There are some rule updates / clearifications for the Drunken Coders Coding Competition. Those guys are pretty reliable, so join the coding fun!

Anyway here is the information:

To ensure things work a bit smoother this year the judging for the competition has been standardized. I hope this does not throw too many people off but it should give people a much better idea of what we are looking for.

http://www.drunkencoders.com/documents/DS/matrix.htm

For the moment, no category is weighted more than another but it is possible the “Fun” category will end up worth twice that of any other.

Also the game submission and judging process is now fully web driven. This means the authors will control what info appears about their entries in the results list (and can update their info at any time). I had a bit of trouble keeping it all strait via email (i think last years results don’t even list the game authors). It also means the results will be available as soon as all judges have submitted.

The final feature is after the results are published the general public will be able to rate and comment on the games. In the future, public opinion might factor into the final results but for this compo only the Judges scores will count.

Good luck in coding

http://www.drunkencoders.com/compo/compo.htm

PuzzleManiak is a port of the marvelous Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection on Nintendo DS. All 27 games are ported on NDS: Tents, Dominosa, Mines, Bridges, Light Up (aka Akari), Pattern (aka Picross), Net (aka Netwalk), Untangle (aka Planarity), Sudoku (aka Solo), Galaxies, Slitherlink (aka Loopy), Blackbox, Mastermind (aka Guess), Map, Filling, Solitaire (aka Pegs), Sixteen, Fifteen, Slant, Rectangles, Netslide, Samegame, Unequal, Flip, Inertia, Twiddle and Pyramid (adaptation of Cube).

Release notes:

In this beta 4, I fixed a bug concerning the ‘Undo’ button, which is not accessible anymore when a game is over (thanks to gh0st for finding this bug).

As a new feature, for this beta 4, you can play (and play) (and play again) (and play again again) the past daily challenge puzzles. For that, go to “hi scores” and then to “daily challenge ranking”. On the score pages, a “PLAY” button is available, you can try it 😉

http://www.puzzlemaniak.com/blog/index.php

WabbitDS is a Texas Instruments 83 (TI83) emulator for Nintendo DS.

Features:

ROM8xu loading
RewindingFast Forwarding
Rotatable Interface (ie portrait mode)
Touchscreen Interface
Disassembler
Key Configuration
Sleep Mode
Fast Application Loading
Perfect Gray Scale for Gaming

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14456

Spirits DS is a game inspired by Spirits, a spanish videogame from Topo Soft.

Release notes:

Just added 3 new levels of new graphics and minor corrections on others

http://www.telefonica.net/web2/nightfox1975/

Woopsi is a Nintendo DS GUI library for rapidly creating user interfaces for homebrew software. Modelled after the AmigaOS windowing system.

Changes:

– Fixes:
– Tidied up a lot of the code.
– Gadget deletion queue now handled solely in the VBL events.
– Optimised TextWriter by preventing it from drawing empty glyphs.
– Changed TextWriter into a static class.
– Optimised TextViewer so that it uses much less memory.
– Text font and glyph font now sent around hierarchy instead of each gadget creating their own font.
– Improved Font class.
– Removed 8-bit code from Bitmap class.
– General refactoring and code tidying.
– Made EventHandler methods virtual instead of pure virtual.
– Split gadget events into “raiseXEvent()” and “x()” functions.
– Clicking a gadget automatically notifies its parent that it is the new clicked gadget.
– Moved dirty child redraw function into gadget class.
– Added horizontal clipping to rect splitting functions.
– Fixed SuperBitmap border.
– Relevant gadget methods are now virtual for subclassing.
– Removed all unnecessary all_gfx includes.

– New features:
– Added non-draggable screens and windows.
– Added show/hide gadget functionality.
– Added ability to hide a window instead of closing it when the close button is clicked.
– Added closed/hidden/shown events.
– Added monochrome output to Font class and definable text colour.
– Added drawText() function to SuperBitmap class.
– Added window depth button.
– Added enable/disable gadget.
– Started work on alert requester.
– Moved text data manipulation out of TextViewer into a separate class.
– Added Gadget::moveTo method.
– Added Gadget::resize method.
– Added resize event.
– Added move event.
– Added value change event.
– Added window resizing (API only).
– Added radio buttons.
– Added radio button groups.
– Added “clicked” glyphs for screen and window depth buttons.
– Most gadget action methods (click(), moveTo(), etc) return bools to indicate success or failure.
– Added enabled/disabled events.
– Added checkboxes.
– Added NDS screen flipping and support for top NDS screen.
– Added screen flipping gadget.
– Updated screens to swap to front when clicked.
– Added a variety of gadget depth manipulation functions.

http://woopsi.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/woopsi/trunk/Woopsi/Release/

cid2mizard updates his MOD player for NDS.

http://cid2mizard.dev-fr.org/p3743/2007-11-03-fat-player-mod-v2.html

Cid2Mizard released a new version of his hamster game for the Nintendo DS.

Changes (translation by Google):

– New design.
Adding the menu.
Adding music and sound.
Adding disease management and pills.
– To increase the variability 1 Unit Purchases / Sales + or-touch, to increase faster combination and L + / -.
– Fixed various bugs …
– Section option not available.

http://cid2mizard.dev-fr.org/p3742/2007-11-02-hamhamds-v0-5.html

This program displays 11 different shaped objects on your NDS. You can rearrange them as you like – basically that’s it for this release.

ChiSaw has released a NDS program which displays 10 different shaped objects on your NDS. You can rearrange them as you like – basically that’s it for this release.

Thanks to http://www.dev-fr.org for the news.

http://www.nds-toolz.de/wbb3/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=5660

DSOrganize is meant as a homebrew organizer application for the Nintendo DS that should have come built in in the first place.

Changes:

Added extra checking to the image parser code to hopefully stop more freezes.
Added back in ability to create lowercase filenames that are short.
Added bad file check to gba_nds_fat so corrupt files shouldn’t freeze DSO anymore.
Added ability to download files on web browser.
Added auto-hide setting to web browser.
Changed default progress color on web browser to be more visible.
Changed all audio formats that read on interrupt to read from a buffer.
OGG, AAC, M4A files play faster now.
OGG, AAC, M4A, MP3 files more stable.
Fixed a bug in the downloader code that added garbage extensions to some images, making sites crash.
Fixed a bug in the mp3 player that detected some stereo songs as mono, decreasing the quality.
Fixed directory sort order bug.
Fixed bug where sites using script src=”file” notation would not render.
Fixed a few buffer overflows in web browser which should increase stability.
Fixed a bug where uppercase hex digits converted to zeros in WEP keys.
Fixed not being able to clear WEP keys.
Fixed issue with random freezes while using the touchscreen in the sound player.
Fixed random seek crashes with aac/ogg/flac/m4a.
Fixed link issue with some php links.
Fixed a bug with saving favorites.
Fixed a bug where the cursor wouldn’t auto-scroll when editing text.
Fixed a disappearing cursor bug with fixed width text editing.
Fixed a bug with sites that used bad tags like br/ instead of br /.
Fixed a bug that allowed todo’s with illegal characters to be created.
Fixed a crash bug with small png images that run out of memory.
Fixed several out of memory crashes with web browser in general.

http://www.dragonminded.com/?loc=ndsdev/DSOrganize