Digital Workshop

OK - I admit it - at age 55, I went and bought a Nintendo DS lite.

And - I'm having a lot of fun.

Nintendo say there will be 30 million of these things around next year.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=173787

The DS has an excellent touchpad and these is some great software that allows then user to interact. I bought "More brain training". Using this software I have to say I'm amazed that the DS can recognise my writing most of the time and by the variety of educational 'games' in this software pakage.

In addition, the DS can play what is called "Homebrew" software - software that is mostly written by amateur programmers, tinkerers and so on. Quality and playability is highly variable as one would expect.

My point is that is that could Opus be modified to produce suitable software for the DS?

Are those who make applications using Opus missing out on a market that has massive educational potential?

I tell you what though, if I was able to write and code software, I'd be seriously having a look at the DS market.

Anyway, I owe and Owe, so off to work I go!

Cheers

Graham

good to see there is another 55 year old child on here!!

talking about creating Opus pubs for different platforms...has anyone run a flex publication on their phone--they run really well. I tried a couple of simple pubs, but they weren't interactive. I'm not sure how interactive applications are done on a phone...but very interesting----I'll add it to my list of things to investigate

I think the DS and the Wii and the way they have widened the games market is a stroke of genius. But then I would say that because I advocated a similar thing years ago when we were trying to expand into games. Too many games developers forget there are people out there who love games but get motion sickness if they play fps games too long or don't have the energy/inclinaton to enjoy a frantic fragfest. My wife and I still recall with fondness the times we spent together trying to get Horace to go skiing successfully Now the whole family plays Wii Sports together or passes the DS round to do their daily brain training. Only our son wanders strangely-shaped landscapes chainsawing the competition in clan matches on some X-box megagame or other

However, I understand programming for the DS is tricky. Any console is challenging because it is so highly optimised and they are often used on games programming courses at university to sort the real developers from the designers.

So I'm afraid we won't be producing a DS publishing option anytime soon. However, that doesn't mean you can't use Opus to produce those kind of games on the PC or Flash because it is perfect for that and you'll hit an even wider market than Nintendo

Paul

Hi Sandy,

Yes I have played about with Opus Flex on my phone (Nokia 6300). I can get basic interactivity using number keys. I was also able to get the input text box to work as well - not sure how useful any of this would be but as you said in another post - interesting. My Nokia uses a version of Symbian so I think I would have to learn more about this.

I have also played around with flex pubs on my PDA (Windows mobile 5) and these work a treat - full interactivity using pen.

Hi David,
I tried running a small Opus EXE on my Win mobile 5...it didn't work but didn't think of trying a flex publication!! I must try it!!

I find that I keep getting out of memory errors on my phone (Nokia 6300), but I'm not sure if that is system memory. I don't have any flash memory added.

Sandy

Hi Sandy,

I didn't have any memory problems with my Nokia 6300 - However I do have a 2GB card in it which I used to save the flex flie.

David

I think that's the problem--I have no external flash memory.

I am still trying to get the flash player to work on my iPAQ!! It loads, but won't play the files...not sure why.


Sandy

Has DW purchase a Mac mini (£340 ex vat) and downloaded the free iPhone dev kit from Apple? This could be interesting if you could port the player from Opus to the iPhone.

Also because the iPhone dev environment is almost the same as Mac OS X development environment it would also work on all Intel Macs. Hitting two birds with one stone.

Played around with the iPhone SDK, extremely powerful, way more so than any other cell phone or Nintendo DS operating system.