of Porting Ordeals and made his work available for public consumption! If you have a DS flash card and a copy of
Quake for the PC (shareware or full version!) then in just a few short minutes you could be on your way to playing a flat-shaded, slow, imperfectly-emulated, but still undeniably
Quakey Quake!
We are willing to cut them some slack on the technical issues, since the release is still a work in progress, and the fact that it works at all is
keen. They've also added touchscreen camera control and
the ability to toggle god mode with the R button!
We have great memories of playing multiplayer
Quake at one of those pay-by-the-hour LAN gaming centers at our 16th birthday party. We also have great memories of playing our DS earlier today. Seeing the two come together is just
blissful. We love the ingenuity of the homebrew community.
We're going to crank up the Nine Inch Nails and get to installing.
[Thanks, wraggster!]
Posted Jan 20th 2007 10:00AM by Alisha Karabinus
Filed under: Homebrew, Features
So we already found out who
is and isn't into homebrew, but for those of you who are -- what do you like? Dislike? We're curious about your favorite hardware selections are. What have you found to be reliable and worth the money ... and what needs AVOID, AVOID, AVOID stamped across its packaging?
For those of you who confessed to not knowing what to do when it comes to homebrew, we're gearing up for a series of features on the subject, which is part of why we're looking for recommendations from our favorite fanboys. So bear with us a little longer. For you salty dogs ...
tell us what works for you!
Posted Jan 11th 2007 8:00AM by Alisha Karabinus
Filed under: Fan stuff, Homebrew, Features, DS Daily
Welcome to
DS Daily, a new daily (yeah, really!) feature here at DS Fanboy wherein we'll open up a discussion for a little morning chat. We've shamelessly stolen this idea from our friends at WoW Insider, but hey, shameless theft is what blogging is all about,
amirite?
The first ever DS Daily question is pretty simple: are you into the homebrew scene? If not, are you interested, just too uninspired (or lazy, cheap, or perhaps uninformed) to try it? Or are you just not a fan of the whole grassroots DS development scene? Inquiring fanboys want to know.
Posted Jan 5th 2007 4:45PM by Alisha Karabinus
Filed under: Homebrew
The DS motion card we
told you about before is now available for the promised price of $25. It's tempting, because that whole DSaSketch bit sounds cool, but the novelty may wear off too quickly. We do hope that this catches Nintendo's attention, though, or at least the eye or more homebrew developers. We'd love to see more games, either community or officially produced, that take advantage of this nifty DS motion sensor. But if Nintendo made one ....
Posted Jan 2nd 2007 6:30PM by Alisha Karabinus
Filed under: Homebrew
How
many different versions of Sudoku do we really need? Maybe some of us are just a little slower at solving them, but apparently there is some gaping void of
demand for brain-crunching number puzzles. If you've already devoured all available Sudoku like a ravenous beast and are desperate for any puzzle fix, one homebrew artist whipped up a fresh batch over the holidays just for you. Yeah, between pinched cheeks and presents, this guy programmed a (mostly) working homebrew Sudoku game. And here we thought we were doing well not to just pass out on the sofa on our off days. Maybe we need to aim a little higher. That
t-shirt project sounds a little easier, though.
Forgive the digression.
DSudoku, by Crescent Moon, the homebrew solution for your raging number puzzle needs.
Posted Dec 28th 2006 3:00PM by Alisha Karabinus
Filed under: Homebrew
If any system is well-suited to guiding chains of lemmings through levels filled with danger, it's the DS ... and thanks to
homebrew developer Matt, that potential has been realized. LemProject brings a homebrew
Lemmings game (based from the Amiga version) to the DS, with full stylus functionality and all the tools you need to build your own levels. And if you're the type who wants to dig around on the back end, it's all open source.
It's not perfect -- not all the old levels could be transferred to this game, there are a few reported bugs, and some people are pulling sad faces that it doesn't work with DS-X, but nothing's perfect. All in all, this looks like a great homage to a classic.
[Via Digg]
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