Homebrewed game music has an uneasy relationship with the mainstream game industry. Running or developing DIY music software isn’t possible on the Nintendo DS without special hardware – hardware that’s also favored by pirates. Nintendo is now suing the makers and sellers of that hardware, because they (correctly) point out it’s being used to pirate — but that could impact the homebrew music software scene, as well. And against that debate, we have a major leak of the Korg DS-10 cartridge, the one cartridge that is official and runs like a normal DS game. The twist: the "pirate" DS-10 music mix sounds fantastic, and should be a terrific argument to go buy a legitimate copy, right now. In fact, this should be a golden age for game music, provided the interests of developers large and small can be balanced. And, ahem, provided we all go buy that DS-10 cartridge so it isn’t the last legit game synth we ever see.

Nintendo Goes After Flash Loaders

For lovers of 8-bit music and mobile music, Nintendo DS flash cart loader hardware is all about the ability to run homebrew music software – seriously. Despite the snarky comments you might see on tech blogs, there really is an audience for whom running and/or developing home-built software, not piracy, is the primary reason to buy these gadgets. An entire music scene uses portable game systems exclusively, dating back ten years ago to the emergence of Nanoloop (and later LSDJ) on the original, 8-bit Game Boy. And it’s not just about piracy: because of the stringent requirements for developing for a game console, there’s simply no other way to write or run oddball music apps on the DS.

The appetite is certainly there. Running homebrew software on the DS is arguably more challenging than on any other mobile device, but paradoxically the DS has become the richest mobile platform for unusual, home-built music software. The DS is blessed with trackers, step sequencers, hacked hardware MIDI support, wireless communication with computers and other game systems, cellular automata synths, stylus scratching, and many other tools. All of this is possible because of the ready availability of flash loaders. The hardware tricks the DS into running homebrewed software by exploiting backwards compatibility features integrated with the device.