About a year ago, DS homebrew developer Davr created DS85, an emulator of the Texas Instruments TI-85 graphing calculator. The calculator itself is an interesting piece of work, as it allowed for a degree of programming and custom apps, ie, homebrew games.

Unfortunately, application also had limited DLDI support. This meant that later-gen Flash cards such as R4 DS, M3 Simply, or CycloDS Evolution were unable to run DS85 even if there were patching tools available.

That just might change in the near future, as Louis (our tipster) has informed us that he's convinced Davr to hand out a DS85's source codes. Louis himself states he's currently busy working on www.comiccrowd.com, so he's asking other willing and able DS devs to check out the app's source codes, and see what sort of playing around that can do. Here are a couple of extra notes from Davr:

• The code is very ugly
• I started making various changes & optimizations & enhancements, but haven't finished them
• It may not even compile, and if it does, you'll be lucky if it works
• Have fun! :)"
  

Guys interested in updating DS85 can just head on over to the download proper. Good luck!

Download: DS85 source codes

Before there were DS and PSP homebrew games and their respective homebrewers, there were other handhelds that people turned into homebrew for their uses. One of these was a Texas Instruments calculator known as the TI-85.

It was a graphing calculator that allowed you to input numbers to represent graphs in various configurations. At the same time, anyone who spent a few hours poring over the manual could try and program a game for himself that would automatically be stored in the calculator's memory. Perhaps in fond memory of the days when he held a TI-85, Davr has programmed an emulator of the graphing calculator on the Nintendo DS, which he calls the DS85.

According to him, it will work pretty much in the same way the TI-85 used to, though you'll have to use the touch screen for typing down numbers and letters. For those who want to forego those sorts of calculator-y aspects of the emulator, the file also holds 12 games made for the TI85 emulator itself, which you can access through the DS85's interface.

If you'd like to know more about how to use it, don't hesitate to email Davr and check the included readme. You can also watch a video of the DS85 in action here and check on the changelog below. Enjoy!

New Features:

• Saving & Loading State
• Support for loading Virtual TI save states
• ROM & Save/Load support for non-libfat devices (GBA Flashcarts, EZ4, G6)
• Can turn frameskipping on & off (when skipping is on, speeds things up a bit)
• Can toggle between real speed and full speed. (full speed is actually faster than a real TI, but it makes it hard to play games)
• Comes with an included save-state with several games already loaded. (Usgard shell, ZKart3D, ztetris, solytare, jezzball, Lunoid8, mineswp, and PhoenixZ)
• Toggle between proportional and stretched scaling modes

Download: [DS85 Release 2]

Homebrew developer for the Nintendo DS, Davr, is back after quite some time. Actually, he is back with some minor yet important updates for his DS homebrew creation Draw that functions just like MS Paint in DS. The only change from the last version is that if you'll be using this one, you'll be testing with the new alpha version of libfat. Since this is a work in progress, for now loading is disabled since the libfat does not support directory listing yet.

Davr mentioned that he had tested saving on GBAMP snd SUPERCARD CF. He urges you, future users, to let him know through your comments if it is saving correctly so as he could easily provide an update. Here are some of the dev's notes:

-Tested, working: GBAMP, Supercard CF
-Tested, seems to create 0kb files? M3 SD
-Untested, but should work on: M3 CF, Supercard SD, Neoflash MK2/3
-Untested, may or may not work: Max Media Player/Dock, EFA2

And with that, don't hesitate to hook us up with your constructive suggestions, criticisms, opinions and other what-nots through your comments. Not only would you help him in the perfection of this app, but you would also have a hand in making Davr a more experienced and polished homebrew developer. So with that, feel free to speak out in the comments section.

Download: [Draw Test with new libfat NDS Version]
Download: [Draw Test with new libfat .DS.GBA Version]

David Rorex (or davr) has developed Draw, a simple framebuffer drawing app for the DS. A framebuffer is a screen mode where the screen is mapped to a portion of memory. When you write data to this memory area, the data appears on the screen. So basically you can draw nifty stuff (like the one in the image) using Draw. David has received some feedback about Draw bugs.

If you're using Draw and the upper screen does not display correctly when launched directly, davr says you can fix this by launching the homebrew through moonshell. If you cannot read the information on the top screen, davr suggests running his from moonshell, instead of directly from your flash cart menu. If we receive more updates and fixes for Draw, we'll keep you posted. For now, we hope this helps.