Updates to the downloads section

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Updates to the downloads section
Aug 9th 2024, by Arisotura

I have been making updates to the site lately. About time.

Namely, the downloads page didn't do our project justice. It was just a very plain listing of all the melonDS releases since 0.1. Technically, it was a static page that I manually updated after each release.

But this is no more! Go check out the new downloads page.

Now it shows just the last melonDS release. However, if you go down, there is an extra page that will list all the older releases, just like the old download page. Except it's not a static page, so new releases can be added without having to modify everything by hand. I am even thinking of adding a Github hook to post releases automatically when they are posted there, but one thing at a time.

There is also another section named 'Misc. tools'. For now, there's nothing in it, but I plan to add all sorts of tools that are relevant to melonDS or DS emulation in general. For example the DSi dumper comes to mind -- there would be a stable place to get it rather than having to dig into the blog. I will probably add that in real quick.

(edit- I did; after 3 years, about time)

And there's a last section, that isn't finished yet: nightly builds.

The idea was to provide access to builds from the Github CI without requiring users to have a Github account. I coded a Github hook and a backend for it, which downloads the builds from Github onto the server, and keeps the last 100 commits. However, this raises a few questions.

We need to make sure nightly builds don't spread and cause confusion. Right now, any melonDS build just uses the same version number as the last release, which isn't ideal. We would need a way to properly identify builds to avoid confusion.

I also hope that releasing nightly builds doesn't end up killing the incentive to do proper releases.

So we need to plan this out a bit, but hopefully we will take care of it all soon.

Have fun!

3 comments have been posted.

< LAN: almost done!LAN: finally merged! >

Zyute says:
Aug 9th 2024

Definitely a improvement as the old design only provided basic functions. With this new layout more options are available for users to decide what to use and how to verify if the hashes match (This is a big deal in terms of security). Finding a way to label each nightly with a unique release version number would be great so there is no misunderstanding. Thanks for finding ways to enhance melonDS and its site for us users Arisotura. Keep it up 😎!

melonJYC says:
Aug 9th 2024

Good job Arisotura! Keep it up! :)

Dwight Thomas says:
Aug 23rd 2024

This is kind of good I the new power up