My Turn

This blog has an ID of 9215273. Which means there were 9,215,272 blogs created on this site before this one. Not necessarily all valid, some could be tests, some could be deleted. But it's kind of interesting in the scheme of things.

I had a decision to make. Dual-Layer DVD burner, or Nintendo DS.

On the one hand, my computer has been running without a wipe and reinstall since 2000. Five years of trash has accumulated, things hidden in places I have no idea, registry entries older than dirt and almost as tasty.

I don't run anti-virus programs. I don't back anything up that I don't remove from my hard drive. I'm a ticking time bomb. It's only a matter of time before I get floored with something. I really need discipline to backup my hard drives. With a pack of 25 rewritable dual-layer DVDRs I can make checkpoints maybe once every six months. I'd do a more frequent backup but they don't make rewritable dual-layer discs. My current backup plan is non-existant because I just don't want to wade through all my data and mark this as important, that as not, and whatnot. Plus, in my experience, no matter how good you are at backing things up, you will forget. And even if you don't, most of the time you'll have to reinstall everything manually anyway because your backup couldn't get at the files Windows uses to save your preferences. Bah, humbug.

On the other hand, a breakthrough has been made on the Nintendo DS homebrew development front. There is a widget that you can plug into your DS and attach a game to it which will reroute the code execution to the GBA port. In that port you may put a GBA flash cartridge and all of a sudden you've got DS programs running!

This is actually one of the best things to happen. The neat thing about this little guy is that it's an amateur homebrew kit that does NOT allow piracy to happen. DS games, as you may already know, are encrypted with RSA. It isn't impossible to crack it, but until an elegant solution is discovered for Nintendo's implementation the brute force method will take many many moons of CPU time to figure out. Moreover, I believe the maximum size for code is 32Mbits (I could be wrong) and there is no way DS games can fit in that kind of space. Metroid Hunters Demo is 128Mbits, for reference. Does that mean you can only do crap? No, a lot of GBA games are 32Mb and nobody would guess. FZero, Klonoa 2, Sim City 2000, Blackthorne, Yoshi's Island, Advance Wars, most of the launch titles (and a slew of crappy recent titles) fit in that space, which should give a signal to what the upper limits of DS homebrew would be able to do as far as textures, graphics, and audio. It runs faster and has that whole touchscreen thing that can really tickle the imagination.

It's always easier to get into homebrew on a system from the ground up, learning as the community learns, instead of playing catchup later.


This decision was a no brainer. I'm just gonna have to keep ever watchful over potential virus attacks.

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