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DS development > DS Web Browser?

#122282 - thegamefreak0134 - Sun Mar 18, 2007 9:24 am

Has anyone made a web browser of sorts for the DS yet? I really want to see one in operation. If no one has, I'm considering researching the details on making one for the DS myself, namely the whole DS wifi library and such. So please allow me to have informedness. Thanks!

-gamefreak
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#122287 - Shtroodle - Sun Mar 18, 2007 11:19 am

There are 2 projects currently in the works. One is "Okiwi" - http://okiwi.blogspot.com/, and the other one is "Gnirfleo" - http://gnirfleo.blogspot.com/.

I'm afraid that at least one of those is a fake, and by "at least one" I mean "Gnirfleo".

"Okiwi" seems a bit more valid to me but then, who knows?

#122289 - Miika - Sun Mar 18, 2007 11:30 am

Of course there is the commercial Opera browser.
Shtroodle, I rather think Okiwi is a fake. Gnirfleo should be
released after 6 days from now, let's see.
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#122290 - felix123 - Sun Mar 18, 2007 11:31 am

There's also DSLinux.
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#122291 - Lick - Sun Mar 18, 2007 12:31 pm

Miika wrote:
Of course there is the commercial Opera browser.
Shtroodle, I rather think Okiwi is a fake. Gnirfleo should be
released after 6 days from now, let's see.


Looking over the blog, it seems like Okiwi really talks about development details, while Gnirfleo (what name..) only shows pictures. Anyone could easily display a static screenshot of Googles homepage.
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#122293 - Miika - Sun Mar 18, 2007 2:17 pm

Lick wrote:
Miika wrote:
Of course there is the commercial Opera browser.
Shtroodle, I rather think Okiwi is a fake. Gnirfleo should be
released after 6 days from now, let's see.


Looking over the blog, it seems like Okiwi really talks about development details, while Gnirfleo (what name..) only shows pictures. Anyone could easily display a static screenshot of Googles homepage.

We'll see what the time brings..
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#122313 - thegamefreak0134 - Sun Mar 18, 2007 6:01 pm

I agree, they both look a bit sketchy to me...

Anywho, that settles it. I am going to get to work this week (provided I can find the time) and get the wifi network working. I'll post back if I have any real success. I realize that the real bulk of the work will come about in rendering the pages, but it seems useless to me to render pages that are offline, so I plan on concentrating on getting my networking stuff happy first.

-gamefreak
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#122320 - simonjhall - Sun Mar 18, 2007 6:17 pm

Good luck! A proper homebrew browser would be seriously ace.
Don't forget to mock up some shots of google when you're taking a break from the programming slog ;-)
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#122323 - dantheman - Sun Mar 18, 2007 6:27 pm

Doesn't DSOrganize have the ability to render HTML pages semi-decently? That might be a good starting point for the rendering engine.

#122347 - thegamefreak0134 - Sun Mar 18, 2007 8:00 pm

Actually, my rendering engine is going to be last. I figure support for the "a" tag is of primary concern, simply because it's most important for enabling simple pages to work. I plan to focus on primarily functionality over prettiness, so images and other things will be dealt with as they become necessary. My main goal is to make gbadev accessible through the DS. If I can make that work early on, I think the rest will follow, even if you can't see the images at first. (I can get by images by displaying their alternate text if available, and their filename-path if not availavle.)

I am going to first work out the details of Wi-Fi, and then focus on downloading a page's HTML through the DS and saving it to the memory card, at which point I can borrow DSOrganize's HTML rendering and have a go at the page. I'll focus on the rest from there.

-thegamefreak0134
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#122349 - tepples - Sun Mar 18, 2007 8:09 pm

thegamefreak0134 wrote:
My main goal is to make gbadev accessible through the DS.

Now that gbadev.org uses a textual anti-bot question instead of an image, this should finally work.
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#122352 - thegamefreak0134 - Sun Mar 18, 2007 8:48 pm

True.

Can you point me in the general direction of Wifi libraries and their respective documentation for the NDS homebrew scene? I'm having no luck searching the site for some reason.

