My Shiny New Toy

Mar 18, 2007 · 2 minute read

I was going to post about The Trap, but I’m too depressed about it to talk in any meaningful way…so instead…shiny!

This arrived in the post this week. The R4 is a flash cartridge for the Nintendo DS that allows you (via the impossibly tiny magic of microSD cards) to store multiple games on a single card. Which is handy if you're about to go away and don't want to take a multitude of easily-lost cartridges. (Also, if you're into that sort of thing, it means that you can download the entire DS catalogue from the internet. Or 'sample'.)

However, the most exciting thing about the R4, and indeed all DS flash carts is devkitProARM, a version of the GPL-licensed C compiler with additional libraries to utilise almost all of the DS's features (at the moment, only the local wi-fi seems to be eluding the amateur developers). For the price of an R4 and a microSD card, a total cost of around £35, you can get yourself a DS development environment. Hurrah!

(Yes, I have a few ideas. Abstract. And, in a vague-news style manner, it may turn out to be useful for the near future…)

There are a few excellent homebrew applications out there, but the one you need is this: SpeccyDS. Yes, you can turn the Nintendo DS into a handheld version of the greatest 8-bit computer of yesteryear (C64 owners: you were wrong then and you're still wrong now. points to Chase H.Q.). An eerie coincidence (perhaps planned by the Gods of Nintendo) means that the screen resolution of the DS's screens matches the Spectrum's almost exactly, so the games look exactly like they would have done all those years ago, just now in the palm of your hand!

I have Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner, Head Over Heels, and a host of other games for the upcoming flight. I will eventually become a real person in Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Oh yes.

(Still, what we really want is proper DS conversions of both Chaos and Rebelstar/X-Com. They'd be awesome…)