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Little news... Mar 17th 2025, by Arisotura

Thank you all for the kind messages, it means a lot to me. Things are still rough for me. On one hand, I'm dealing with old personal issues that I have never really addressed properly. On the other hand, I have been feeling very pessimistic about the state of the world and the future for years now, so that doesn't help. There's also surgery recovery playing into this, but that should hopefully get better with time. Anyway, I'm going to try a new type of therapy, since previous attempts haven't really helped. As far as melonDS is concerned, there won't be much news from me for a while. I think I need a break from it. Sometimes it just feels good to focus on something else. I could talk a bit more about the Wii U gamepad stuff, though. For now, I mainly post in threads at GBAtemp and nesdev, but I could make a kind of blog for it. I don't know... I intended to make a blog of that kind for it and other personal projects, but, you know, ADHD. Anyway. The Wii U gamepad. As you might already know, that gamepad is a nifty little tablet with its own processing power. It runs off an ARM9 CPU clocked at 108 MHz, with 4 megabytes of RAM. Okay, it's less powerful than the DSi, but there's something about running custom software on it that I like. It scratches a very particular kind of itch for me. It's actually a little project I had started back in 2016, around the same time melonDS was born. Which resulted in some files for this project having melon-themed names too. Heh. Anyway, I was able to run some custom code on the gamepad, but couldn't do much beyond toggling the rumble motor -- the gamepad version of your typical 'blink a LED' embedded hello-world program, I guess. Lacking hardware documentation and proper means to upload and debug gamepad code, I was fumbling in the dark, and didn't get much done. I had made another attempt in 2022, but it also went nowhere. Last year, I went for it again, but used a FPGA to replace the gamepad's SPI FLASH memory. In a more detailed post, I could go in details about how this was done and the clever tricks it uses, but long story short, this not only lets me easily upload code to the gamepad, but it also serves as a handy debug output. This checkerboard pattern may not seem impressive, but it took a bunch of trial and error to get this to show up at all on the gamepad screen. This isn't the DS where the screens kinda Just Work(tm) and you can display basic stuff with some simple initialization. The gamepad requires you to initialize the LCD and video hardware before anything will be displayed. My plan is now to provide a kind of boot menu, that could be installed to a gamepad over wifi (via a Wii U, or a PC with adequate setup). That menu would then let you install apps over wifi, boot already installed apps, boot apps over wifi directly (for testing purposes), boot the stock firmware, and of course uninstall the menu. I already have things mostly working, including a basic wifi driver and lwIP port providing network functionality. I just need to finish putting everything together... work has been slow on that front. If you're interested in this sort of stuff: • melonpad -- codebase for the boot menu • melonboot -- codebase for a custom bootloader • Hardware documentation for the Wii U gamepad Keep in mind that all of this is WIP. I might post more about it elsewhere if there's interest.

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