- December 26th, 2006: Only weeks ago Francesco Lombardi has submitted changes to the Free Pascal compiler to add a target for the Nintendo DS platform based on his work on the GameBoy Advance platform. Just yesterday Francesco and I (Jason McMillen) have released a small Christmas demo that acts as a demonstration of what can be done so far with the new binaries now offered at his website. The only other previous examples show simple patterns and blank screens. In this tiny WIP demo we have put together shows background music, detailed background graphics, stylius input and simple sprites. The FPC 4 NDS project is really taking off fast!
- October 3rd, 2006: Added News updates from Francesco's Site via RSS Feed. Also, added a link to the brand new, official 'FPC 4 GBA Game Programming Tutorial', your own extensive reference guide to writting your own software on the GBA platform.
- June 1st, 2006: Free Pascal 2.1.x now officially has GameBoy Advance support included! Francesco has released a binary package of the GBA targeted port of FPC 2.1. This release was rewritten from scratch to be more compatible with the Free Pascal source. Future versions of Free Pascal will now permanently support the GBA target and Francesco himself has been added to the Free Pascal Team as the official GBA port developer. The 1st binary package is now available on the FreePascal.org site and Francesco's personal site. There is now a push for testing and improving of the standard RTL and units as well as a possible Nintendo DS branch target. ARM THUMB for ARM7 (and ARM9 for NDS) still needed for full GBA target hardware support.
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2009.05.25 - FPC 2.2.4a released
Hello there! I have just uploaded the new fpc stable release 2.2.4a, for GBA and NDS. Because some bug fixes added in the development trunk that arent merged to 2.2.4 branch, a couple of new features are postponed to the next release. But don't worry, all should work fine without them =)So, let's talk a bit about this release! I have added a batch script to auto configure the fpc.cfg file, so it should be easier to install the compiler. Now there are several new examples and, among others, I'm sure you will find interesting the ones about sprites and background, as well as the ones about music and effects. I'm a bit lazy, you know, so at this time no screenshots, sorry =P
2008.12.27 - Happy new year!
So, after a few months I'm coming back here. I was busy with my new job and I had some hard times too, but things are going better now. Let see, there are some good and bad news to show. First of all, maybe you have noticed that there is a new devkitPro and libnds version, so I'm spending my vacations to update fpc4nds and libndsfpc. There are a lot of changes to do and something does not work yet as expected. On the other hand, some old bugs have been fixed. I'm working now on a mechanism that should allow accessing files in the pascal way (assign, reset, rewrite, read, write, close, ...).In the next release it will be an audio library too, maxmod, that is a way better than older libs that where shipped in the past with libnds. About the book: because some heavy changes in the library interface, I need to rewrite some parts here and there, but my main problem is the lack of time because my new job, so don't expect anything soon.
2008.08.22 - Mummy, look: a book!
Some months ago I wrote a post on PGD forum about a book I started to write. Telling long story short, I'm writing a book about Nintendo DS programming with Free Pascal compiler ^_^.I have spent my vacation to write down some other stuff and to reorganize the book, correct mistakes, write examples and so on. At this time I'm writing in Italian, but an English translation is
already planned. My intention is to make it available for free as ebook
and, maybe, sell it as paper book at Lulu.com for a little fee. A zip
archive with all tools and examples will be available here too and, maybe, i'll enclose a CD to the book too. The work slowly goes on, but I hope to release it as soon as possible. In the next days I'll put online a new section to show the work in progress percentage.
2008.07.15 - bin2unit released
As I promised, there is a new tool available for download: bin2unit. It's another binary-to-code (pascal and/or asm) converter, use it if you want. You will find a dedicated section on the left menu =)About other things: I'm a bit busy now, because real life every so often knocks to my door to remember that it's still there, so don't expect any update soon. Though I have almost finished a visual tool to view and change nds roms header (yeah, you know, things like icon, title, publisher and so on) but, as I have said, I can't find some spare time to complete it.
2008.05.25 - Tuning up fpc4nds and fpc4gba
I have passed the last few days working on fpc4gba in order to reflect the latest updates on devkitARM for gba. I have modified the examples and the libgba, because this is a job I should had to do months ago, but I never had the time to do. About fpc4nds, I'm working on the memory manager (again... *_*): Sergio, a cool guy that is working with fpc4nds, has discovered a bug on the memory manager and has shared some nice ideas in order to fix it. He has proposed some fixes and ideas about file and console I/O in order to make fpc4nds more pascal compliant. We are working on it now, so stay tuned.
A last word about a command line tool I have made: it is a converter that takes a list of binary files as parameter and exports them in a single pascal unit or in a pascal unit + asm files (for relocating purposes). I'm improving it now (I'm thinking about loading templates, in order to implement other languages) and I'm just too lazy to upload it now, but stay tuned, because I'll release it soon . Oh, by the way, its eccentric name is bin2units...
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