Monday, August 4, 2008

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.