-gamefreak
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#122355 - Dood77 - Sun Mar 18, 2007 9:36 pm

Another browser? Awesome. OMG PLZ 2 ADD TEH FLASH SUPROT!!1wun Okay, just kidding.
Concerning <a> tags, please make them work with same-page anchors.
(http://www.domain.com/folder/page.html#anchor) retawq doesn't to this and it makes me angry... links (the other browser) works but its very sluggish.
Also something that would be nice is http downloading, like DSlurper, but with DLDI. So at least we can download the images (and even homebrew! provided its not zipped...) and view them with other things.

#122376 - chatterbug89 - Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:28 am

You know...the real best solution to browsing the internet on your DS (as well as the cheapest) is to just SSH into a box at your house...considering you want to surf the internet on the DS, its assumed you are connected to the internet, so you can just SSH into your home box and do IRC, use elinks with its color and tabs, use IM on variouse protocols, do some programming, and more all from your DS. That's what I do at least. elinks works great on the DS over SSH. Get screen working and wa-la, you can do just about anything on your DS. Everything except images.

#122381 - Lynx - Mon Mar 19, 2007 2:48 am

Well, if your going to go that route, why not just use the GUI based remote controll apps out there?
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#122392 - HyperHacker - Mon Mar 19, 2007 4:04 am

They're sssssssllllllloooooooowwwwww.
Dood77 wrote:
Another browser? Awesome. OMG PLZ 2 ADD TEH FLASH SUPROT!!1wun Okay, just kidding.
OMG DOES IT SUPORT UTUBE YET?

[edit] The Okiwi alpha is very nice if you're into black screens. Or does it need to be patched even for GBAMP?
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#122395 - tepples - Mon Mar 19, 2007 4:24 am

HyperHacker wrote:
They're sssssssllllllloooooooowwwwww.
Dood77 wrote:
Another browser? Awesome. OMG PLZ 2 ADD TEH FLASH SUPROT!!1wun Okay, just kidding.
OMG DOES IT SUPORT UTUBE YET?

Is there anything demanding about the Universal Tube & Rollform site?
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#122415 - HyperHacker - Mon Mar 19, 2007 4:51 am

Well there's an animated GIF... :-p
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#122416 - dantheman - Mon Mar 19, 2007 4:56 am

HyperHacker wrote:
They're sssssssllllllloooooooowwwwww.
[edit] The Okiwi alpha is very nice if you're into black screens. Or does it need to be patched even for GBAMP?


Haven't tested it myself yet, but the site says it's prepatched for SC Lite. I'm guessing DLDI patching is probably required.

#122419 - felix123 - Mon Mar 19, 2007 5:15 am

The interface does look pretty slick. On SCSD.
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#122431 - thegamefreak0134 - Mon Mar 19, 2007 8:29 am

Holy Cow...

[note to self]Never mention "Web Browser" on a forum again...[/note to self]

Well I've done myself in this time I guess... I'm using PAlib by the way, since it looks easy enough to get what I need to get done done in. Thanks for the 7+ posts telling me this. >_>

I plan to support as many HTML tags (and their proper useage) as possible. I will of course ask for lots of help I'm sure. At this point, I'll be doing well to get the google HTML code pulled down. Although give me a minute or two and that should be done. Thank goodness HTTP requests appear to be quite simple to use... o.O

kk, off to drown myself in code now. I'll let you know how it turns out.

-thegamefreak

[EDIT] OK, ok, so I spoke too soon...

I downloaded the PAlib (the wifi one) from the website, but everything inside the folder refuses to compile. Do I need to use the actual installer first? (My devKitPRO folder still works just fine. ???) I ask because actually gettig the installer is a several hour process over slow dial-up...
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#122436 - Genoil - Mon Mar 19, 2007 9:51 am

dantheman wrote:
HyperHacker wrote:
They're sssssssllllllloooooooowwwwww.
[edit] The Okiwi alpha is very nice if you're into black screens. Or does it need to be patched even for GBAMP?


Haven't tested it myself yet, but the site says it's prepatched for SC Lite. I'm guessing DLDI patching is probably required.


