Squeak on Nintendo DS

Hi,

The Nintendo DS game handheld is very successful at game developers .  
In addition, a linux is already running on it (http://www.dslinux.org/ 
wiki/Main_Page).
Therefore - would Squeak running useful at this ? Here are the  
specs:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS#Specifications

I ask it because I had lost me feeling for hardware in the Intel Core  
Duo age......


Regards


Hans

The DSLinux site says it has two ARMs, one with 33MHz and one with 67MHz. From
my experience with ARMed Squeak I would not use anything under 200MHz (at
least with Morphic.

Cheers, Torsten

Am Mittwoch, 13. Dezember 2006 22:22 schrieb Hans N Beck:

I ported the VM to the DS a few month ago.

I only spent a weekend on it, so it's not working very well but I can
make it a bit more usuable if you need to use it.

You need to use a third party flash card to run anything that's not
certified by Nintendo and since the DS have only 4MiB of ram on the DS
don't expect to use your regular image.

I wasn't able to implement the save function because the file system
driver for my flash card doesn't support writing yet but I guess it's
doable.



Le jeudi 14 décembre 2006 à 10:21 +0100, Torsten Sadowski a écrit :

Hi,

very interesting.

Am 14.12.2006 um 18:41 schrieb Alexandre Jasmin:

> I ported the VM to the DS a few month ago.
>
> I only spent a weekend on it, so it's not working very well but I can
> make it a bit more usuable if you need to use it.

I have only some ideas, not concrete plans.  The far goal would be  
games for Nintendo, and I asked me if Squeak could be a "integrator"  
or scripting tool, if graphics etc. are provided by plug-in. I have  
no experience make a own VM, but it seems not to be a great problem.  
Also, I have no experience with the homebrew things, and therefore  
before I consider to go on I wanted to know if there is a chance at  
all that squeak runs. So I notice that the answer is yes :-)
Thank you for your infos

Regards

Hans

Hi,

how did you port squeak to the DS? Did you use the linux port or do you
use the DS directly?

I like to try it out very much and I think there are other NDS fans on
this list too.

- Jens -

I'm quite curious about this myself, both as a user and developer of  
Squeak on PDAs, but I'm also a fan and owner of a DS.

I've never used Squeak on a machine *that* slow, but I have used  
Squeak on a machine at least in the same league- the VTech Helio with  
its 75 MHz MIPS CPU.  No way you're going to run Morphic, both  
because of speed and memory availability on something so skimpy like  
the DS.  But MVC is incredibly fast- I've run it just fine under DOS  
and Linux on 33 MHz 486 machines, which is more powerful than the 33  
MHz ARM most likely in the DS, but still.

I think I can say (conjecture) that the simple CharRecog character  
recognizer that is apart of Squeak and works great in MVC would run  
fast enough as well.  Some work would need to be done on it to allow  
a person to train it, selecting the intended character using the D-
pad and A button. A soft keyboard could be written as well, but  
outside my expertise (for MVC at least).

Looking forward to hearing more about this...

Regards,
Aaron

On Dec 18, 2006, at 12:05 PM, Jens Lincke wrote:

Hi Alexandre,


Am 14.12.2006 um 18:41 schrieb Alexandre Jasmin:

Is ist expensive and / or complicated to use these "homebrew"  
things ? From the descriptions in the internet it seems not, but  
practice may be different ;-)

As far as I know, there are emulators for DS to run on a PC, so one  
could make an optimized Squeak version (VM) in a  more easy way ?
 From the practical use I would use Squeak as scripting or  
integrating part for use the SDK API to develop games. So the  
important part would be to have the mechanism of smalltalk, not the  
normal image....

Regards

Hans