Alpha uploaded

Here you go guys. Finally got the alpha uploaded. Its current up on a geocities account (hey, its free) for download. Doubt there will be many of you downloading this, but wanted to share. Hoping new improved alpha will be out by the end of the month. See previous post for Known Bug list. Please leave a comment if you find any other bugs I do not know about.

eBook Reader alpha 0.1

PS I will be trying to set up a SourceForge account sometime this week. However, if that doesn't work out for some reason, if anyone knows of any websites that allow for free file upload and download, please leave a comment about it.

Alpha 0.1 is complete!!

I am happy to announce that the alpha release of my eBook reader is ready!! After fighting with it this (or is it last) night, I was able to get it completed. It is running and has most of the functionality I hope it would have. :) It reads from a hard wired text file, so you must have a text file named "text.txt" in the root directory of your flash card in order for it to work. ATM it displays the paresed text into pages that fit on the screens of the NDS and allows you to turn to the next or previous page in the "book".

Known Bugs:

• Turn to the previous page at the first page of the book causes the program to get stuck in an unknow, blank page
• The amount of text read into the program is not the entire text file. This is due to the size of character arrays. This is my own fault as I didn't think about the memory restraints C put on the program. This will be the first fix for the next alpha release

I know it look quick and dirty, but getting this far took a lot of work. I am "releasing" this alpha as a milestone marker. Also, this build is what I am going to present during my "final" in Senior Project. I am going to continue working on this as time permits. I really want to get this working as well as the other eBook readers I have seen on the NDS, complete with GUI, by the end of the year. After that happens, I will work on including RTF support into the reader. I will uplod the file sometime tomorrow as I am converting my virtual machines ATM. I recently got my hands on Parallels and wanted to compair it to VM Fusion, which I use for my NDS development purposes. Parallels is suppoed to be able to convert VMWare images for use with Parallels, but my first attempt ended up with me losing all my work in the "converted" virtual machine. Thankfully the original for VM Fusion was fine. I am trying it agian just to see what happens.

Anyway, I hope to get the alpha up before my presentation tomorrow (or is it today) in the morning. At the latest, it will be up Monday night. Now its time for me to get some well deserved rest. See ya.

Solve one problem......

run into another.

ATM I have again run into a problem with the eBook Reader alpha. While I was able to get the file system library working last night, I have now run into a problem reading the text from a file on the flash card. Seems that the loop used to read in the file is not stopping. For some reason it just keeps reading indefinitely for some reason. I can't tell if this is a NDS programming or C problem. I am currently hunting for answers online and at the PALib forums. I will also be talking to one of the programers I work with about it. He has a lot of C programming experience, so he might have an idea of the problem and how to fix it.

So that's it for today. Tomorrow I go into work, so I will not have time to work on the project. Expect an update no earlier then Thursday afternoon unless I find a fix and get it working sometime tomorrow.

Problems solved!!!

That was fast. With the help of some people from the PSLib forums (schlegel11 and ThemePark), I was able to find out what the problem was. Seems that the make file needs to be explicitly told what libraries to include. I don't use MakeFiles all that often, so I would have never thought to check there without their help.

I haven't tested the program out on my NDS yet since its late. Thankfully, with the library problem fixed, I should be able to finish porting the code over in a hour or two tomorrow. If all works out with the program, I will post the "alpha".

ATM the only thing I need to worry about with the port is getting the sideways text to work properly. Hopefully I will get some more help from the people at PALib.

Problems yet again

Having problems yet again. This time they are not totally caused by me. I am currently porting my parsing code from my command-line test program to the actual DS program. The problem I am having is that the library for reading the FAT file system of the flash card is not being found during compiling. So the code is there and working, but I can't test it because the NDS program can't read the text file to be parsed.

Currently I am hounding the PALib help forum for answers to why the library isn't being recognized or found. Hopefully I will get an answer tonight. I wanted to have the code ported over by tonight so I could work on the button inputs tomorrow. As of right now, I am dead in the water till I either figure out a way to fix this myself, or get help from someone in the PALib forums.

:sighs: I am soo close to getting the beta working..... why can't this work right now?!?!?!?!?

Parser now working

Hello all. Just post a quick update. I have gotten the parser working in the command-line code. It parses text from a file into pages made up of 17 lines with 23 characters each. Pointers to prev pages seem to be working also. Tomorrow I will be taking the code and reworking it for the DS. Hopefully by the end of the day Sunday, I will have an "alpha" build running.

As promised, here is a pic of the working parser.

Pic of Parser Test

Just wanted to post a pic of my progress before heading home for the night. This is just a pic of a emulator running the parser test program.

Here it is for ya.

Enjoy it, I guess. Will be posting Blog updates with Pics to show progress from now on.