It’s been a long while since an update. I’ve gotten quite a few emails suggesting that the project was dead but no- my intention in going public before was only to find help in developing on this project. I found a person that has been a great help in developing DSQuake, The Lord of the Pings (LOTP), fitting as he did most of the networking code.

With that said I would like to announce a pre-release of DSQuake available to download here. Since this is a pre-release it isn’t in the full state that we wish to have it, things like better hardware support, graphics glitches, missing dynamic lights, better sound and possibly music and of course better optimized code for the DS.

The shareware of Quake is currently all we support. Which isn’t so much of a technical limitation but because the optimization for the DS of the media in the Quake Pak files isn’t fully automated just yet and without the tools we cannot obviously support the full game because distributing the full game isn’t an option.

DSQuake also currently only supports the flashcards that work in the GBA slot of the DS and emulate a GBA cartridge, the Supercard, M3 and so on or are of the older style Flash Linker types. It currently doesn’t support any of the fat only supported devices or any DS slot 1 devices. Sorry to the ones with hardware that isn’t supported, we may be able to support those in the future.

There is another port of Quake to the DS being run by a friend Simon Hall which is a completely separate effort and our projects don’t share some of the same limitations as mine so please check it out!

Basic sound works and now textures work and the game does looks quite good now and the frame rate is quite playable but it does get somewhat choppy in some sections of the game.

Networking is in fact working for those who want to deathmatch but only in client mode we haven’t got a DS to connect to a DS in network mode yet, but connecting two or more DS to a PC host works fine. It works great locally but the original quake protocol wasn’t designed to work behind NATs which are very common these days so LOTP to developed a tunnel program which can sit between DSQuake and the Quake server. So playing on the internet is also possible with this program. It needs to be run on both client and server side so look into the .bat files for more information.

When starting the game you can press up and down to select the level you wish to play or watch the demos, and press start to make the selection. The controls for the game are the touch screen looks around like a mouse, shooting done with the L button, and jump by either double tapping on the screen or pressing R. Changing weapons is done on the very basic HUD we have now on the top of the bottom screen Pressing the weapon number switches to that weapon. To network or for other reasons to operate the game by the text console is done by Hitting select at the start of the game, but make sure to have a wifi connection configured with the DS, then you can telnet into the DS and operate the Quake command console by doing things like “connect x.x.x.x” to connect to an ip address.

Thanks everyone and I hope you enjoy the port so far.

-john