Laceys Investimigations

Having played around a bit, and with the advice of others I decided to drop efslib, and am now using the NitroFS system created by Eris

It’s a similar set up, i.e. lets you keep everything in a single file w/o statically linking in your data, but it’s got a nicer interface (you can just use fopen/fread etc.) and I’ve got it working nicely on both my DS and on No$GBA.

Hopefully now I can finally get some real graphics on screen - I’ve written half a VRAM manager for dealing with tile sets and maps, just need to give it some more testing now I can load in proper data.

Just thought I’d share my choice for file system for the time being, rather than using something like libfat directly I wanted a solution more similar to the official way of doing things, partly because it means I can have all my files in one place without having my data compiled statically in the application.

The advantage of not having the data static is that you don’t waste valuable RAM storing it all permanently, and the advantages of having it all in one are pretty obvious with regards to distribution.

So for now I’m using efs lib which is built on top of libfat, and even comes with a switch (#define) so you can turn it into simply a light weight wrapper for libfat should you have trouble using it on certain devices or with certain emulators.

I’ve built a further wrapper around this myself so in my code file references are purely integers, though whether I’ll keep this I’ve not decided - it’s extra overhead for not much benefit, but then I don’t forsee a need for super fast file access either just yet.