<story><title>DSLinux – Linux for the Nintendo DS</title><url>https://www.dslinux.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>erik</author><text>I made a few small contributions to this a long time ago. Nice to see that the website is still up!&lt;p&gt;Probably the most interesting feature of this project was how it handled memory. The DS only has 4mb of ram.  And there is no MMU, so swap isn&amp;#x27;t an option.  But the gameboy cartridge port has 32mb of address space mapped to the bus.  And there are homebrew&amp;#x2F;piracy cartridges that fill that space with 32mb of ram.  Which is great, except that the DS can only write to the cartridge port on 16-bit aligned addresses.  And almost all software will assume that 8-bit aligned writes will work. To make use of the expansion memory the developers ended up creating a patched GCC that would convert any writes to unaligned locations to an appropriate read, 16-bit write, and set of shift operations.</text></comment>
<story><title>DSLinux – Linux for the Nintendo DS</title><url>https://www.dslinux.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mikhael28</author><text>I recently did a deep dive into DS homebrew. Some cool stuff - a Yugioh calculator, mp3 player, port of Doom. In particular, I just love the hardware of the DS Lite or the DsI - it feels great in 2023, and the symmetrical screens are amazing when holding in vertical mode reading an ebook or playing Hotel Dusk. It also has one of the best pieces of software ever for learning Chinese, ‘My Chinese Coach’ - there are additionally two more (at least) homebrew software packages that focus on Chinese, such as DS Zhongwhen.&lt;p&gt;DS is very underrated - so many great games, and it’s an emulation dream. All without being too powerful, and having ‘realistic’ graphics that just drain battery life.</text></comment>