Looking for a .nds or .gba exporter

[jimbobert94]

The Nintendo DS has a 67 MHz processor. That's not anywhere close to powerful enough to do what LÖVE does.

Also, less double-posts and meaningless image macros please.

We can export 3d games to it with blender, but not 2d? That doesn't sound right.

[slime]

You're welcome to contribute your own, if you think it's possible.

[jimbobert94]

You're welcome to contribute your own, if you think it's possible.

[veethree]

You're welcome to contribute your own, if you think it's possible.

Also, less double-posts and meaningless image macros please.

[RedHot]

@jimbobert94

It's never a bad idea do dream big.

Don't listen to the party poopers. It is possible. There are open source nds emulators. Learn about hardware architecture of nds or gba. You will be dealing with ARM cpus here. Try to understand what a RISC cpu is. Heck it might take a year or 2 but try to make it

Long story short if you feel this stuff is hot and you won't give up after a couple of months it is possible. There will be dirty hacks, there will be limitations (a lot) but it will work

[raidho36]

There's an easier way: just learn to program NDS games, with NDS tools. Though you will most likely have to learn C or even assembly. Lua is for sure the best scripting language for embedding to games, but it's performance is pretty far from blazing fast, even with LuaJIT. I mean, seriously, how do you even expect handheld's puny processor to munch Lua code?

[RedHot]

There would be no such thing as running LUA code in an interpreted way. Lua code would need to be compiled for an NDS instruction set.

[MPQC]

@jimbobert94

It's never a bad idea do dream big.

Don't listen to the party poopers. It is possible. There are open source nds emulators. Learn about hardware architecture of nds or gba. You will be dealing with ARM cpus here. Try to understand what a RISC cpu is. Heck it might take a year or 2 but try to make it

Long story short if you feel this stuff is hot and you won't give up after a couple of months it is possible. There will be dirty hacks, there will be limitations (a lot) but it will work

It is possible, nobody here is going to really deny that. However, you are not going to get any uses out of it, and will most likely not get anywhere past a POC. It most likely just will not be usable.

There's an easier way: just learn to program NDS games, with NDS tools. Though you will most likely have to learn C or even assembly. Lua is for sure the best scripting language for embedding to games, but it's performance is pretty far from blazing fast, even with LuaJIT. I mean, seriously, how do you even expect handheld's puny processor to munch Lua code?

Pretty much this. I've made a DS game before (link if anyones interested), but that was years ago. You're not going to get very far by using Lua unfortunately.

[seanmd]

There are actually some pretty impressive C frameworks for writing nintendo ds games. It's not so much that it's impossible as it is that love depends on some pretty general purpose tech to display stuff to the screen because it's meant to be platform independent. On a DS you really want to use hardware modes and dedicated (platform specific) calls to manage texture/sprites and their display.

Also, all numbers in lua are floats whereas the DS has no FPU (floating point unit) on either of its processors and would require software conversion -- further eating up your meager allotment of clock cycles.

[szensk]

Also, all numbers in lua are floats whereas the DS has no FPU (floating point unit) on either of its processors and would require software conversion -- further eating up your meager allotment of clock cycles.

You're definitely correct here, but he could build lua with just integers instead of doubles to get ameliorate that problem. Instead of floats, you'd want to use fixed point numbers.

But you're going to have to re-implement the API so if you want a game to run on NDS, there are Easier Ways™.