Comments on: glitchDS: Free Cellular Automaton Music Sequencer

By: Create Digital Music » Audio Damage Automaton is Here: Artificial Life-Driven, Stuttering Effects Plug-in

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:57:53 +0000

[...] automata is in fine form on the beautiful, strange homebrew sequencer for the Nintendo DS, GlitchDS, which has had ongoing updates. It’s still fun as ever in Reaktor 5’s Newschool preset [...]

By: ed

ed — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:39:15 +0000

Just tried it, pretty cool. i’ll try to record something using glitch ds + nitrotracker.

By: Bret Truchan

Bret Truchan — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:35:53 +0000

Hello Jeff Shell,

It’s super easy to get started programming on the DS. Download an emulator such as no$gba and google for palib and “palib tutorial”. The painful part is getting the correct versions of the libraries installed. After that, it’s easy!

- Bret

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:19:48 +0000

Best way to avoid hassle is to do a little research. As you’ll see on the GlitchDS site, there are specifics on which cards work and which don’t. If you do some homework before you buy the card, you can save yourself a LOT of trouble. Some cards work very well … others don’t. The DS-X, while expensive, is very much on the “working well” end of the spectrum.

But yeah, in my dream world, Nintendo just opens the thing up, sacrifices a bit of piracy but gets broader appeal for the platform. I don’t think it’ll happen, and I understand their reasoning, but it is my *dream world*, so things go the way I want.

By: BirdFLU

BirdFLU — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:02:00 +0000

NO hassles for me. I just copied to my DS-X card and started playing with it. Glitch DS is more verstaile than it appears in the video. It strikes a nice balance between predictable control and unpredictable results.

By: foosnark

foosnark — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:16:57 +0000

Jeff, I’d categorize it as a minor pain in the butt. Nintendo sill persecutes the homebrew scene — not with all its might, but enough to keep it out of the mainstream.

To get something like this running is still basically a hack on top of a hack, but developers have done what they can to not make it too nasty. DLDI stuff for instance means that, with the M3 DS Real (and some other hardware I’m sure) you don’t have to go through any sort of patching process; just stick it on the memory card and hope it works.

By: Jeff Shell

Jeff Shell — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:26:12 +0000

How easy is it to get the homebrew DS stuff going these days? Not long after I first got my DS, I got interested in the little audio nuggets I saw floating around (including a tracker). And the Commodore 64 / GEOS emulators looked fun for nostalgia’s sake.

But I never got anything. It seemed like there were too many different options for getting homebrew stuff onto the DS and they weren’t all compatible with each other; and many of them seemed to require hard to find items. I couldn’t find any stores or good starter kits that catered to such a market.

At the time, it appeared that there were some libraries in late development that would unify a lot of the storage options, or at least make ones choice of storage option irrelevant. But I haven’t checked on their progress.

So - what’s the state of homebrew for the DS? Has it gotten easier for the lazily-interested?

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the luscious-looking DS-10.

By: Foosnark

Foosnark — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:00:21 +0000

Once I got it working, it proved to be awesome. Going to use this to generate some loops to play with in more traditional ways. :)

By: Create Digital Motion » Circuit-Bent Cellular Automata Video Synth Toy with Patch Bay

Wed, 28 May 2008 19:29:35 +0000

[...] devices on his site. For more cellular automata, check out the free Nintendo DS music sequencer glitchDS, which just happened to land in my inbox at about the same [...]

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:04:11 +0000

I think you misunderstood me. Strumming, I’ve seen quite a lot of. (Not least on guitars, but yes, on Jam Sessions!) But the idea of strumming or scrubbing a sequence is interesting.