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< Not much to say lately...The joys of programming >

Sneak peek Oct 27th 2025, by Arisotura

Just showing off some of what I've been working on lately: This is adjacent to something else I want to work on, but it's also been in the popular request list, since having to manually enter cheat codes into melonDS isn't very convenient: would be much easier to just import them from an existing cheat code database, like the R4 cheat database (also known as usrcheat.dat). It's also something I've long thought of doing. I had looked at usrcheat.dat and figured the format wasn't very complicated. It was just, you know, actually making myself do it... typical ADHD stuff. But lately I felt like giving it a look. I first wrote a quick PHP parser to make sure I'd gotten the usrcheat.dat format right, then started implementing it into melonDS. For now, it's in a separate branch, because it's still quite buggy and unfinished, but it's getting there. The main goal is complete, which is, it parses usrcheat.dat, extracts the relevant entries, and imports them into your game's cheat file. By default, it only shows the game entry which matches your game by checksum, which is largely guaranteed to be the correct one. However, if none is found, it shows all the game entries that match by game code. It also shows a bunch of information about the codes and lets you choose which ones you want to import. By default, all of them will be imported. This part is mostly done, besides some minor UI/layout bugs. The rest is adding new functionality to the existing cheat code editor. I modified the melonDS cheat file format (the .mch files) to add support for the extra information usrcheat.dat provides, all while keeping it backwards compatible, so older .mch files will still load just fine. But, of course, I also need to expose that in the UI somehow. I also found a bug: if you delete a cheat code, the next one in the list gets its code list erased, due to the way the UI works. Not great. I'm thinking of changing the way this works: selecting a cheat code would show the information in disabled/read-only fields, you'd click an "Edit" button to modify those fields, then you'd get "Save" or "Cancel" buttons... This would avoid much of the oddities of the current interface. The rest is a bunch of code cleanup... Stay tuned!

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< Not much to say lately...The joys of programming >

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