Hello indeed! I’m trying out WordPress now, obviously. Mostly because there’s a handy Android app for it, which I will probably get into later.
Speaking of Hello worlds, I’m working on a Hello World! program for the Nintendo DS. Not a wimpy one that uses the stdio.h library included with libnds, but a real, manly one that draws directly to the framebuffer with raw machine code routines. This is all for my world domination plans, or something.
Well, being serious. I’m working on an operating system for ARM devices, starting with the Nintendo DS. I’ve been wanting to do such a thing for a very long time, but it’s taken a while to get the various pieces of knowledge together in my head. I’ve been progressing on that path. So far, I can now program the DS with ARM assembly, as in, I can write programs for the two processors in assembly, assemble into object code, and wrap the object code with an NDS header and run it on the actual device.
What I need to figure out now is how ARM assembly works at an intimate level (I’m about 20% complete there, by my estimation) and to learn how to work with the DS hardware directly (about 5%). I’ve barely scratched the second part – so far, I’m ignoring the ARM7 coprocessor by putting it in an endless loop. There’s plenty of stuff to learn about on the ARM9, though, because it does all the graphics, all the touchscreen input, and two of the buttons. The ARM7 handles the sound, the other buttons, and the wireless, but I can ignore that for now.
What I’m going to do first is just a Hello World that actually displays the canonical text, but what I intend to get going before too long is a dead simple program loader that can load and run programs off of a flash card. This will probably end up being a lot harder than I would hope, but we’ll see.
Oh, Android. I got an HTC Dream thingy. It’s cool. Might learn to program it sometime.
