There’s been a problem processing my new internet account so it’s going to be a little longer before I’m online which is rubbish. In the mean time here’s an update:

I’ve got some new GUI controls working including a tick box and a new ‘popup’ style GUI base class. Right now I have a popup colour chooser and a popup list control. Basically when you select that GUI item it displays a nearly full screen popup that lets you edit it. So normally with the list you see a single item, click it and the list of items appears you can choose from.

I’ve tied this in with the new WIP skirmish settings screen and you can now enter and leave a mission, though this is still unrefined but basically working. I haven’t done much checking for memory leaks but it’s looking pretty good so far.

Now the next part.. and I apologise because this is going to sound a pain to some people! I’ve started to put together all the editing tools (think map editor, unit editor and image convertor) for the game engine into a single C# application (yes it’s dot net). For those who remember I used to be doing this with Blitz but that has turned out to be a bad decision.. though it looked very pretty it was becoming very tedius to add to it. Now with the C# I can get loads of it done really quickly. I’ve been really impressed with how easy it is to do a lot of stuff. Though I don’t think I’d use this for a game for a PC tool its perfect.

I’ve started to lay the groundwork for some of the pretty graphics but I was relying on the net for this and so it’s going slowly

Its a clone of the Wii channels menu, on a smaller scale, with some artistic license taken. Right now its main purpose is to launch NDS files. Each program should have an 80x48 pcx icon in the qlshell/icons folder for it (not many icons have been made yet!) Soon I'll add a feature to load the icons from the same folder as the nds file, and also to load icons from within the nds file if all other attempts fail. I've got to recreate my source images for the skins because I recently had my primary hdd fail.

This should work for most cards, Don't bother reporting here that it works unless someone has already reported it doesn't. I'm interested in bug reports, so send away! Also, just so everyone knows, it doesn't have pen input yet.

Future plans:
Slot 1 / Slot 2 booting

Settings menu

Download channel (a separate app, usable on its own or together with DSChannels)

For now DSChannels only indexes nds files under the /Applications or /Apps folders on your card. You should be able to nest a level or two deep, but keep in mind that will increase scanning time at boot, and you cannot ever exceed the pathlimit of 255 characters (240 to be safe) including slashes and periods.