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656KB of Vram: how I ported my game to the Nintendo DS

In a previous article, I’ve talked about Kallune (a small 2D game I made). Can’t be that hard to port to the Nintendo DS, right ?

Oh boy.

As it turns out, the DS is a beautiful, elegant, but incredibly stubborn piece of hardware. In this post, I’ll walk you through the reality of developing for the ARM9, the art of aggressive tile management, and how I slowly started loving chasing every microsecond of performance.

Picture of a Nintendo DSi running the homebrew port of Kallune.

I had an old DSi lying around so I've been able to test the game on real hardware!

Picture of a Nintendo DSi running the homebrew port of Kallune.
656KB of Vram: how I ported my game to the Nintendo DS - Killian Guilland