Yes, it actually works pretty good. From what there is now, this thing is going to own Opera DS, gnirfleo (...) and even Elinks over SSH. Really nice font support, quick panning and zooming and a keyboard as responsive as DsLinux' one.

#122492 - ChuckMcB - Mon Mar 19, 2007 7:43 pm

Okiwi working fine on my DS-Xtreme as well.

FYI: It's patched with the DLDI for "SuperCard Lite(TransFlash MicroSD)" already.
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#122495 - deshi - Mon Mar 19, 2007 8:28 pm

did anybody get it working with SCSD (normal)? I just get the top red screen..
I had to create the okiwi and fonts folder myself because my supercard woulden't show them when i just copied them form the zip file, anybody got an idea why that ist?

Edit: Ok, got it working ^^ every homebrew on my SD-card needs the moonshell dldi file, exept okiwi it needs the chism file..

#122508 - chatterbug89 - Mon Mar 19, 2007 10:11 pm

Lynx wrote:
Well, if your going to go that route, why not just use the GUI based remote controll apps out there?


Like the VNC type stuff for the DS? I don't use those because first of all, they are slow, second off, they don't fit to the DS screen, and third off, I prefere to the tools on either or of my two linux servers than I do the tools I could use graphically on my windows desktop. If I could somehow run links with graphics over SSH on the DS that would be extremely usefull though...i've been doing a little research to see what I could posibly get working with dslinux.

#122528 - Lynx - Tue Mar 20, 2007 12:01 am

thegamefreak0134 wrote:

I downloaded the PAlib (the wifi one) from the website, but everything inside the folder refuses to compile. Do I need to use the actual installer first? (My devKitPRO folder still works just fine. ???) I ask because actually gettig the installer is a several hour process over slow dial-up...


That's probably a question best answered on the PAlib forums.
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#122544 - Dood77 - Tue Mar 20, 2007 3:34 am

The Okiwi download site says couldn't connect, can someone upload it for me pretty please? :D

#122559 - HyperHacker - Tue Mar 20, 2007 7:13 am

K, I patched it for GBAMP and now instead of two black screens, I get a red top screen and black bottom screen. :-(
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#122561 - DragonMinded - Tue Mar 20, 2007 7:29 am

I get the same on Okiwi. Perhaps the alpha only renders one html, and that happens to be a red page?
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#122573 - Miika - Tue Mar 20, 2007 8:35 am

DragonMinded wrote:
I get the same on Okiwi. Perhaps the alpha only renders one html, and that happens to be a red page?

Naw. It looks like this, Zoom levels are 25%, 50%, 100% and 200%.
http://img182.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture19yu5.jpg
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#122578 - ChuckMcB - Tue Mar 20, 2007 1:38 pm

Dood77 wrote:
The Okiwi download site says couldn't connect, can someone upload it for me pretty please? :D
Try this mirror: link
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#122640 - sonny_jim - Tue Mar 20, 2007 10:28 pm

GPF did get a graphical links working, but he seems to have stopped working on it. I suppose the need for Duke Nukem 3D grew too great.

#122652 - dantheman - Tue Mar 20, 2007 11:44 pm

I'm not entirely familiar with what happened, but DSLinux completely changed the way it handled Links, so all of GPF's work basically went down the drain. It's a shame, as it was looking pretty good there.

#122696 - thegamefreak0134 - Wed Mar 21, 2007 8:56 am

OK, this is really starting to bug me. I cannot get the wifi version of PAlib to do anything. It keeps asking for "arm-elf-gcc" and the like, but I searched through my devkitPro folder and all I seem to have anywhere is arm-eabi-gcc and the like.

Does the newest version of devkitPro (which I'm downloading with like 2 hours to go) fix this? If I can't get this to install I'm a little screwed, because it looks like it will make the whole Wifi connection thing a snap.

If there is a tutorial or docmuentation on the DSWifi library that will let me get connecty without using PAlib, now would be the time to let me know. Besides, I'm going to end up writing my own custom functions to wrap it anyway, PAlib was just going to make that easy.

