Nintendo DS News
Powder (Build 105) (NDS Game)

POWDER is a roguelike game, which is not a port of an existing roguelike. It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning. Author of this piece of software is Jeff Lait.

Changes:

[All but GBA]: When you load a game, the fact you have loaded it is immediately saved. This means you can no longer power down before you die to avoid save scumming. (Eilu, Zach Firth)
Familiars always leave corpses to facillitate their resurrection.
Petrified creatures count to your kill total
You are only punished for the death of a familiar when the death becomes irrevocable.
The party guilty for creating traps, lava, etc, is now tracked so proper responsibility can be assigned. (Andrew Poandl)
Dodge Skill’s “foes” properly ‘ified. (David Damerell)
Extra flavour text from Eilu.
Ricochet skill for arrows. (Furrot)
You can climb trees. (Adam Boyd)
When a bitmap has to many colours, it now fails more gracefully. (Ibson the Grey)
An embarassing mistake in combat calcs has been fixed. It is now the attacker’s skill, not the defender’s, used to roll attack bonus. This will mean weapon skills are more necessary and make monsters more threatening since they always default to 2 stars.
Jumping out of a pit only moves you one square. (Irashtar)
Incorrect there in helm of draining description (Mark Rushakoff)
Adjusted some monster sizes to better reflect how I envision them. Hopefully this doesn’t affect food nutrition balance too much. (David Damerell)
When you die your options are saved even if you don’t make the high score table. (Zappa Penguin)
Knock no longer closes the door if an item or creature blocks it.
Knock cast on doors with creatures on them will knock them back and damage them slightly. (Lim-Dul)
Light radius for creatures on fire increased to 2 from 1 to make it a bit less subtle. (R. Dan Henry)
[Start] and [Select] can be used to enter and shift respectively on the on-screen keyboard. (Zappa Penguin)
You can eat water elementals, but be warned there might still be some life in them. (Eilu)
Polying into or polying back into gargantuan forms will crush any walls that would entrap you. (Korgoth)
Flaming swords slightly nerfed to 1d3 fire damage to prevent them from being such an obvious weapon choice.
New item: lightning rapier. (Terje)
New item: ice mace.
Imps summoned by demons that you summon will no longer attack you provided the demon stil lives.
Monsters should now open doors if they are smart enough. (Derek Ray)
New monster: Kobold Thief.
You can now wish to learn a skill directly rather than having to acquire the specific book.
“wizard’s hands” in chilling touch description, “an uber-storm” for a living frost, along with an extra hyphen in that description. Description of Pax clarified to resolve amiguous sentence and disarm skill description has an s returned to it. Finally, another lost s added to the flesh golem description. (R. Dan Henry)
“You gain insight into the nature of foo.” now has a full stop. (David Damerell)
Ibson the Grey has produced a new 32×32 tileset based on the rltiles to give you some high resolution POWDER experience. Since this isn’t the 16×16 res, it doesn’t come packaged with POWDER but has to be installed manually from the artpack.

Note: While the highscore is kept, save games are never preserved between versions. Please wait until your current character dies before upgrading.

http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release

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NeoDS v0.1.1a (NeoGeo emu for NDS)

NeoDS is a Neo Geo AES/MVS emulator for the Nintendo DS.

Discussion: http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=15460

http://groups.google.com/group/neods

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Fractal Junkie v1.0 (NDS misc)

Fractal Junkie, previously known as Mandelbrot Generator, has been updated.

Quote:

So why the name change? And Im sure I downloaded v2.0 before, so how can v1.0 be a new version?
I wanted to change the name to a more generic name instead of limiting the name to the Mandelbrot set only, so now the new name Fractal Junkie implies several fractals, which it does have serveral fractals. And it’s now v1.0 simply because of the name change.

