GeoDeo

I’ve finished the base of the topography game. I’m now able to load an image and pan and zoom it. Also it calculates a clicked location from screen to image coordinates. This is not as easy as it sounds, mostly because I try to avoid floats due to the lack of a floating point processor. I wonder how they implement 3D games on the DS without floats and doubles.

If I get the WiFi working it should be relatively easy now to create a simple WMS client supporting panning, zooming and the getfeatureinfo request. Totally useless, but fun to do.

Although, really useless? We are involved in a project, EduGIS, to support geography lessons using e.g. WMS. Most students (or their younger brothers) will have a Nintendo DS.

Well, unfortunately it’s just a home project to play around with the DS, but I could imagine we could do more serious things. On the other hand, we will probably use the iPhone for that.  I hope schaaltreinen will blog about that soon I still don’t understand the policy of Nintendo towards ‘homebrew’ applications. iPhone development licences are a lot more clear.

I started to port Geodan S&R’s succesful Topography Game to the Nintendo DS. Installation of the SDK, compiling samples, etc, was fairly easy. A lot more difficult is actually developing something useful. I have lots of years of C++ experience, but the architecture and libraries are quite different to what I’m used. Developing for Windows with Visual Studio, Boost, STL, etc looks incomparable to developing for ARM7 and ARM9 CPU’s. It’s more like embedded programming.

To keep track of what I’ve used:

The SDK, or toolchains as it’s called, is devkitPro: http://www.devkitpro.org

Some documentation about developing for the Nintendo DS:

http://osdl.sourceforge.net/main/documentation/misc/nintendo-DS/homebrew-guide/HomebrewForDS.html#andnow

http://www.dev-scene.com/NDS/Tutorials

http://www.drunkencoders.com/index.php?system_id=1&page=Tutorials

http://www.double.co.nz/nintendo_ds/

The Emulator I use is DeSmuME. Several emulators can be found at http://www.ndsemulator.com/

Just as an example, someone ported Doom to the NDS, cool :)