It's time for another DS entry to the NeoFlash Spring Coding Competition 07, and as you can tell by previous entries, coding competitions do produce some good end products, and NDS Sports is no different. This homebrew game from Davgav is a "tribute" to Wii Sports, and currently includes two of the sports included in the Wii game: Bowling and Tennis.

Of course, we don't have the benefit of a Wiimote adaptor when playing on Nintendo's portable console, but Davgav has tried his best to emulate the movements using the touch screen. A little word of advice from us: it works a lot better if you use the stylus and not your finger which seems to be something commonly-used by narrow-fingered DS gamers nowadays. Here's how to play:

Tennis

• Use the touchscreen.
• If you move the pen slowly you move the racket.
• If you want to swing the racket move it faster or click in the screen.
• Your Mii will move automatic to the ball, so swing in time.
• You have to do three full points to win.

Bowling

• Use the touchscreen.
• First grab the ball touching the touchscreen whit the pen.
• Then move it to the top screen to launch it.
• When it says how much pins get down you can launch the ball.

Stay tuned to QJ as we'll have all the latest on the Neoflash Coding Competition 07 as it comes in.

Download: NDS Sports

Nintendo of America have today smugly stated that the Wii was the No.1 selling videogames console in the United States in January, and are proud to call the Wii "the fastest selling new-generation home system."

The independent NPD Group (an organization that provides global consumer and retail information to manufacturers) states that Nintendo sold 435,503 Wii systems in the USA for January, more than any other video games console in the region.

The title of "the fastest selling new-generation home system" comes as the Wii has sold 70% more systems than any other new video game system has in its first January of availability during the last 10 years. Impressive heh?

Nintendo has gone from strength to strength with their consoles, with the DS platform selling nearly 239,000 hardware units and more than 2.4 million software units. The combination of Nintendo's home and portable consoles has been revealed to account for 46% of the total market sales for gaming systems.

Finally, Nintendo have said that they will continue to ship units as fast as they can make them, with most consoles selling out straight away.

With the 2007 line-up looking strong for both the DS and the Wii, Nintendo are making a lot of headway in the next generation console market with the help of gamers just like you - keep it up!

  

Wright Flight for the DS has such a long history as a homebrew game, and has had so many updates we really can't keep count. But the developers known as Koopa Troopers have finally decided that their biplane dogfighting homebrew game deserves a new name after the wealth of updates that have far surpassed what we would have expected when the game was in it's infancy back in October 2006. Now the game has been tastefully renamed "Explosion of an Aeroplane", and with version 0.2.2 update comes many updates.

Here's the changelog:

• The project has a new name: "Explosion of an Aeroplane."
• Incorporated the dswifilib bugfixes (DSLite related) done on 11-Jan-2007.
• When the current special weapon runs out of ammo, the next one with ammo is automatically selected.
• Added third flight model: 'Outer Space'.
• It is now possible to select the base color for the plane in the plane selection screen.
• Redrew the missile sprite, and flying missiles now emit smoke particles. The missile sprites are also rotated correctly.
• When out of gas, the turbo boost works as the normal acceleration.
• Added a template banner (icon) to the ROM, though it seems that M3 cannot show it. DS-X shows it correctly.
• Added support for delayed particle spawns (very easy to create a lot of particles that appear later).
• Added heat seeking missiles.
• It's possible to destroy the AI turrets with missiles and bombs.
• If you press L+R in less than 0.5s after your plane has started to explode, it fires some (50% chance per bullet) of
  the remaining special weapon bullets into random directions.
• Made the zooming zoom more away from the playfield.
• The bombs get the plane's initial Y speed.
• Added enemy missile launchers.
• If you press the name of the level in the PLAY menu screen, the level will be reset.
• It is now possible to zoom out and in into the plane in PLANE SELECTION menu screen using X and B, and corrected the
  Z-scaling.
• The plane selection and the plane colors are saved in SRAM.
• After re-spawning the plane is invulnerable during the first frame of the new life as well.
• Changing layers uses only 50% of a gas tank, not 100%.
• The level is reset when a multiplayer match begins.

