Stephen's Weblog

Hi everyone, it’s been a while, but here are my priorities in the homebrew realm for the immediate future. I’m going to disappoint some of you, sorry – but this is how it has to be.

The DSWifi project is going to be discontinued for the time being, until sometime next year. I’m not going to go into more detail on why, but I will not be continuing to work on it for now. I would like to turn it over to an individual or group of people if anyone would like to maintain it – if you’d like to do this, get in contact with me (on IRC, or leave a comment, or send an email…)

I will be starting a new project to reverse engineer the Wii’s wireless hardware, and build a new library based on it. This is expected to start around the start of december, and run a few months (who knows how long it will take)

The DSTunnel project is currently inactive, but I will make an attempt to revive it later this year, I would like to first complete the Wii wifi library, and I may actually build DSTunnel directly for the wii, or at least as one of the supported platforms.

I have 2 undisclosed DS projects that I will be working on… you’ll just have to wait and see what they are :)

Beyond all that, I have a few other general purpose libraries (besides the 802.11 and TCP/IP libs) that I’m going to start on at some arbitrary time (FAT lib, crypto lib, and some others) and a few emulator projects I want to work on.

So, that’s what my schedule looks like for the next several months – I now await your kind comments and harsh criticism ;)

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)

Alright, about DSTunnel – I’m promoting it to active status in my checklist. In reality I probably won’t be able to touch it until after E3.

The last attempt at dstunnel was a partial success but never actually managed to successfully tunnel any games (contrary to [prior] popular belief). It did however do a lot of things right, and brought much hope to the testing team.
However, there are some serious bugs in the current version and some protocol oversights that have caused a lot of problems; to remedy all this, the dstunnel system will be completely rewritten.

I’ll be posting here in my blog when I get the time to start the rewrite, and will update the checklist with a breakdown of tasks; so bear with me here, I’ve got way too much other stuff to do in the interim.