I'm not quite to the point of coding the browser bit, I'm still in HTTP request land at the moment. I have my PC submitting requests and recieving data quite nicely with one particular flaw, that being handling of large files. I can't seem to intercept the entire message, it keeps cutting off at a certain point. Once I get this fixed on the PC (it's bound to be something relatively simple) I'll be ready to roll. I think.

UPDATE: I just finished installing the newest devkitPRO. Still no "elf" functions, still no PAlib building. Drat. [evil n00b sounding]Help me please... someone...anyone...[/evil n00b sounding]

-gamefreak

*edit* Nevermind, I got it to work. It seems that the PAlib tutorials are a bit out of date, and the properly compiling wifi template is now a part of the current PAlib download. someone should fix that. Oh wait, it's a wiki... ^_^ I'll go fix that.

On to mass coding then. -Yay! Basic HTML retrieval in the template is flawed! It apparently doesn't handle either long messages or chunked data, so I'm getting the incomplete header of the google page prefixed in places with a number. I'll have to write those GET routines myself then... sigh. Oh well. I wanted this challenge I guess. I'll report back probably in a different thread if I get anything useful going.
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#122717 - tepples - Wed Mar 21, 2007 1:51 pm

thegamefreak0134 wrote:
It keeps asking for "arm-elf-gcc" and the like, but I searched through my devkitPro folder and all I seem to have anywhere is arm-eabi-gcc and the like.

Does the newest version of devkitPro (which I'm downloading with like 2 hours to go) fix this?

The newer versions of devkitARM changed from arm-elf-gcc to arm-eabi-gcc because the old version of the ABI (application binary interface) had no way to indicate that the DS ARM9 has some features not in the base CPU model (ARM9TDMI) but lacks floating-point hardware. You can change all occurrences of arm-elf- to arm-eabi- in the makefile in order to fix the problem.
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#122720 - Eddy 912 - Wed Mar 21, 2007 2:55 pm

are okiwi and gnirfleo slot 1 web browser?
because on my supercard and superkey it doesn?t work

#122726 - GPFerror - Wed Mar 21, 2007 3:39 pm

dantheman wrote:
I'm not entirely familiar with what happened, but DSLinux completely changed the way it handled Links, so all of GPF's work basically went down the drain. It's a shame, as it was looking pretty good there.


I have got my changes moved over to svn dslinux now, but haven't had a chance to figure out the new patch process for svn yet, need some time to read the wiki :)

I have also done a native port of retawq to libnds , but still haven't figured out my dswifi problems I'm having, so it can only load .html files from FAT right now.

Troy(GPF)
http://gpf.dcemu.co.uk

#122738 - thegamefreak0134 - Wed Mar 21, 2007 4:53 pm

@tepples: I tried that and it gave me weird errors, like there were errors with things being included twice, or things that were used but not declared. My guess is that PAlib had adapted to some weird quirks of the \"elf\" system that didn\'t transfer over too well. Regardless, I\'ve thrown out the wifi version entirely, as it was unecessary. The entire thing was just generally weird, and since (completely by luck I might add, seems to be my expernience with these types of things) it works, I\'m through bothering with it. Until I have to go instal it for The_Perfection that is...

Anywho, I\'m considering implementing the \"grafitti\" style writing as well as a keyboard for entering text into forums. I want to take that a bit further when I do it and allow you to \"train\" the letter recognition so that the program can recognize what works best for each person. I just personally find that being able to draw letters \"blind\" rather than having to look at a clunky keyboard (no matter how well implemented) is faster and more efficient. You can look at your text this way.

For basic implementation, expect to be seeing the HTML code of a lot of pages in the early days. I am going to basically output everything within the body tags if present, or the \"noframe\" tags if present. As I add tags to the rendering engine, the tags will dissappear from the display and their effects will show up instead. In this way, something not being implemented yet will be blatantly obvious and you can yell at me directly.

I plan on first implementing the basic functionality tags. Things like hyperlinks will come first, followed quickly by form tags and the form POST method. (no email method, that will simply return an error as I don\'t believe it should have existed in HTML in the first place, plus I\'m not writing an email client. Sorry.) This should allow the gbadev site to become useable, once I have everything sorted out. Oh, and if I haven\'t implemented a form object, you will still be able to \"click\" on the tag and give it a value, so you can use the element anyway. Functionality first, prettiness later.

