What the DS can do (besides games), Part I

By: Chan Chi-Loong

18 Jul
2008

3 Comments

Being a huge DS fan, I’ve been tinkering with my device ever since I got it last year.

With the right mods, the Nintendo DS Lite can be far more than a portable gaming platform — and can be used to run any number of fun homebrewed apps. In my opinion the DS is probably one of the more moddable gaming platforms that can be “repurposed” for other uses.

Three pictures below tell the story of some apps I’ve been playing with: a wardriving app utilizing the dswifi development kit, an e-book reader that uses TTF (true type fonts), and a video player, dsvideo.

A fun wifi scanner and packet capture tool

Chapter 2 of Alice in Wonderland on my DS

Any Full Metal Alchemist fans out there?

Once my Slot-2 chip arrives I’ll be able to showcase instant messaging, browsing and FTPing (part 2). There’s also fun stuff like Linux for DS, dictionaries, etc. A shoutout to all DS fansboys out there!

Tagged in: Gaming, Uncategorized,

ozzy50

Being a huge DS fan, I
Chi-Loong

Woah… cool gadget.

Hardware based emulation is probably overkill for older game roms like SNES and NES — our newer phones are very much more powerful computing devices than what we had in the past.

Still, having a chip that makes everything work will make it easier than installing a software emulator.

My choice: get a windows mobile phone and mod away. I’ve seen ScummVM installed on my friend’s phone, and he demoed Police Quest I (that’s a 4-color CGA adventure game for those old enough to play such games). Works perfectly fine on his HTC Dual touch.

For GBA there’s PocketGBA and for SNES there’s PocketSNES.
Boon Kiat

Too bad Nintendo has steadfastly refused to make phones or license their games to phone makers. Will be sweeeeet if it happens. By the way, Chi-Loong, do you know any other phone that can do what this earlier-reported Fly Mobile one did – play Gameboy?