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< blackmagic3 merged!The DS cartridge interface: endless fun >

Little status update Feb 14th 2026, by Arisotura

So yeah, it's been a while since the new OpenGL renderer was merged in... Haven't been very active with melonDS since then. I've mostly been taking a well-deserved break from all this intensive coding. Real life is catching up, too. Mental health stuff. Things coming up that I have to take care of. Add a minor Hytale addiction to the mix, and... yeah. I'm going to post a few notes about the future of melonDS at large. First, I've been toying with a Golden Sun hack for the OpenGL renderer. (click for full-size version) Flicker-free hi-res. When I had first attempted it, there was some flickering, which was caused by color conversion issues that have since been fixed, so I figured I could give it another try. It is a gross hack, but a nice proof of concept regardless. It doesn't address the performance issue (which will need a separate fix), but it fixes up the upscaling issue by replicating what Golden Sun does in a high-level manner. I could envision adding a more refined version of this hack into the renderer. After all, the OpenGL renderer is a big hack in itself - upscaling is not something the DS can do. As long as the accurate path (in this case, the software renderer) is hack-free, this can slide. Next, I've also been working on the melonDS site. One of my ideas is to add a wiki, which would keep all melonDS-related information, help pages, and such, in a less awkward way than this site does. I made a test run locally with Dokuwiki - so far, I ported the melonDS site skin to it, and added a custom authentication plugin, so that it functions with the same user accounts as the rest of the site. I'm not quite sure whether to keep going with this, or use Mediawiki... I think Dokuwiki will be fine for what this is, and I'd prefer something that's light on the server. I also have some plans in mind to get the community more involved into melonDS related affairs. The wiki, the documentation aspect, is one of them. I also have ideas in mind for the main site (which you are currently looking at), but I haven't yet done any work there. I want to rework the home page, to better present melonDS and what it's good for, make it more clear which version is the latest release, and so on. I might move the blog to a separate page, maybe only include certain posts on the homepage... I also want to add better ways to search the blog. Categorization, sorting by date, maybe a search function. This stuff didn't feel very necessary back in 2016, but now the blog has been operating for nearly 10 years, and there's a lot of content. It can get hard to look for a specific post. Which also brings me to quality-of-life enhancements to the blog itself. Some kind of formatting toolbar or reference - as it is now, you can use basic BBCode in comments, but there is no reference as to what is possible. Maybe Markdown support would be good to have, instead. I don't know. What I definitely want to add, however, is attachment support, much like what the board has had for a while. It wouldn't be meant for user comments, but would greatly help when writing posts with images and such. Web development is my least favorite area, so I've been giving myself time to develop those ideas before I actually make attempts (or, in other words, being lazy :P ). Another idea would be to make the IRC/Discord chats more prominent, so you don't have to look into the forum to find them. Which brings me to the other point of concern coming up: Discord. If you've been following the news, you might know that they plan to add age verification. Which is basically a thinly veiled pretext to collect your ID or face. I could envision a few outcomes to this: 1. In the face of public outcry, Discord backs off, and the status quo is maintained... atleast for now. 2. People move en masse to another chat platform. 3. People complain for a while but just adapt to the new situation, due to the lack of good alternatives. 4. A mix of 2 and 3, with people moving to different chat platforms. Seeing as I'm present in several different servers, I'm not exactly looking forward to having to maintain presence on several different chat platforms due to this. But having to provide identifying information to Discord isn't appealing either. It's not like they don't have a track record of security breaches. At this point, I don't yet know what to do with the Kuribo64 Discord server. I intend to wait and see, to go with the flow. So far, we don't really have a good alternative to Discord in mind. Moving will inevitably cut off some of the community, and I want to minimize that. Seeing as we are still present on IRC, this may pick up some activity, who knows. But the problem with IRC is that of accessibility, especially when compared to Discord. You miss activity when you're not connected, unless you use a BNC (which requires a server to run it on). You can't edit or delete posts. You can't embed files either, you have to use an external service for that. As far as user-facing features go, you get what comes with your client of choice. IRC however has the advantage of being decentralized. Unlike a platform like Discord, "IRC" is not owned by one big entity, because IRC is just the protocol. If your IRC server of choice starts enshittifying, you move to a different server, and that's it - it's nothing like moving to a whole different platform. If only there was a modern version of IRC, that could address the shortcomings... So, yeah. Wait and see, I guess. That's it for now. When those things advance more, I'll keep you updated.

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< blackmagic3 merged!The DS cartridge interface: endless fun >

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