Well, that sucks.

I’d hoped this trip afield would provide me with at least a few opportunities to update the site, but it would appear that I failed to factor three things into my plan:

1. My own tenacity when attempting to overcome a problem and the associated tendency to lose all track of time when researching said problem
2. The vagaries and frustrations of attempting to debug C++ code with the Mark One Eyeball
3. The utterly craptastic wireless Internet access at this here hotel

So I’ve only managed to get about half of the Ultima 7 files restored as a result. This is…er…quite far from what I’d hoped would be the case. Still, it’s some progress. I’m closing in on completion, little by little.

So…apologies for getting behind. I’ll see about getting the news postings up to date, at least; it’s month-end, which means a couple of projects will probably be publishing news of some kind.

Update: Okay, the Ultima 7 files are fully restored. I’ve just learned, by the way, that I will have to return to the place I’m in at the moment — Fort McMurray, Alberta — on or about the 12th of this month. Barring a sudden onset of Mass Effect 2 addiction, I hope to put at least some of my “off work” time toward the site here. I don’t foresee getting as consumed by work on this next trip; the program is now in a functional state, and any further revisions will hopefully be minor, and straightforward, in nature.

To anyone reading this site who might be working — or who has, in the past, worked — on Pentagram, the Ultima 8 environment — I have a question on behalf of a reader.

Do you think it will be possible to port Pentagram to the Nintendo DS? There is a 4Mb ram limit. It would be nice to use this engine with the touch screen of the DS.

There is a library for Nintendo DS programming call libnds heres a link…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libnds

Theres another one which uses libnds called PaLib it makes somethings easier. We would need to scale or crop the resolution down to 256 x 192 if we are using just one screen. Theres a top and bottom one but I think it would be cool to use the bottom screen since thats the touchpad.

Libnds comes with DevKitPro which includes an ARM assembler and a C/C++ compiler basically everything you need to program for the NDS.

So…can anyone on the Pentagram team throw an answer my way? Would it be possible to port Pentagram to the Nintendo DS?