In 2006 the Nintendo DS came out and I was really interested in the dual screen idea in portable video game systems. I instantly thought of the old X-Wing and TIE Fighter games from the early nineties. Starfighter games on home consoles were always arcade oriented because you couldn’t easily replicate the 20-30 keyboard shortcuts used in the old sim games. These let you manage your shields and various targetting in a complex manner.

The dual screen element means you could map system status items to the bottom screen and use it as your own sort of personal ship computer.

I made a small game using this concept to see what it would be like on the Nintendo DS. Using assets from the existing games, I made tools that would convert the 3D and texture formats to compatible formats for the DS graphics chip. The game was written in C++ and used the homebrew communities devkitARM to compile to the dual chip format for the DS. The graphics used were from the DS’s GL library.

Overall it worked quite well and the game was pretty fun. It made me really wish a real version of the game had been published to the DS because it was definitely feasible and fun.

As I don’t own any of the graphics assets and this was a project for my own learning I never shared any of the code.