A little imperfect software for you

Back in June, I wrote a little bit about how I use an old Nintendo DS to dump GBA ROMs as well as dump and restore the save files. I also teased that I had a magical solution using TFTP to use WiFi instead of doing endless SD swaps.

Well, thing is, it's not magical. It's actually some of the most imperfect software I've ever worked on, and that's why I haven't released it for fifteen years.

I sucked it up and ended that streak four days ago, with a little bit of a caveat.

transfile (transing your my files since 2009) is a source-only release for a Nintendo DS program that starts a TFTP server on your Nintendo DS, letting you send and receive files to whatever storage is available. There are many options, thanks to the brilliant homebrew community,including the SD card on a homebrew DSi!

But it requires a lot to get going, including some kinda crusty networking knowledge and kinda crusty networking hardware, as well as a lot of patience for stuff that, even though it doesn't freeze up within seconds like the TCP-based file transfer options you can also run on DS, will still fall over from time to time after transferring a lot of data or even—somehow—fail to write files properly to my Acekard for reasons I'm definitely not clear on.

I'm releasing it in part because I am trying to embrace imperfection. If someone finds it valuable and can figure out what I've done wrong, that would be amazing. But it'll never ever have a chance to get there if I just keep it to myself for another fifteen years.

Speaking of imperfect things, I also found out that gbfs-web has a bug. I haven't really had the time to track down exactly what's going on, but I imagine it's some weird intersection of Chrome being Chrome and JavaScript's really weird buffer APIs being JavaScript's really weird buffer APIs. That one, at least, I have hopes for fixing.