NitroROM

Interface with Nintendo DS ROM images.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Background
• Install
• Usage

Background

NitroROM is a program for interfacing with Nintendo DS ROM-files in a variety of ways. Its primary aims are to provide a reusable tool-suite for developers, modders, hackers, and reverse-engineering researchers. This tool-suite is sub-divided into a set of commands which act as programs unto themselves; the top-level executable acts merely as an access-director to these programs.

This project originally began as a packaging utility for building ROM-files with a similar strategy as that used by the original SDK-tooling. This implementation is thus able to construct binary-matches of retail ROM-files for decompilation projects and modders making patches of their outputs using a delta-encoding format, e.g., .xdelta or .bps.

Install

This project does not yet have a release distribution for end-users, as it is still in an alpha-stage where many breaking-changes are anticipated.

Developers and early-adopters can build the project from source:

1. If you have not already, install meson using either their official instructions or your package manager.
2. If you have not already, install libpng.

Warning

Developers working on MSYS2 will need to compile libpng from source; after downloading a source archive:

tar xf libpng-<version>.tar.xz
cd libpng-<version>
./configure --prefix=/usr
make check
make install

3. Clone the repository.

4. Configure the project's build as you like using Meson:

   # Use -O0 with debug symbols
   meson setup --buildtype debug build
   
   # Use -O2 with debug symbols
   meson setup --buildtype debugoptimized build
   
   # Use -O3 and strip debug symbols
   meson setup --buildtype release build
   
   # Link the project against Address Sanitizer for richer crash reports
   meson setup -Db_sanitize=address --buildtype debug build
   

5. Use Meson to invoke the build:

   meson compile -C build
   

6. Verify that you have successfully built the executable by invoking it with no arguments, which will display the program's help text:

   ./build/nitrorom
   

Optionally, distributable manual-pages can be generated from the plain-text files in docs/. An alias target is provided for convenience, e.g., if using the ninja backend for meson:

ninja -C build docs

This requires setting up the project with the manuals option set to true, which must be specified when configuring the build:

meson setup -Dmanuals=true build

The generation targets use asciidoctor to convert the .adoc files into manual pages.

Usage

nitrorom's built-in help text provides a basic overview of its usage.

nitrorom - Interface with Nintendo DS ROM images

Usage: nitrorom [OPTIONS] [COMMAND]

Options:
  -h / --help      Display this help-text and exit.
  -v / --version   Display the program's version number and exit.

Commands:
  list             List the components of a Nintendo DS ROM
  pack             Produce a ROM image from source files

For details on the usage of individual commands, refer to the associated documentation in docs/. Some example input-files for the pack command are also provided in examples/.

Note

More detailed documentation is a work-in-progress as the project evolves.