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DS development > Building Moon Shell

#157967 - RobinWatts - Mon Jun 02, 2008 5:15 pm

Hi all,

I've just bought a DS and an M3 Real card so I can play with doing some homebrew stuff. I am a newbie to coding for the DS itself, but am an experienced ARM coder.

I installed DevKitPro/ARM over the weekend, and built myself libmad and scummvm - that all seems to be working OK.

I thought I might start off with getting a feel for the system by applying myself to various apps/libs etc to see if I could speed them up.

Moon shell looks like a prime candidate. Apparently it runs video at 20fps fullscreen, and 24fps widescreen. If I could tweak that a bit to make it run faster, then that'd be worthwhile, especially for PAL video that is natively 50fps (so 25fps would be a much nicer rate than 24 or 20).

So I downloaded the moonshell 1.71 sources, but can't for the life of me see how to go about building them. I might be blind, but I can't spot any Makefiles...

Does anyone here have any experience with building this?

Thanks,

Robin

#157970 - sonny_jim - Mon Jun 02, 2008 5:48 pm

You might be better off picking something else as the source code to Moonshell is notoriously untidy. Maybe picking up DSOrganise from where DragonMinded left it would probably be a more popular choice.

#157976 - RobinWatts - Mon Jun 02, 2008 7:10 pm

sonny_jim wrote:
You might be better off picking something else as the source code to Moonshell is notoriously untidy. Maybe picking up DSOrganise from where DragonMinded left it would probably be a more popular choice.


Moonshell is more where my interest lies though - I have a background in audio/video/graphics on ARM platforms :)

Robin

#157978 - sonny_jim - Mon Jun 02, 2008 7:14 pm

Perhaps you could add video playback to DSO? Also the framebuffer driver in DSLinux could do with some looking at, the GUI isn't particularly speedy at the moment.

#157981 - wintermute - Mon Jun 02, 2008 7:31 pm

Unfortunately you're going to have a lot of trouble building either Moonshell or DSO from source. Both of them use older versions of devkitARM which are no longer supported. I believe the Moonshell author recently shifted to a commercial ARM compiler too.

You'll probably be much better looking at Chishm's TunaViDS - http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14720
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#158000 - RobinWatts - Tue Jun 03, 2008 1:15 am

wintermute wrote:
You'll probably be much better looking at Chishm's TunaViDS - http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14720


That's very interesting, and I shall certainly look into it. Thanks.

Robin

#158161 - dantheman - Fri Jun 06, 2008 2:08 am

From my understanding, for Moonshell v1.7x Moonlight switched to the 30 day trial of the ARM SDT to make some necessary optimizations to squeeze a bit more performance out of the DS. After the trial ended, he no longer had a way to compile it, hence why the core of Moonshell has not changed in months.

#158367 - Sarvesh50 - Mon Jun 09, 2008 7:37 pm

but this would be great if somebody can tuneup moonshell and make it better.
with new things etc.