Homebrewed

This weekend brought with it many a revelation, one of which was my new found love of the DS. I have owned my DS for going on three years now and I have never held it on the pedestal that the media, critics and other owners have. I just don't have a lot of use for a portable gaming device. I don't have a long, hands-free commute to work. I own two "next gen" consoles and a gaming ready computer. So what is the point of hand held gaming out side of a trip to the loo.

That was before I discovered homebrew. Well actually not discovered, because I have always been aware of it. It would better be described as, I finally took a real interest early last week in homebrew. If you are unfamiliar with homebrew it is user created content for video game systems that expand upon the systems limited and intended original use. What that boils down to is I can have an organizer very similar to the functions of a PDA on my DS. That and hundreds of other possibilities.

I picked up a M3DS Simply (see last paragraph) which arrived Friday night and had a 2Gb micro SD card in it by Saturday afternoon. By Sunday I had the organizer and media player (mp3 and video) installed and to be honest I have only scratched the surface. There are tons of useful little applications available, but also a thriving indie game development community. There are also tasty morsels to look forward to in the future.

I will be spending the next week trying out different applications and hopefully have a report on my successes and failures up soon. Also a quick note in reference to the M3 Simply. Don't buy it! Get the R4DS Revolution instead, it is the same exact hardware as the M3, but the group that makes it is still updating the firmware. The M3 team seems to have stopped making firmware updates so the community has started hacking new R4 firmware releases to work with the M3. Save yourself the trouble and get a R4.