Stephen's Weblog

There have been some pretty significant updates to the dswifi lib in CVS – TCP is now a lot more stable, and some other things have been addressed (As always, see the Checklist [wiki.akkit.org])
Of course please let me know if you do manage to find any bugs or it doesn’t work how you think it should.

I’m also still debating whether to spend some time converting the junky videos I took of the Wii action and post them… to give you an idea of what we’re talking about, the footage is 640×480, 15fps without sound – the footage is a bit shaky but some is better than others, I’ll clean it up to the best of my ability if I convert it.
More importantly I’d like to know if you people (whoever reads this blog, if anyone :P) would like to see this footage, given that there are of course lots of nicer sources out there – there is at least one video I’d like to show everyone though, so I will at least convert and post the one.

Update: ok, the source video is actually 320×240 (bleh)
Anyway, I’ve uploaded 2 samples of the crazy shaky videos I had the pleasure of taking
Hopefully you will enjoy what little footage I can post here :)

Wii – ExciteTruck (bad video)
Wii Sports – Baseball (bad video)
(note, these videos are encoded with the xvid codec, if you can’t play this format let me know and I can probably post another set in a different codec)

I finally broke down and bought an Xbox 360 – I’ve been wanting one for a very long time now and I finally had a good opportunity and excuse to get one :)

No, this doesn’t mean my projects are going to go slower – I probably won’t play it a whole lot – right now things are moving slow because my work is taking a lot of my time and I haven’t worked out a nice balance to keep all my projects moving smoothly yet.

Anyway, if you’d like to add me as a friend on xbox live, please feel free, my username/gamertag is ‘sgstair’.
If you do add me, I’ll look forward to seeing you online.

Work is progressing on the dswifi library, you can see the progress as it is being made here, on my SgstairChecklist wiki page.
It’s not ready for a full release at the moment, but there’s even better news:
Now, thanks to some help from WntrMute, I’ve reorganized the dswifi library to make building easier and have added it as a module to the devkitpro sourceforge CVS server (see file listing here).

Keep in mind that this certainly isn’t the best option for everyone, but for those of you who are sufficiently capable this will put you at the cutting edge of dswifi library development, which can only be a good thing with the ndshb.com DS wifi game coding competition coming to close in about a month and a half. Having the latest wifi codebase could give your app the edge it so desperately needs! :P

In all seriousness though… Feel free to download and compile the libraries, it’s an utterly painless process if you can get CVS to cooperate, the new build system dumps 4 output files (libdswifi7.a, libdswifi9.a, libdswifi7d.a, and libdswifi9.a – arm7 and arm9 release and debug versions respectively) into [root]/lib, and the include files you need are in [root]/include. [NOTE! the old lib used "libdswifi7r.a" and "libdswifi9r.a" for the release versions - the 'r' has been dropped for the new version.]

If you find bugs…. let me qualify: if you find bugs that are not explicitly listed in my checklist, please feel free to bug me about them. Please do try very hard to explicitly define the bug though, generally “recv doesn’t work” isn’t nearly as helpful as “I noticed that recv fails in xxxx circumstance and tried a bundle of other things but it worked ok for them” – in other words just don’t be extraordinarily vague.

If there are known bugs that are hindering your progress, you may also bug me about them, I’ve got a rough set of priorities in my mind about what order to tackle the bugs in but if you have something you need to have working correctly, I can usually adapt my workflow to fix it more quickly.

As always, bug me via email, leave a comment here or on the wiki, or stop by on the IRC channel – #dswifi on EFnet
Have fun, and good luck with your (hopefully wifi related :P) projects.

Okay, finally I’m getting around to posting some pictures and stuff here.
Coming back from E3 was just tiring, and since then I’ve been busy, but here’s what I’ve got.

On wednesday (as reported earlier) I stood in the line to see the Wii – that was the highlight of the show; the line itself was pretty interesting (they had talking posters, namely large tvs with a videoconferencing system so it looks like it’s a talking poster or something) – the line was very long, about 2.5 hours or so before I managed to get in, but it was a lot worse on other days (up to 5+ hour wait on friday, according to nintendo’s E3 media.
I of course watched almost all of the games, and most of them look really interesting – the games I played were the warioware game, excitetruck (which is a heck of a lot of fun), and a stupid dragonballz game (just to see how they did the only apparent fighting game there – unfortunately it was not very good.)
I have a number of videos taken from my camera (640×480, 15fps with no sound) that I will try to convert and upload in the near future, just for the heck of it :)

Besides the Wii, there were a few other things that caught my attention…. Here they are listed in no particular order:

Gametap was doing a live space-ghost interview, which was pretty neat (additionally, I’ve also seen a particularly funny interview with peter more – but you have to ignore the crazy laughing in the background :P)

nVidia had seating, which we used frequently and watched some of their presentations (such as microsoft flight simulator X, and many others) – the two things I saw there that really stuck out at me though were the Robo-blitz demonstration (looks like a ton of fun) and Timeshift (which looks interesting due to somewhat unique gameplay)

I also saw geometry wars for x360 for the first time (heh heh) – color me uninformed ;)
Well, I still very much want to get an xbox 360, this just strengthens that desire.

Besides all that I visited most/all of the other booths and wasn’t incredibly impressed… I even played lumines 2 and didn’t like it very much :P

I’ll post some pictures now, and will work on converting my videos sometime…. maybe this weekend? dunno.

