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Beginners > gba or ds development?

#137986 - seoushi - Sat Aug 18, 2007 6:05 am

I've been programming in c/c++ for almost a decade and have made a few pc games and I think my current project would be more suited to a handheld device. I would really like to develop for the ds but I've come to the conclusion that it is quite a bit more painful then the gba. The reason I say this is because the current emulators fail to run for me (dualis, no$gba) however visualboyadvance works great. I do own a ds lite so I could test that way but loading to sd card then booting it up on the hardware seems like it would be time consuming and frustrating.

That being said, I have a few questions.

How do you guys test your code?

Is the ds really that much more powerful then the gba for 2d games?

Can gba games be ported to the ds with minimal effort if I do go the gba route?

Is there some reason that I only get a white screen when I try to run homebrew on an emulator? (specifically I've been trying to get the code from here to run). Some of the examples that come with devkitpro do work however none of them can display a bitmap.

Any input would be great, thanks.

#138009 - tepples - Sat Aug 18, 2007 12:51 pm

seoushi wrote:
How do you guys test your code?

There are homebrew programs that receive a .nds file, write it to the SD card, and then run it.

[qutoe]Is the ds really that much more powerful then the gba for 2d games?[/quote]
The DS 2D hardware is almost the same as that of the GBA, except with more VRAM. But a lot of games use the 3D hardware to draw 2D graphics on one of the screens by drawing each sprite as a quad.

Quote:
Can gba games be ported to the ds with minimal effort if I do go the gba route?

Yes, apart from sound.
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#138048 - seoushi - Sun Aug 19, 2007 1:35 am

Thanks much for the reply, I have a few more questions however.

tepples wrote:
There are homebrew programs that receive a .nds file, write it to the SD card, and then run it.

Can you point me in the right direction for these?

tepples wrote:
a lot of games use the 3D hardware to draw 2D graphics on one of the screens by drawing each sprite as a quad.

What is the advantage of this on the ds? In the pc world using 3d for 2d is a lot faster however I thought the ds already has a very powerful 2d mode. The only other possible advantage I can see over 2d is that you don't have to worry about memory banks for images but rather just load them through opengl.

I also have another question on why some things can't compile but I'll post them in a separate thread in the appropriate forum.

#138051 - tepples - Sun Aug 19, 2007 2:41 am

seoushi wrote:
tepples wrote:
a lot of games use the 3D hardware to draw 2D graphics on one of the screens by drawing each sprite as a quad.

What is the advantage of this on the ds?

2D: 128 sprites, 32 different rotation matrices, and about 32 KiB of VRAM (GBA) or 128 KiB of VRAM (DS) for sprite cels.
3D: 1,500 sprites, 1,500 different rotation matrices, and 512 KiB of VRAM for sprite cels. But it works only on the main screen.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
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-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

#138457 - hi2u - Fri Aug 24, 2007 9:54 am


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