ICANN has announced their intent to allow the registration of new gTLDs in a repeated auction process, starting for the princely sum of $100,000 for a handful of letters. In IRC in debate the question came up how many vanity 1st level domains (hereafter vanity 1ld) would be purchased.

IANA / ICANN Gambling! Place your bets, be a psychic

My bet is 840. What’s yours?

• Metatiles (small tile maps that make larger tiles)
• Background tile animation
• Sprite movement & animation
• Parallaxing
• Collision detection
• SFX & music (not sure on this one yet)

I’m still brainstorming so any ideas are welcome. The tutorial will only cover libnds usage so you PALib zealots are out of luck. You may want to read my PALib Survival Guide to find out why.

I normally hate doing stuff like this as it’s completely out of character for me. However, my pride is interfering with my health & well-being. The past couple months have been hell on my wife & I and we’ve fallen on harder times than we’re used to. There have been a few times where I’ve gone a couple days without food in order to make sure my rent and other important things are paid. It’s really tough to keep focused on code that could prove to be profitable when you don’t even have the energy to stay awake.

Again, this is not a thing I like doing and I don’t like to make a habit of asking for help. However, going out of character to do things you don’t normally do can sometimes help keep you alive & well. If by some odd chance you’re reading this and would like to help, I’ve created a ChipIn widget to accept donations. If you do choose to help, I appreciate it very much.

flashme.zip
flashme.nds
MD5: fa220267edb05f4386025d97e2168f3f
SHA1: 010224b1edddf8d881248a60d215b493cb1c1cd7

flashme_stealth.zip
flashme_stealth.nds
MD5: d4521d1f86232d11ee63562393b630f9
SHA1: 943ab02e5c22ff6c2beac11693053ef3aa9b0f5f

noflashme.zip
noflashme.nds
MD5: 8cdfc84f6882e1a988b776753b3e6a67
SHA1: fe3f72e28a85465c6a506d5cbf78edafe58ac33b

To give you an idea how it works, let me step you through the process I used.

1. Install the host device (in this case, the router)
2. Tweak your network settings as you see fit
3. Go into your NDS’s WFC config screen (my game of choice was Lost Magic but any WFC-enabled game will do) and select an empty profile
4. You should have 3 buttons (duh) but the only one that is of interest to you is the AOSS one
5. Tap the button and then hold the AOSS button on your host device
6. The host and the NDS will start talking to each other to make sure they both support AOSS
7. Once they’re done, the host will send over the Wi-Fi connection config data and store it in the selected profile
8. The NDS will then verify that the connection works
9. That’s it, unless there was some sort of funky error. For that, see your manual/tech/guru/etc

That’s it, really. Now onto the reason for this post.

When setting up my AOSS profile, I noticed that instead of the normal “Ready” text on the button, it had an AOSS icon. This made me believe that somewhere in the profile data lies an identifier that says if the profile is AOSS or not. Oh how I didn’t expect to find as much as I did.

Using the information from the User Settings page of the NDSTech Wiki, I decided to dive in head first. There was a good chunk of information missing and I figured I could find the identifier myself. Turns out that instead of finding just the identifier, I completed a good chunk of the missing information (about 69 bytes worth), thanks to AOSS. Rather than just dancing around the subject, I’ll post my findings here until they can be added to the Wiki. There’s still a bit more left to figure out (for instance, the 14 bytes starting at 0xF0 bother me) but that’ll come in due time. Follow the link below for the technical stuff.

0×00 - 64 bytes - 00s
0×40 - 32 bytes - SSID
0×60 - 32 bytes - SSID for WEP64 on AOSS host (each security level has its own SSID)
0×80 - 16 bytes - WEP key #0
0×90 - 16 bytes - WEP key #1
0xA0 - 16 bytes - WEP key #2
0xB0 - 16 bytes - WEP key #3
0xC0 - 04 bytes - IP Address
0xC4 - 04 bytes - Gateway
0xC8 - 04 bytes - Primary DNS
0xCC - 04 bytes - Secondary DNS
0xD0 - 01 bytes - Subnet Mask
0xD1 - 20 bytes - WEP64 key on AOSS host (see WEP64 SSID note above)
0xE5 - 01 bytes - ??
0xE6 - 01 bytes - WEP Mode
0xE7 - 01 bytes - Status (0×00 - normal, 0×01 - AOSS, 0xFF - deleted)
0xE8 - 07 bytes - ??
0xEF - 01 bytes - Seems to be randomly set, may be priority
0xF0 - 14 bytes - ??
0xFE - 02 bytes - CRC16 of 0×00 through 0xFD

“Must have” features:

• XML-RPC, Atom, e-mail interfaces for posting (would cover a good chunk of blog options)
• HTML & rich text editing
• Multiple account support
• Handwriting recognition & keyboard entry

“Nice but not necessary” features:

• *Voice recording (could be used for those podcast people out there)
• **Photo/Video uploading via some means (FTP, HTTP, etc)
• Plug-in based system to allow for more blog types as well as posting options later on
• Templates for commonly-used formatting options
• Anything else?

* We could use the various CF/SD storage devices available for storing said voice messages via fatlib and post them somewhere (Putfile, for example)
** Photos can be stored the same way as voice but there is a catch. Right now, there’s no means of taking photos from the DS other than pulling them off pre-existing media (again, CF/SD). A nice addition to this app could be some sort of cart (using the GBA bus) to interface w/ any USB-enabled camera via PTP. This cart could then save the pictures to our various mediums for use when posting.

The way I see the photoblogging working from a DS is that you start a new post, tap “Attach Photo” and it gives you a menu listing pictures on both your storage medium as well as your camera, if one is attached to the cart. From there, it could post both the pictures to some storage site (ImageShack, for instance), grab the url, link it into your post then publish the post to your blog.

Pipe dream, I know. Any takers?

Added:

• Can initialize the class for use with bitmap or tile modes
• Pixel plotting (the beef of the class)
• Line, Rectangle, Circle, Polygons, Filled Circle, Filled Rectangle, Filled Polygons
• Flood Fill (though it could still use some work)
• Bitmap/Sprite drawing (draws an image at x,y)
• Transparency modes (None, RGB Color)
• Pen modes (Normal, AND, OR, XOR)

Next:

• Transparency modes (Indexed Color, Alpha)
• Writing modes (direct to video, buffered)
• Anything else that comes up…

I also have a fractal class that I’m playing with to test it as well as working on some text display stuff. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to let me know.

The submissions should be sent to the same address as pointed out here and here.