Bored…….
bored bored bored.
I’ve managed to see all the stuff I want to, and my feet hurt too much to just wander around aimlessly ;)
Still haven’t met many people, and didn’t take many pictures today; maybe tomorrow will be better in both of those regards.

anyway. still looking into why my images aren’t working how I think they should, I hope to get them working soon, or at least once I get home (saturday evening) – ya I know I’m late, I want to post the pictures anyway. Yesterday with the Wii was thrilling though, and I still can’t think of anything else.

Ok… there were a *few* interesting things I saw today ;)
The gametap booth had a *live* space ghost coast to coast interview, hehe – that was really entertaining, I’d imagine it’s somewhat downloadable somewhere if you want to see it.
Well, stay tuned, tomorrow I’ll update my blog with more info tomorrow.

Augh, well – I’m back from the first day of E3 in one piece… or at least I seem to be – don’t quite feel that way.

Started out the day with some wandering in Kentia hall, got to meet a few people I previously knew.
Then went over to west hall, saw the nintendo booth (it was REALLY neat), and the other fun booths over there (stopped by the sony booth briefly and some of the others…)
Then over to south hall, to see nvidia, microsoft, and another load of others who I don’t care to name yet.
Then I went back to the nintendo booth to wait in the Wii line… :)
After about 2-2.5 hours, I managed to get in – it really is amazing.
I do have pictures and videos that I will try to post later, but for now, my feet feel like they’re about to fall off and I don’t feel like doing anything else.
Keep watching, I’ll update this blog entry in a few hours.
(oh, another side note, there are apparently no DS wifi demos this year…. nintendo’s getting smart ;) )

(Update: Ha! I got some images loaded :) – I still have a bundle of gameplay videos (really bad quality, heh) that I need to convert & upload.)
(Gah, images still not working how I want, will update later -_- now sleep….)

Hi again, I’m looking forward to E3 with great anticipation (leaving here in roughly 24 hours…. wheeee!)

Anyway, I thought I might mention that I’ve put some thought into the new DSTunnel protocol, and have written up some basic documentation on how I want the protocol to work, what kind of messages will be present, and how the system should behave.  When I get some time I’ll be properly putting this into code, and hopefully getting a bug-free implementation going this time ;) – some of the premises of the protocol have changed since last attempt, this one will act as a cross between a true p2p udp network and a server-client network, based on configuration and network ability… it will determine whether a p2p or client/server system is more effective based on connection speeds and lag times, and configure the network in an attempt to create the best performance for an arbitrary group of peers. 

Additionally, since I know a bit more about what I’m up against now, I’ve designed some mechanisms in the protocol that will make managing some aspects of timing a lot easier… no idea if they’ll work as well as I hope, but they should at least work better than last attempt (which uh, really screwed a lot of timing stuff up) – Also I’ve designed the interface between the transport protocol and the hardware interface to be a lot more streamlined, and I will probably introduce a simple plugin system so people can write their own custom servers easily.

All this when I have time….

Now, more about E3:

I’ve already been contacted by a few people who want to meet me; needless to say I’m thrilled – whereas last year I didn’t meet many people at all, this year I hope to be able to meet a lot of people in the DS homebrew scene and otherwise – like I’ve said in my previous post, I’ll be either running around E3 or hanging around the nintendo booth wearing a white “dswifi” shirt – see my cafepress store for info on it, or I’ll be wearing a black “reverse engineer” t-shirt from thinkgeek. If you run into me and want to say hi, please do :)

I’m also going to be visiting the 4colorrebellion meetup on thursday, so you can catch me there if you don’t feel like chasing me around…

And, people inevitably ask me about capturing demos…. well, I suppose I am the one to ask about that – I don’t really have any plans to capture at the moment, things have been too busy lately for me to prepare the requisite apps… but I’ll look at what I have when I get into LA and make a decision on what to do.

Anyway, I’ll be ecstatic if I get the chance to meet some of you people at E3! If you can’t go this year, that’s too bad – keep watching as I’ll be posting news and pictures from E3 on my blog when I get the chance :)

*One Last Thing* – I will be on IRC and teamspeak (if bandwidth allows) if I have time in the evenings, so if you wanna bug me, I’ll be in the usual places (#dsdev and #dswifi on EFnet for IRC – I have a personal teamspeak server I will reveal the info for if I decide to use it)

This came up in #dswifi, so I feel obligated to now post it somewhere more public so people have a good feedback path.

At present, the list of known issues for the dswifi library is In my checklist on the wiki [wiki.akkit.org]

If you find a bug that’s not on the known issues list, or want to request a feature that isn’t on the list, please do report it! I don’t really mind you reporting issues that already are listed, but it is a bit counterproductive. About reporting issues, you can bug me on IRC, send an email, or alternately Add it to the talk page for my checklist on the wiki [wiki.akkit.org] – I’m partial to the wiki option cause wikis are cool (and mine doubly so :P)
Anyway, don’t feel like you lack the ability to strike back about features missing or being incorrectly implemented, do bug me about it :)

Ah E3… I’m going to E3 this year, it will be my second time :)
That being said, I’m more than happy to meet any of you people who aren’t too scared to meet me. I’ll be staying at a hotel a few blocks from the LACC, and I’ll be hanging out in the Nintendo booth monopolizing their machines quite a bit I think… I’ll probably be wearing either a dswifi shirt, or a thinkgeek “reverse engineer” shirt, and should be pretty easy to spot ;)
If you do want to meet up with me or anything, feel free to email me (see here for the address) or just leave a comment in this thread – I’m not planning much at the moment so I’m more than happy to meet anyone who wants to bug me.
(I might post a picture later but for now I’ll spare you ;)