Usenti’s been updated to match.

• link to grit
• link to usenti

libnds has two sets of names. This probably is a result of serving
different masters in its early days. One set uses
Mappy’s nomenclature.
That’s the one without the REG_ in front of it, and
uses things like _CR, and _SR. This is
one you’re most likely to see in the current NDS tutorials.
The second set uses GBATek’s names (mostly) plus a REG_
prefix. If you’ve done GBA programming, these should feel quite
familiar.

For the most part, I don’t really care much for the the Mappy names.
One reason for this is that they don’t match up with the GBATek names,
making it harder to look-up what they do. More importantly, though,
without any sort of prefix that indicates they’re registers, they all
look like the constants you put in the
registers. After all, that’s what all-caps usually means: a constant.
When I see the identifier WIN0_X0, I’m more likely to
think that it’s something to set a window coordinate to, rather
than that it is how to control the window. Having to wonder constantly
whether a particular identifier is a constant or a register is pretty
annoying(1).
But perhaps this is just me.

What’s especially grating about these names is that the elements of
the affine matrix
are transposed. HY is actually VX and vice
versa. Shame, actually, because the HX-VY naming
scheme does make more sense than old PA-PD names.

Elements XDY and YDX are also transposed …
I think. It’s hard to be sure since this nomenclature is highly ambiguous
anyway. I really can’t tell how the elements are supposed to
be read, much less determine if they are in the correct order.

The REG_ registers do not suffer from those problems, but
they have their own issues. The registers that had a GBA counterpart
are generally okay, except that some are mapped with the wrong
datatype. For the NDS-specific ones, some follow the GBATek names,
some almost follow them (MTX_LOAD_4x4 vs
REG_MTX_LOAD4x4, for example; note the underscores), and
some are the Mappy-like names plus prefix.

And to top it all, registers of both nomenclatures lie sprinkled
across multiple files and one file called registers_alt.h,
which is not included by nds.h, making sure you never
know which names are included or not until you either search
though the whole include hierarchy or get an error from the compiler.
And then have to search the hierarchy to find out the
exact spelling.

What I’m trying to say is, it’s a frickin mess. To make a little
more sense of things, here is a list of all the registers as they
appear in GBATek, the primary libnds set (plus the file where they’re
defined), and the alternate libnds set (registers_alt.h).
I’ve also included links to where you can find the descriptions
in GBATek.

• The bold black names are those corresponding exactly to GBATek.
• The bold red items are problematic in some
  way; usually the datatype is not what is should be, or some registers
  have been swapped somehow. Follow the footnotes or hover over them to
  see my comments. Note that some of these are already fixed in CVS.
• Sometimes there are gaps. In this case, that particular set has
  no name for it.

• 1 Arm 9 registers
• 2 Arm 7 registers

1 Arm 9 registers

2 Arm 7 registers

Every month there’s one in a different location; and this weekend it was Utrecht. I wasn’t planning on going at first because I know I can’t keep my hands of the things and I still have a considerable backlog from the last few times I went, but I had to go in that direction anyway, so I figured why not. And, as always, I went in with the idea that I didn’t really need anything anymore, but came out with a bag full regardless. Book included:

• “It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science”, exploring the story behind some of the most important equations in physics today.
• “Quantum Field Theory: A Modern Introduction” by Michio Kaku. Yes that Kaku. I didn’t do much with QFT at univeristy because it’s fucking scary, but perhaps this time I can have better luck. If I ever get round to reading it.
• “Cross-Platform Game programming“, dealing with memory and resource management for multiple systems, creating debugging facilities and more. I think this would have come in handy if I’d found it a few years ago. Oh well. Particularly nice feature: it was only €4; nearly a tenth of the regular price.

So yeah, another good batch. Now I just have to find the time to read them all.

On many occasions, I just hated not going for C++. Not so much for its higher-level functionality like classes, inheritance and other OOPy goodness (or badness, some might say), but more because I would really, really like to make use of things like function