This is a followup to 1.4 which resolves page drawing speed issues. Other aspects of operation will be faster too.

A little experimental feature also snuck in here: support for OpenType fonts. The font files you add must be named with an .otf extension.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ndslibris

1.4 is primarily a maintenance release. Among other things, it removes the limit of 2048 pages in books. See the the release notes on SourceForge for more details.

IMHO, one useful model for estimating time for, say, software tasks, comes from Engineer Scotty of the Star Trek television series.

Scotty typically states his estimate verbally, usually 48 hours, or else invariably much more time than the current crisis will allow. In the end it takes 15 minutes or something. All of us are, like, “oh, snap-damn!”, because converting dilithium to trilithium does sound really complicated. Hell, is it even possible?

In this kind of case the obscure nature of engineering deck and some lack of transparency regarding what Scotty is up to when he’s offscreen helps to make this type of estimation and actualization pattern work.

I was pleased to find that it was possible to set up Eclipse Galileo CDT to debug ARM code running under emulation; in this case, DS targeted homebrew built with the GCC ARM toolchain, via devkitPro, running inside of DeSmuME, on Ubuntu 9.04.

You make new a debug configuration and

• under “Main” tab, set the executable to your ARM9 ELF binary (.elf file);
• under “Debugger” tab, set the debugger to “gdbserver”;
• point the debugger path to where your arm-eabi-gdb lives;
• set the connection to use TCP from localhost at, say, port 10000.

Then, for convenience, make an external program entry for desmume with arguments

–arm9gdb=10000 <path_to_your_program.nds>

Run desmume first, then Debug in Eclipse, and you will be paused in the first line of source.

Until this point I was using Insight targeted for arm-eabi to do debugging. Eclipse’s IDE is more robust, more powerful and, well, integrated.

I had the pleasure of attending the first collaborative volunteer get-together for OpenAustralia, an open source website project which provides a view on the record of debate in Australian Parliament.

The nice people at Google in Sydney provided us with a great space to meet, discuss and experiment. Kudos to them.

I just got a pingback about a licensed application coming out before year’s end for reading books on DS. This is promising. The blurb on the Nintendo site suggests that there will be a way to download content to it. Reports claim that the existing content is from Project Gutenberg.

I like this turn of phrase, “no worries.”

It’s so flexible. It can be used to elicit a number of meanings.

• There’s no need to worry.
• You’re not worried, so I’m not worried either.
• You’re not worried, but perhaps you should be.
• I’m perhaps a little bit concerned, but not full-out worried.
• I really can’t spare any worry on this, I’m overdrawn in the Worry Department.

What’s Hot, What’s Not

Let’s keep in mind that this is only IME (In My Experience). And it’s only been a few weeks here so things could get much better or much worse.

The strongest cultural statement in Sydney I’ve noticed so, apart from the adoption of English place names and other old world-isms, is that around the beach. Being a person who tends to be attracted to coastlines, this suits.

Signed, an Auslander in Australia

The dslibris user mailing list has been brought down as it was too susceptible to spamming. Please use the forums on the Sourceforge project page to report issues, etc. Thanks.

Check Sourceforge.

Finally, brightness control! Press Y to cycle through brightness levels on NDS Lites. Sorry, it won’t do anything on the Phat.

X still inverts colors.

Thanks to everyone who have sent in reports, problems, and commendations. It all helps.

Note that there are bug and feature request tracking lists on the Sourceforge project page; you can enter issues there.

ADDENDUM: some have had trouble with getting the font to load on startup. I’ve seen trouble too. I’ve released 1.0.2 to try to address this. NOTE, however, the locations of files will revert to the old ‘everything in the same directory’ scheme. Probably the root, but a subfolder might work! Sorry I can’t be more certain but I misplaced my DS! Testing with other than an emulator is a little hard right now.