Haven't gotten it yet, but judging by its descripting and star rating, I'm optimistic, I've been hoping for something like this for a while now. Downside is that it requires WiFi to work, though I'm not sure if that is required or just a bonus.

On the way to work the other day I came by a sign that I thought was hilarious. Tree Cutting but with a man digging symbol. Maybe its only me who find it funny, I think the falling rocks symbol may have been more useful there, if not like you have to watch out of holes in the ground, they were not digging them up, they were literally cutting them.

I was tempted to sell my limited edition Phantom Hourglass Nintendo DS (there is only 1000 in the entire world), its already tripled in price. Taking into account damage and loss, there probably closer to 900 by now. But I decided against it, I still haven't completed the most recent Pokemon Ranger, and Chrono Trigger comes out next month.

Plus once I have the feather stylus, I will have all 3 limited edition phantom hourglass items from around the world (I found one of the Australian box thing in a shop in Brighton).

I've started to do some iPhone development again, working on one of my game ideas, thanks to my friend Dave I have some awesome music now, so currently I'm working on getting my 3d geometry export from Milkshape3D to render quickly. I wish there were shaders on the iPhone, they'll probably add them in the next generation.

Speaking of shaders, I've been playing around the Geometry Shader in OpenGL. Its really annoying me since there is very little documentation compared with DirectX. DirectX seems to be moving forward, yet OpenGL is moving backwards with 3.0, maintaining it C structure.

- Tales of Phantasia
- Final Fantasy 6
- Chrono Trigger
- Ocarina of Time
- Prince of Persia Trilogy

With 13 different endings, several characters to choose from, and so many 3d projects remaking this that got shutdown by SquareEnix, this has to be amazing.

Though I do get the feeling it will just be a 2d port with some extras like the Final Fantasys, I'd much prefer it to be 3d, I don't understand why SquareEnix don't do this.

I suppose its so that in another 10 years they'll rererelease it and make more money... bastards, I want a 3d one now!

After programming for Win32 for most of the time I've been programming, and Playstation 2 for a little bit when I first came to university. I decided for a bit of change, and began to learn to make games on the Nintendo DS through homebrew.

Using a basic 3D engine I had wrote for the PC a long time ago when I first started making 3D programming, I ported it over. It was a little confusing at first, since I had no experience with fixed point numbers.

After a while, I discovered how to make Cel Shading working, there was very little documentation on how these things work on the Nintendo DS unless you were an actual developer. My initial attempts were to change the table to be filled with three shades of a colour, then switch it over when another colour material needed to be rendered. However this didn't work, everything was the same colour.

In the end, I figured it out, what you needed was to fill the shading table with a few shades of white to black, then using a texture for a table of colours to use. When combined together, the texture with colours would colour things the correct colour, while the shading table would multiply against these and give a cel shaded effect.

One other annoying problem I had was with the FIFO, it was hard to debug the ARM7 since it kept breaking. Eventually it turned out you needed to clear the error flags if an error occurred.