Download: [Explosion of an Aeroplane v0.2.2]

It's been a long time since Bronto last updated his NDSMail homebrew application, but today we've received word of yet another update to this excellent email application for the DS. With this app, you're never too far away from your messages, as long as you have a WiFi connection for your DS where you can access your emails.

Bronto would like to apologize for the absence of releases recently, but as he says, NDS development can be very time-consuming. It was worth the wait though, as although Bronto is still having problems with SSL, this version has been compiled with the latest Devkit, dswifi, and libfat (DLDI), so even owners of the new wifi-chipset DS Lites should be able to use it.

This latest version also contains all the changes from the large overhaul of last autumn, including save mail support. When you run this version make sure you take a look at the new attachment feature by sending some jpgs to your DS. Just remember, JPEG lib is causing some problems at the moment so try sending small JPEGs first!

Download: [NDSMail 0.54d]

Here's a new application for those using the Slot 1 SuperCard flash cart with their DS, and it comes straight out of the developing office of SuperCard coder ratx.

The SuperCard DS Skinner increases compatibility with the SuperCard just as ratx's Magic homebrew patcher does, allowing you to patch your own wallpaper into the latest English msforsc.nds using your PC and this batch script and other utilities compiled by ratx. Having custom wallpapers is something we all enjoy, and now you can make your own without any error messages!

What this does is this simply replaces the existing sclogo.b15 with your own image file in PNG format. It then removes the bootup error screen so you don't have to sit through the error every time you boot up with your custom image file. The only limitations with this program is that your compressed wallpaper.bin has to be less than or around 18k to 26k as a raw PNG file.

This package also includes ratx's SuperCard DS "parts maker" that will cut a msforsc.nds into the part1 and part3 needed for patching your own wallpaper, so no need to do that yourself. As far as customizing your DS goes, it doesn't get much easier than this.

Download: [SuperCard DS Skinner v0.1]

Deal or No Deal DS">Robert Durbin has released a bug-free version of his Deal or No Deal homebrew game for the DS. I'm sure you've already seen the TV show, and this game is exactly the same.

First you choose one of the 26 cases as "your" case, and then you start to eliminate other cases on the board. Periodically a banker offers to give you money in exchange for your case, and your mission if you choose to accept it is to get the best deal for yourself by either saying "deal" to the banker and accepting one of his offers or continue to the end where you can choose whether to keep your case or trade for the other one.

The game also keeps track of your previous deals, so you can see just how well you've been doing. It's a pretty basic game, but just like the TV show, it can be quite difficult to beat the banker and get a good deal for yourself. Robert ran into a few bugs in earlier releases, including crashes, the game allowing multiple cases to be selected and so forth, but all of them have been fixed now so it should run perfectly. Just one rather simple question remains...download or no download?

Download: [Deal or No Deal]

You might have been thinking that MoonShell v1.06 finafinal would have been the last release of the popular media player for the DS, but oh no! The workhorse that is the Infantile Paralysiser has still been working on this release and has found more bugs in MoonShell 1.6 finalfinalbeta1, which was released earlier this week.

Thankfully, he has fixed the bugs and now we see the release of MoonShell 1.6 finalfinalfinalbeta. Now is when you will start to get confused, so just to get things straight, this is MoonShell v1.6 final3. Here's the changelog:

• This is a version that can be used with 'M3Simply/R4/SCDS/EZ5'.
• The disk driver changed completely, and there is a possibility that the adaptor that has worked up to now doesn't work, so make sure you test it out.
• Start NDSROM file has been was changed: older name '/shell' was changed to '/moonshl' and file name 'global.ini' was changed to 'moonshl.ini'.
• The ZLIB compression routine was backed to the Ver1.51 for the text bookmark bug.
• When the error occurs even if it updates it, the bookmark file is broken. Please delete moonshl/bookmrk0/1/2/3.sav and setup again.
• The text plug-in can have displayed on both screens.
• 'The L/R button is locked' item was added to the system menu.
• The number of file reading buffers of the DPG reproduction has been expanded.
• The memory leak bug of the OGG plug-in was corrected.
• The enhancing memory can be used by the PNG plug-in.
• Restore when the last folder is remembered, and it will start next time.
• The StartPath item was deleted from the [System] section of 'moonshl.ini'.
• The DLDI driver for G6Flash was renewed to 2007-01-11 version.

