0.4?


After loooong time without programming, I'm working right now on 0.4
I'm scaling back a lot of features, because I'm rewriting much of the stuff. Basically, the code right now is a royal mess, and given that I'll be completely moving from C to C++, I hope that in the process of the objectification of my code it'll gain more stability.

So the new motto shall be:
Stability over featuritis!

So there won't be any protocol updates in 0.4.

Stuff you can forget about:
- Live stuff
- User comments
- Animated downloadable icons
- Offline messages
- Listening to mp3s
- Beup getting you a girlfriend. That feature was always broken.
- More unicode support.

I'll be moving to libfat completely. I'm tired of having to compile with the 80 different libraries of the day. And you can also forget about the NoFAT version. If your card isn't supported, too bad. Complain to your distributor. I'm not spending nights awake debugging because your card manufacturer doesn't care about homebrew.

Stuff I will add:
- Add / delete users / confirm invitations
- See online / offline users
- Manage users in groups / by connection status / so on
- Avatar caches
- GUI revamping. Obligatory, since I've been doing that for every version since .1
- Skins. Almost every widget will be skinnable. Almost every window has an individual background.
- New font engine. Fonts are now 7k in size but contain much fewer characters. In exchange, you can put about 40 fonts in your system.

Stuff I'm taking away:
- dsType. Too buggy for the stable release I'm expecting. So bye bye subpixel antialiased fonts.


And some other stuff to keep you in suspense.But since nobody reads this anyway, I'm not sure it'll be of any work.

beup 0.3's [probably last] update

MaHe from the gbadev boards made me notice that DragonMinded released an updated FAT lib.
OTOH, HtheB pointed me to a new update to Sata's Rein FAT lib.

So I'm releasing a beup version compiled against these 2 libs. Hopefully it'll help somebody.

On other news, I'm finally releasing the source for those brave souls who like to recompile stuff.
There is no default makefile. Instead, if you want to compile, for example, the "nofat" version, try make -f make-ds-nofat. For the "rein" version, try make -f make-ds-rein. And so on.

Some beup resources
(by far incomplete)


(by MEstk)

Translations:
Original English
Swedish by GizmoTheGreen
French by MEstk
Dutch by LS5
Dutch by BMH
Spanish by quesewo
Italian by Bafio
Finnish by Baba


Keyboards:
Original Qwerty
Azerty by skaor
Anothe Azerty by cano

Emoticons
MSN pack


Please leave a message in comments if I missed one.

beup

Once I found myself with time again, I thought about what project to write so I could get myself a name withing the DS dev community. I thought, hey, nobody is writing a MSN messenger (ok, thoduv was writing one at the time), so I threw myself at the project.

Boy, if I had known at the time how big it would become, I would have run into a corner and cowered. Sometime between 0.2 and 0.3 I almost gave up on the project. But it was worth it. 3 months and 9937 lines of code later, I had a somewhat stable MSN client in version 0.3, called beup (for which only an elite subset of programmers know its meaning), with support for avatars, emoticons, ink, in various languages. Oh, you can send IMs with it, too.

The links are in the first page of the gbadev thread at the bottom (originally it was in the 23rd page, but people made me notice that it wasn't trivial to reach that page). Beup is in version 0.3 revision 5 and counting.

dsType

Continuing my anthology of old and tired projects, my next project was dsType, a Truetype font renderer for the DS. The code was messy, it was slow, but the rendering was pretty :), I had reliable unicode fonts with subpixel rendering at 5px that didn't look too bad. And I got a mention in drunkencoders.com!

The project pretty much died there, but I revived it to use as a font rendering engine for beup.

Frist psot!

Given that I'm going to use this blog for my programming stuff, I'll start with my first program for the DS :)

Flaca DS!

Back in the old days when I had too much time in my hands, I was writing a Flash player for the PC. Given that I couldn't make one that worked reasonably well, I decided to port my code to the DS. Which, didn't work well either, but it was enough for a MK2 (which I got about 8 months later :( ).
It's a dead project, given how much frustration it caused me, but it's still worth mentioning.