So I'm going to start using The Video Game Name Generator to come up with them.

So this blog is now called

Bling Bling Dragon Choreographer

.

Anyway, I took a trip recently to the city of Cape Town. Was a rainy weekend, but I had a good time. And of course I had to visit the game shops and bankrupt myself.

Because that's how I do things.

I managed to get hold of Street Fighter IV, Bionic Commando and Red Faction 2 as part of a "3 games for R129" bargain (That's about $10). Was thinking of getting Dark Souls 2, but the retail price was far higher than Steam's price, so I decided to hold off on it for a while longer.

And then, while wondering around aimlessly in the local mall, I went into an electronics and audio shop for the fun of it. And I found something I had been looking for: An R4 clone.

An R4 is a flashcard system for the Nintendo DS series (You can use the DS ones on a 3DS too, to play NDS games and run homebrew roms).

And these guys were selling one of the units I was thinking of ordering from a local importer for about $30 less than the importer was selling it for.

So of course I snapped it up. And now I have what amounts to most of the good NES games on my DS, a bunch of homebrew apps, a DOS emulator, an SNES emulator that works really well (Can play Megaman X1, Super Mario All Stars + Mario World, FFIV, but not games like MMX2, X3, etc. Emulator isn't fully complete/compatible… I might just have to write my own :P)

But the real reason I got an R4 was so I could do silly things like port some of my games to it. For no real reason other than that it's something I've wanted to do for a while: Make something I can run on actual hardware.

And if I make something good enough, I can always pull a Battle Kid and make back what I spent on the unit :P

Other developments

My GBJam game is coming along… slowly. I've done more engine work than any game-related work, but that's fine by me. I'm actually looking forward more to the 7DFPS jam coming up directly after GBJam.

No, I'm not going to try make an FPS for the DS in seven days… … Oh damn it all. I just thought of what Exile would look like on the DS…

Maybe if I can learn DevKitPro's setup and the basics of libnds in time, I'll take a crack at it. :P

I can implement a software renderer pretty quickly if I have access to a good framebuffer. Give me a way of drawing pixels quickly and I'll pull it off.

Anyway, I was streaming development of my engine for a while on Saturday. You can take a look at the archive here if you want:

http://www.twitch.tv/64mega/b/553411324

Comment about how screwed up/odd my programming style is below.

And yes, I'm fully aware that I'm still using OpenGL 1.2 functionality. I'm just keeping things simple for now; the rendering code is pretty much plug-in/out as far as I'm concerned; a black box from an outside perspective. So switching it over to a shader based system should be a piece of cake.

Well, that's enough from me. Go blog some more guys, you're being boring. =3