Sep

AmplituDS - Nintendo DS Homebrew

Written by Neil Galloway

I think I might have a new second best homebrew game. The first is Warcraft Tower Defense of course.

The game is called AmplituDS and is made by Sander Stolk. He has a few projects kicking around and you can check him out at the his page on drunkencoders.

Basically, it is a game where you pilot a ship over various ribbons (I know this is hard to imagine) and as you your weapon targets pass over spots on the ribbon, you need to press the trigger buttons to shoot at the target. It is all done to music and the ribbons represent different tracks. If you can hit all the targets for a section of ribbon, then it turns on that music track. It is actually very addicting and fun.

Here is an image I took from their website. What makes it so awesome is the cool soundtrack, bright colors, and the sky texture is very cool.

My Hardware

I have Nintendo DS Lite (NDSL) with a Supercard Lite and Super Key. The Supercard Lite takes a microSD card for memory storage. I use the 1GB Kingston microSD.

Getting It To Run

The setup is very simple. Make sure to check out the site and go to the AmplituDS project page if you have any other problems or want further instructions.

Download the latest version from the AmplituDS download page. I am using the 3rd release dated 2007/05/26.
Unzip the download into its own folder. The important files are the amplituds folder and the amplituds.nds file. There is a pdf file included with very good instructions.
This application reads and writes to the memory card so you will need to patch the amplituds.nds file with the DLDI for your hardware.
I have written an instruction page on doing this called Patching NDS Homebrew With DLDI. Follow the instructions there and then continue on here.
Copy the amplituds folder onto the root of your flash card. The amplituds.nds file can go anywhere I believe, but I have not verified this.
Boot your NDS and start playing.

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