We did not get to perform for CosFest VI. A "management commitee" of sorts came with the decision to include a hidden rule: No Crossovers. That effectively eliminated our chance, as our group was made up of characters from different anime and games. We even had a script to go with it...

Anyway, this year's CosFest has three days. The first day wasn't bad, though it was made into a freakin' family carnival, complete with security guards and metal detectors. I met Eugene and K_L (both did not cosplay). Wee Siong was still sour over that rule thing. He was very sure we would win the prize... Well I do agree with him to a certain extent. Quite a lot of good cosplayers, except lesser Gundam (only one Kira and a few Lacuses, probably I should do Amuro Ray or Kai Shiden next year). The performers were as usual, professional cosplayers or people wearing beautifully tailored costumes having fun on stage.

It was quite a rush, so I can't remember much except for the large amount of Stormtroopers and a Star Wars/Star Trek booth. I parted ways with Wee Siong as I went to watch the Transformers film with my family. I loved every second of that movie.

On Sunday, instead of starting revision and clearing immediate assignments, I went on upgrading the firmware of my UNC to version 1.44. What happened after that was LOTS of tweaking, installing, charging and testing. I went from having an upgraded interface to installing stuff like DSOrganizer 2.7, Moonshell, SNEmulDS, DSDoom, ScummVM DS, LMP-NG, DSBlue and tried POWDER again. I skipped school just to find a working version of DSCrawl (to my disappointment, none existed and I have to make do with POWDER and NetHack DS). After that, I went to explore the WolfenDoom series (a series of DOOM2 wads that play have elements of the 2.5D shooter, Wolfenstein 3D) and missed another lesson.

I'll run through the stuff I did for DS:

-DSOrganizer 2.7
Nearly everything works now. I say nearly only because the media player freezes when I change the play mode from Single File to Continuous. The new icons from 2.45 were gone and replaced with the old icons. Icon packs can be found in the official site, though. IRC and Web browser work like magic, though the latter still does not allow viewing of images.

-Moonshell
Works perfectly fine. The only thing that doesn't work is running homebrew roms and using the soft reset function. Moonshell is now my primary music player. I did not try viewing videos.

-SNEmulDS
It works for most of my roms. Gun Hazard failed to show anything but play random noise. Masoukishin is in the official list of roms that cannot work. Roms that work will have problems with rendering the layers. For example, Maxim in Lufia II will appear to be on the top when he is actually inside a doorway and action icons cannot be seen in battle. SRW games display garbage but work fine.

-DSDoom
Awesome homebrew. My wad for Doom2 did not work however. Only the wads from the Final Doom package worked. When I tried to run with the Doom2 wad, DS will turn off its screens with its power still on. DSDoom does not play music yet. I haven't tried cheats.

-ScummVM DS
Works like the ScummVM on my computer (Monkey Island 1 went without music). This was all until I dug out my Monkey Island CD and ripped the audio from it into .wav files and placed them in the MONKEY directory inside my DS. I can hear speech in Indiana Jones thanks to the 143MB monster.sou file, which was compressed to form the 56MB monster.so3 file. (Both will work but the latter takes lesser space) Of all homebrew roms, this is the one that has the highest compatibility (I did not even need to patch it with a DLDI).

-LMP-NG
Great interface. (It is exactly an iPod inside a DS) Though it screws up during playback of my mp3. On checking the log it says "recoverable frame error (lost synchronization)" or something along the lines. My guess is that it tried to use a better technology to play my mp3 which somehow did not work.

-DSBlue
I need to figure out how to make it work since I can do wardriving with it.

Alright, that's all folks. Here are the links to upgrade your UNC if you are still using version 1.23O.

Patch to Version 1.43 [format required if upgrading from 1.23O]
Patch to Version 1.44
Note: Both patches consist of an .nds executable that can be run straight away from within the UNC loader to upgrade the firmware. In case anyone of you have forgotten, soft format can be done by changing your DS boot method to Manual mode and holding L+R+A+B+Down after switching on the DS. (The Down button has to be held before switching on as pressing it after switched on will move the cursor to the Pictochat button, making the combo fail)

Also, the xmenu.dat file sort of replaced the need to have a DSYSTEM folder in the directory. It allows the UNC to automatically generate a DSYSTEM folder on boot up. When upgrading from 1.43 to 1.44, please run the 1.44 patch executable first, before replacing the xmenu.dat with the newer one that comes with the 1.44 patch. Otherwise, you will not be able to enter the menu as the new xmenu.dat requires the UNC to be of version 1.44 in order for you to access the menu.