Tables will be next in the list, as most pages use them and they tend to make things much more readable. This should be followed closely by formatting tags and images. (I may not have a very extensive font collection though, don\'t expect much there.) I\'m not quite sure how I am going to handle showing the page with proper proportions though. I think basically I will need to \"render\" everything by giving it a position on the page, and then re-draw stuff as you pan around the screen. If I can get this going fast enough, it should be useable. I may also go with a DSopera style \"whole page view\" at the top, although that will take a bit of time to render properly with a lot of images in place.

So there you have a basic outline of my plans for the project. Right now, I\'m lost in the world of networking issues. As soon as I can get the entire page into memory (which is giving me grief right now) I should be able to get something useable on-screen. At the very least I want you to be able to enter an address and get the proper page for it. So yeah, I\'ve gone full steam ahead on it.

-thegamefreak

PS: I\'m going through a proxy right now, so I do appologize for the slashes. It just happens...
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#122762 - Oliv5400 - Wed Mar 21, 2007 10:32 pm

Hi gamefreak,

There are a couple of ?online? browsers / sites that allow you to view normal full size pages normally only meant for your computer desktop.
This ?proxies for cellphone internet? could be usefull to make a good xHtml/cHtml browser.
You can use the Google?s wml/wap reformating proxy with this URL request :

[/url]http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=YOUR_ HTML_URL

Result with GbaDev :

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://www.gbadev.org

Google?s mobile search :

http://www.google.com/xhtml

The Browser only read the page without any other reformatting operations. (less CPU usage, less RAM needed -> biggest cache allocation to speed up the surf)

Some other proxy example :

Quote:
* skweezer.net - Skweezer is both a mobile-optimized browser and a fully functional Web portal, with features such as e-mail, contacts list, RSS reader, and more. To use Skweezer, go to www.skweezer.net, type in Web address or search phrase, and click the ?Skweeze? button. If you enjoy using Skweezer, you can sign up for a free account that allows you to customize your Skweezer service, add and import favorites, and use Skweezer Mail.
* mobileleap.net - MobileLeap Virtual Browser will detect your device type, and instantly reformat websites by compressing data, filtering out unsupported content and fitting the pages to your screen. Your data usage will be reduced by up to 80% ? even with images enabled.
* iyhy.com - IYHY.com allows you to surf any website from your cell phone, PDA, Blackberry, Treo, Sidekick, or other mobile device even if the page is not formatted for mobile use.
* mobile.aolsearch.com - Everyone has their own reformatter it seems.
* phonifier.com - PHONifier is both an open source script and a web service. PHONifier is aimed at automatically stripping webpages of unneccesary code. It can be used to surf the web on your mobile device or to make RSS feeds accessible on your mobile phone or PDA.

#122778 - slizekalfer - Thu Mar 22, 2007 12:38 am

You guys seen this yet? http://youtube.com/watch?v=NAcfI_-kduM

#122781 - quadomatic - Thu Mar 22, 2007 1:17 am

EDIT: I got it working. Can this browser navigate to other pages?

#122810 - ChuckMcB - Thu Mar 22, 2007 12:03 pm

quadomatic wrote:
EDIT: I got it working. Can this browser navigate to other pages?
Nope that's as good as it gets.

slizekalfer wrote:
You guys seen this yet? http://youtube.com/watch?v=NAcfI_-kduM
Impressive.
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#123100 - Drood - Sun Mar 25, 2007 3:35 am

DSOrganize has added a browser feature, but it's a bit mental. Won't work properly for me.

#123151 - Darkflame - Sun Mar 25, 2007 5:43 pm

Works fine for me.
Just text and links.
Some links dont work, but I think thats more unsupported tags rather then it being broken.
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#123438 - Drood - Wed Mar 28, 2007 5:28 am

The second release works fine for me, but DSO freezes quite a lot.

Once it has forms support, with that Google proxy, it'll be awesome. Oh yeah, and bookmarks/favourites.