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

In a previous article, I’ve talked about Kallune (a 2D game we've made with friends). 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.

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