Welcome it is 2005 just kidding.
So I want to talk about the difficulties that DS developers have (mainly because the problems i am having while making darniell for cubed pixel when cubed pixel is me) when people are like "PORT MARIO ODYSSEY FOR THE DS", it not that easy lol, says it the guy who ported palib to modern devkitarm, a task near impossible.
first of all the cpus are so bad, you are like CPUS BUT THE DS ONLY HAS ONE you are wrong it is 2, arm7 and arm9, the arm9 is where most code is executed, arm7 is basically there for backwards compatibility, here is the thing, there are some things the arm7 can only acess (wifi, audio, some keys, the touchpad) so you need to send data from the arm7 to arm9 to arm7 so it is kinda, cool, still libnds does this job for you and most libs do it for you so no a big deal, the biggest deal with the ds cpus is that, they are like 33MHz (67 MHz arm9 and 33MHz arm7) making it harder since you need to optimize A LOT, MP3 audio is near impossible, ASlib has done it well but it runs so slow and uses way too much memory.
The DMA write speeds are fast but the RAM is 4 MEGABYTES, 4 MEGABYTES. The worst part of this is that your code needs to be loaded into RAM to be executed into memory, which means that if your game code is more than 4MB you are screwed, there is nitroFS but that only works for assets, the only way around this is you need to split your game into separate parts into the SD card, create a bootloader by yourself or just use one, and load those fucking files from FAT as nitroFS does not work for that.
The screen resolutions are so small. Both screens have the same resolution, 256x192 pixels, this has some side effects on my game, like for example for some reason my game made me motion sick because the stuff was moving around, and not many things can fit in the screen.
The tools oh god, you need to use either devkitARM and libnds or use the oficial nintendo tools, using libnds will cause you a mental collapse so i recommend installing another library, here is a problem, there are no good libraries today, the best we got is NFlib, it can only load stuff off nitroFS but that is ok anyways, You have mdpalib or my palib ports but those are so badly maintained that i do not recommend them
The documentation is the absolute worst thing ever, i use a custom mdPAlib (for older devkitarm because my game needs MP3 support) which means i know some of the functions i removed or added, so instead i go to the palib documentation and see stuff there, the palib docs are so bad, the libnds is quite good but i mean if you can read whatever language they have there (it is so confusing), the nflib one is the best.
Anyways so you may think, oh just do not make games for the ds, the problem is that 1. CubeSDK (a toolkit that has some pretty interesting internal tools by Cubed Pixel) is adapted to work on the DS and porting it to PC would be impossible 2. My platformer engine relies on PAlib and porting it to PC would be near-impossible or take too long.
Edit: amaizing how people are defying the specs and making awesome games, it really gave me motivation but i mean, the ds will always have a special place in my heart as it was the first console that i ever had, the first console i ever tried to make a game on. it is just not for me to be optimizing or finding optimal solutions or having near-impossible collisions that will always bug, thanks everyone.
So I want to talk about the difficulties that DS developers have (mainly because the problems i am having while making darniell for cubed pixel when cubed pixel is me) when people are like "PORT MARIO ODYSSEY FOR THE DS", it not that easy lol, says it the guy who ported palib to modern devkitarm, a task near impossible.
first of all the cpus are so bad, you are like CPUS BUT THE DS ONLY HAS ONE you are wrong it is 2, arm7 and arm9, the arm9 is where most code is executed, arm7 is basically there for backwards compatibility, here is the thing, there are some things the arm7 can only acess (wifi, audio, some keys, the touchpad) so you need to send data from the arm7 to arm9 to arm7 so it is kinda, cool, still libnds does this job for you and most libs do it for you so no a big deal, the biggest deal with the ds cpus is that, they are like 33MHz (67 MHz arm9 and 33MHz arm7) making it harder since you need to optimize A LOT, MP3 audio is near impossible, ASlib has done it well but it runs so slow and uses way too much memory.
The DMA write speeds are fast but the RAM is 4 MEGABYTES, 4 MEGABYTES. The worst part of this is that your code needs to be loaded into RAM to be executed into memory, which means that if your game code is more than 4MB you are screwed, there is nitroFS but that only works for assets, the only way around this is you need to split your game into separate parts into the SD card, create a bootloader by yourself or just use one, and load those fucking files from FAT as nitroFS does not work for that.
The screen resolutions are so small. Both screens have the same resolution, 256x192 pixels, this has some side effects on my game, like for example for some reason my game made me motion sick because the stuff was moving around, and not many things can fit in the screen.
The tools oh god, you need to use either devkitARM and libnds or use the oficial nintendo tools, using libnds will cause you a mental collapse so i recommend installing another library, here is a problem, there are no good libraries today, the best we got is NFlib, it can only load stuff off nitroFS but that is ok anyways, You have mdpalib or my palib ports but those are so badly maintained that i do not recommend them
The documentation is the absolute worst thing ever, i use a custom mdPAlib (for older devkitarm because my game needs MP3 support) which means i know some of the functions i removed or added, so instead i go to the palib documentation and see stuff there, the palib docs are so bad, the libnds is quite good but i mean if you can read whatever language they have there (it is so confusing), the nflib one is the best.
Anyways so you may think, oh just do not make games for the ds, the problem is that 1. CubeSDK (a toolkit that has some pretty interesting internal tools by Cubed Pixel) is adapted to work on the DS and porting it to PC would be impossible 2. My platformer engine relies on PAlib and porting it to PC would be near-impossible or take too long.
Edit: amaizing how people are defying the specs and making awesome games, it really gave me motivation but i mean, the ds will always have a special place in my heart as it was the first console that i ever had, the first console i ever tried to make a game on. it is just not for me to be optimizing or finding optimal solutions or having near-impossible collisions that will always bug, thanks everyone.
like a 250 dollar kit back when DDR4 was Intel only