This might not be the final release of this homebrew multimedia player, so don't think take this as 100% finished. As past releases show, the Infantile Paralysiser has a habit of bringing out new releases so stay tuned!

Download: [MoonShell 1.6 finalfinalfinalbeta1]

So you may have probably heard that Dragon Quest IXwill be coming to the DS. Sure sounds great for all those handheld-owners there, eh?

Anyway, we have the first official gameplay footage of Dragon Quest IX here, to give you an idea what it';s like. If RPGs are your forte then this is certainly one you should look out for. The commentary on the video is rather is in Japanese but that sure didn't stop me from admiring the beauty of this game.

Real time combat, action RPG and the pedigree of a successful game series with the status of Dragon Quest will make this a must-have for DS owners. Although some gamers have said that they would prefer Dragon Quest IX to come to the Wii as well as to it's portable sibling, the video footage below might just change their minds. Look out for this game on the shelves in 2007.

  

It looks like it's time for another Wright Flight DS update as the Koopa Troopers have worked hard to bring you more of their Multiplayer Gravity Force clone for the DS. Wright Flight uses dswifilib to connect to other players online and let you battle it out across the skies in a 20th century environment. There's nothing like a dogfight with other players, colliding and destroying the level graphics, and shooting down other planes. If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out the version 0.1.8 changelog:

• All the players are shown as online when they login to the server, not only after a match begins.
• After respawning, and at the start of a network match, the plane is invulnerable for five seconds, unless the player starts firing.
• The plane doesn't move after respawning until the camera has reached it.
• If a player timeouts, but manages to receive the timeout notice, his plane doesn't vanish.
• Changed the button configuration: Now there are two weapon buttons, one for the machine gun and one for the special weapon. The third weapon button now changes the special weapon.
• Adjusted the gravity, made turbo boost faster, made turning faster while turbo boosting, turbo boost eats 50% more gas.
• Plane to plane collisions do now less damage.
• Dropped the initial network send frameskip to 3, the optimizations seem to allow this (or is it my new ZyXEL P660HW-D1 ADSL2+ router?).
• Once again the bullets are reset when a network match begins.
• Added hidden debug menu screen (press spot X on the credits screen).
• When starting the server you must specify the client timeout.
• Each plane has now its own collision region.
• Added new HUD graphics. Also the selected special weapon and the remaining bullets are displayed on the HUD.

As you can see, the Koopa Troopers have been hard at work on this release, but make sure you check back because this isn't the last we've seen of this game. Many updates including airports, two player co-op mode, and better graphics are to come!

Download: [Wright Flight v0.1.8]

The excellent RyanFB has today updated his vintage Sega Genesis Emulator for the DS, adding a few bug fixes and a new experimental 3MB ROM loading module which should allow you to play even more Genesis games on the go.

A lot of fans thought this emulator wasn't being updated anymore since the last time we reported about it was back in August, but there's no stopping RyanFB! If you like to play good old fashioned games when your commuting to work, then this is for you. Here's the changelog:

• Added Max Media Dock FAT support (thanks chishm/Bonic)
• Added EZ4 FAT support (thanks cory1492/Rudolph)
• Reduced memory usage, 3MB ROMs should work again
• Added EXPERIMENTAL support for using the additional RAM on SuperCard SD carts to load ROMs larger than 3MB. This comes with the standard warning that this feature may cause file corruption on your SD card. The SCSD may also keep the Genesis ROM in GBA ROM space after a reboot, causing PicoDriveDS to see it as an appended ROM and crash on startup - to fix this issue simply power down, take the SCSD out, and wait a few seconds.

Remember, take heed of the warning when using the experimental mode which runs ROMs larger than 3MB. Make sure you back up the data on your SD card before using this due to risk of corruption.

Download: [PicoDriveDS 0.1.6]