Hello everyone! I've been looking around this forum for a while so I decided to make an account because I want to ask and post some things. I recently got a NDS and a R4 card and I find it really cool, so I want to begin making some software for it. I already know C++ quite well but I am having trouble finding the necessary tools/libraries because there many threads recommending different tools and I'm not sure which one is the best. If anyone wants to help me, please know that I'm going to open a dedicated thread on this topic.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day!
C (and assembly) is the more common language but easy enough to drop down into it.
Devkitpro/DKP, or indeed the DS based subset of it devkitarm which revolves around libnds for this, is the foundation for most homebrew.
https://devkitpro.org/
It does have its criticisms, most notably its insistence upon the removal of old versions meaning if you find some existing project you are either going to have to dig up said old version from some kind soul (that may well be facing DMCA requests, one of the major criticisms)
Anything that is not raw assembly is then an abstraction put on top of it to make things easier for some, usually at the cost of speed. Most notable of this is going to be palib (named for a French emulation/flash cart/homebrew website called Player Advance but did spin off into its own thing), though long since defunct and not likely to compile with modern versions of DKP.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-i-c...ools-debloated-palib-on-devkitarm-r58.626653/ https://gbatemp.net/threads/mdpalib-release-modern-palib-for-everybody.627328/
Few other things exist
http://web.archive.org/web/20160324104754/http://patater.com/manual/ probably being the most notable of anything here.
If you want to get into the hardware side of things then this is for the GBA but most things carry across
http://coranac.com/tonc/text/
or you can jump straight into
https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm which is the main hardware reference, and said same also houses no$gba which is a nice debugger (though desmume via is gdb bridge and increasingly melonds have such things as well)
There are some other languages that got made for the DS over the years, bit old now as recently we have been seeing a bit of development into things but
https://gbatemp.net/threads/attempt...amming-languages-available-for-the-ds.357792/
Only thing to really see a scene worth speaking of was Lua which had a few different camps
https://pdroms.de/?s=lua+nds&post_type=post for a jumping off point on that one, not sure what sites are still active.
https://gbadev.org/ has some good stuff as well.
There is plenty more I could cover but about the only thing I will note is you can bundle things into a DS ROM (be it in the binary or within the internal file system) but if you would rather read them from the SD card (and also write things if you want) that all flash carts worth speaking of, and options for emulators as well, have then DLDI is what you want. Think something is included in DKP but
http://www.chishm.com/DLDI/ if you need something else.
