Post-installation steps

1. Test the installation

To test that everything is working, you can try building one of the examples or project templates included in BlocksDS.

There is a template that lets the programmer write the code for both CPUs of the NDS (rom_combined) and a template that uses the default ARM7 core that comes with Blocks DS and lets the programmer focus on the ARM9 core (rom_arm9). There are also two templates to create static libraries.

For example, go to the combined template folder and build it:

cd templates/rom_combined
make

This should have generated a NDS ROM that you can run on any emulator or flashcart.

To do a verbose build, run make like this (this also works for the Makefile of the SDK):

VERBOSE=1 make

NOTE: The paths in the Makefile that refer to source code, includes, graphics, data, etc, must be inside the folder of the project. That means you can’t use .. in a path to go one level up from the Makefile. If you really need to use folders outside of the folder of the project, create a symlink to the destination, or build the other code as a static library and link it with the project.

2. Additional libraries and tools

This document has a list of tools and libraries that support BlocksDS and can be installed in /opt/blocksds/external.

3. Keeping multiple versions of BlocksDS

You may keep multiple versions of this SDK in your PC. The location of the active SDK is expected to be in the environment variables BLOCKSDS and BLOCKSDSEXT, so all you need to do is to change their values and point to the version of the SDK you want to use.

BLOCKSDS is used for core BlocksDS libraries and tools, and it is managed by BlocksDS. BLOCKSDSEXT is left for users to freely install third party libraries and tools.

If they aren’t set the default makefiles assume that the paths are /opt/blocksds/core/ and /opt/blocksds/external/. Other tools should imitate this behaviour.