Whats new in this version then?
-Julia sets
-More colour palletes
-More efficient “only render when need be” system

How to use:
D-PAD: Move 32px
TOUCH: Draw a new view
R/L: +/- Iterations
A: Colour Styles
B: Colour Pallets
X: Toggle precise rendering
Y: Toggle Julia set mode
START: Start over
SELECT: Goto previous image

Current Features
-64bit accuracy
-Mandelbrot set
-Custom Julia sets (this includes Fatou Dust)
-7 Colour Palletes (Cycle without redrawing)
-3 Colour Styles (Cycle without redrawing)
-Successive Refinement Rendering
-Only calculates unknown pixels when moving
-Draw with the stylus a new view from any two points on the screen to zoom to that view.

Planned features:
-Custom Colours
-Take Screenshot
-Save Coordinates

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=15449

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NeoDS v0.1.1 (NeoGeo emu for NDS)

NeoDS is a Neo Geo AES/MVS emulator for the Nintendo DS.

Changes:

* Added level2 sprite cache in slot2 ram (if installed)
* Increased rom page size (fix grenades Metal Slug 1)
* Fix interrupt acknowledge (fix Metal Slug 2)
* Fix tile layer palette update (Last Blade 2 gui)
* Update converter to use latest MAME data (fix issues with King of
Fighters 98, etc)
* Thanks to FluBBa for a DAA Z80 instruction that doesnt need a stupid
lookup table (saves ram)
* Fixed -bios options in NeoDSConvert

Discussion: http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=15460

http://groups.google.com/group/neods

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Blargh Text Editor (Revision 103) (NDS Application)

Blargh Text Editor is a text editor to be used with a Nintendo DS.

Limitations:

* its only a demo, you won’t be able to save/load the typed text (although I will use this program to make an actual text editor)
* the vertical scrolling of text still has bugs: it will not work properly with word-wrapped lines & the last line of text gets duplicated when you scroll down (other than that, its working fine)
* the text cursor doesn’t blink yet
* the upper screen is currently used for debug. in the future, that area will be used as non-monospaced text display too
* cut, copy, paste of text not yet implemented
* no unicode support yet
* the other buttons in the gui do not do anything yet; they are conceptual
* no word-wrap yet

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=15343

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WireWorld DS v1.0 RC1 (NDS port misc)

WireWorld DS is a DS port of a cellular automation under the same name.

Release notes:

Changes:
+ – added
– – removed
* – modified
/ – bugfixed
! – important
. – unimportant but still
$ – something

1.0 RC1:
! The first released 1.0 version!
+ scrolling finished
/ scanline/refresh bug fixed
* Moved to a 1D array (now some code uses one for instead of two, but some still needs 2D, and so i use a 1D-to-2D #define converter)
$ something else maybe, i don’t know

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14902

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The History of DS Homebrew (NDS misc)

Lynx, webmaster of ndshb.com has taken his time to summarize the history of DS homebrew. This is quite an article and worths a read both if you’re a new comer or have enjoyed this scene for a while!

Thanks to http://www.drunkencoders.com for the news.

http://www.ndshb.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=40

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Miniville DS Manager v0.3 (NDS Game)

Stravingo updated his Sim City style game for Nintendo DS.

http://stravingo.over-blog.fr/article-19209400.html

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Colors (Final) (NDS Game)

NightFox has released the final version of his puzzle game Colors. It plays similar to Columns, where you need to bring three identical colored gems, into a vertical or horizontal row, to let them disappear.

http://forum.palib.info/index.php?topic=4672.0

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Ports Of Call DS WIP (26-04-2008) (NDS Game)

For those who are waiting for the “Ports Of Call” remake for Nintendo DS, here are some excellent work in progress news.

Quote:

This is a screen of the work in progress of the last event that needs to be included in Ports of Call DS. If you tell someone how such radar screen must respond then it sounds quiet easy but to make it react like intended is rather challenging. At the moment i am struggling with rotating the radar blobs around the center when the ship turns. I know how the math has to be done but translating that to code (and the right var types) isn’t as easy as it sounds. Atleast not for me.

See the progress site for the current standing.

Discussion: http://forum.palib.info/index.php?topic=4063.0

http://85.150.216.22/blog/

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