Bye-Bye Blog

As of today, I am part of TheModGods crew and will be blogging there rather than here. Do not fret-I'm only a click away. Go to TheModGods.com for your daily scoop of DS homebrew goodness from Brett, Theo and myself.

Thanks so much to all the people that viewed and supported this blog.

Play-yan Recall

Nintendo emailed people that purchased the Play-yan media device from the Japanese order site, announcing that they have discoveed a problem with the stereo output. Really the problem is not that big of a deal and might have gone unnoticed had they not said anything. Sound intended for the right headphone plays in the left and sound intended for the left plays in the right. Replacement Play-yans will be ready to ship on March 5th.

DS Redesign Blurp

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata hinted in an interview with SPOnG.com, that developers are working on redesigning the DS.

Hardware developers at Nintendo are always looking for what comes next and what will be the new direction as soon as they finish the design of any particular piece of hardware. Some of them are actually working on improved functionality of the existing machine, with some working on a rework of the exterior design exactly in the same way they did with the transition from Game Boy Advance to Game Boy Advance SP.

Read the full interview here.


Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President

NDSart

NDSart is a site, which promotes the showcasing of doodles drawn on the DS (mainly through Pictochat). I think its a great idea, and the prizes awarded to contest winners are extra incentive to break out the stylus.

The first competition finishes today, and the second will begin immediately afterwards and span through Saturday.

The award for the upcoming contest is a PDA Panache Battle Stylus from MobileMilitia.com. The theme is military. Make sure to take pictures of your military themed drawings and post them here. The contest ends on Saturday.


Drawing by kensbitch

Crank It Up

You're trapped in a waiting room, surrounded by back issues of Reader's Digest. Your DS screen fades to black and you knew you should have packed extra batteries.

Thanks to our friends in Japan, this shouldn't be a problem. This device allows you to cranck a handle to generate power for your DS or SP. What will they think of next?

Video of the crank powering a DS

Another DS Emulator in Development

HyperDS is a DS emulator that is currently in private beta. Their website shows pictures of their program emulating homebrew demos. Immediately, I thought this was a fake, but according to Darkain it is legitimate.


Desktopman's Tetris running on HyperDS

V-Pocket Mystery

Joystiq (and other news sources) reported recently on a trademark Nintendo registered for the "V-Pocket". One assumption was that this trademark was for some kind of handheld device.

SPOnG.com claims to have "learned from official Nintendo sources" that the V-Pocket concerns PDA software Nintendo plans to release for the DS.

The article states:

Nintendo will soon unveil a complete suit of personal organiser tools for its Nintendo DS platform, expected to be shown before E3.

First DS Homebrew Game

Desktopman has coded and run the first hombrew game for the DS through his passthrough. Congratulations!

.hack//DS

All of you who are unsure of how to contribute to the DS hacking community, here is a great way. .hack//DS is a distributed computing project like SETI@Home or Folding@Home. Basically, you give your CPU cycles to cracking the DS encryption. We're already 75% with this test, but new tests are lined up for the near future.

Read more about .hack//DS and dowload it here.

[Thanks shiz]

UPDATE: Test 1 is done with! Great job guys.