January 31, 2026
Two screens, one flame war
Nintendo DS code editor and scriptable game engine
Turns your old DS into a pocket coding studio — and the comments are chaos
TLDR: A coder made a tiny Nintendo DS engine that lets you write scripts on the touchscreen and see 3D games run at 60 FPS. Fans are thrilled and nostalgic, skeptics say the scripting feels clunky versus C, and a side debate about how hackable Nintendo hardware is kept the comments spicy.
Someone just built a tiny 3D game engine for the Nintendo DS that lets you code right on the handheld: tap on the bottom screen to write simple scripts, hit play, and watch cubes fly at 60 FPS on the top screen. It even ships with a playable 3D Pong. And the internet? Absolutely melting down.
The hype squad arrived first. One fan yelled, “Are you kidding me? This is awesome!” and vowed to try it on a modded 2DS. Another declared the DS “the greatest portable gaming system ever,” and you could practically hear the nostalgia cartridges clicking in. Tinkerers piled in with wish lists—turn it into a smart home remote, a sprite maker, an endless handwritten journal—like it’s 2006 all over again. But the party hit a speed bump when a skeptic chimed in: the custom scripting language looks “more cumbersome than C.” That lit the fuse. Fans say the point isn’t elegance, it’s vibes—a pocket coding playground you can hold; critics grumble they’d rather write “real code.” Then there’s the spicy side thread: “Are DSs easily hackable? I wish Nintendo hardware was more hackable.” Cue the legal/technical side-eyes and wistful sighs. Verdict: a 100KB nostalgia grenade dropped into a powder keg of feels, tinkering dreams, and one very pedantic flame war.
Key Points
- •A scriptable 3D game engine for Nintendo DS enables writing and running games directly on the device.
- •Built in C with libnds, the engine compiles to a ~100KB .nds ROM and targets 60 FPS rendering.
- •Top screen provides hardware-accelerated 3D rendering of colored cubes with controllable camera.
- •Bottom screen offers a software-rendered, touch-based code editor with tokens, numpad, and script slots.
- •A lightweight interpreter executes one line per frame, supporting variables A–Z and input/state registers.