devkitPro

Lately I've noticed that while libnds receives updates, libnds's documentation hardly ever does. Not to look too far:

bgExtPaletteEnable();
bgExtPaletteEnableSub();
bgExtPaletteDisable();
bgExtPaletteDisableSub();

Aren't mentioned in the documentation, not even once. As far as the registers are concerned, particular background registers for each layer are described, however not the display registers themselves for screens:

REG_DISPCNT
REG_DISPCNT_SUB

And by proxy, also their attributes, for example:

REG_DISPCNT |= (DISPLAY_BG_EXT_PALETTE);
REG_DISPCNT_SUB |= (DISPLAY_BG_EXT_PALETTE);

Which are the equivalents of the forementioned functions.

Pointers to Palette Slots in the Extended Palette system are also not described, there's also the obvious lack of examples showing extended palette use.

Now, I know that there is a GBATek reference link there, but I think that such functionality should be described within the libnds's documentation itself to prevent researching something that should be visible on first glance in the documentation, especially if the registers and their attributes actually do have wrappers within libnds (and they do, as I've shown earlier).

Is there a libnds documentation update coming up anytime soon? If not, why so? I know it requires extra manpower, but it'd be nice to let the users know that they can in fact use Extended Palettes with relative ease. If the Examples folder has examples as basic as Hello World and as complex as full 3D, perhaps it should also contain these.

Totally agreeing with him. Would be cool if libnds/libogc domcumentations were updated.

bump, I do believe an updated doc is in order. A lot of stuff has been added since the last update. Probably it should be updated every time libnds has a release. Also, extended palette example would be great.

Thanks for showing support guys - libnds and devkitARM are fantastic programming tools and a great initiative, it would be a shame if using it to its full potential was restricted to a selected few who have the patience to browse .h files, .c files and change logs to stay up-to-date - I'm merely thinking of those who are completely new to programming and the DS was their platform of choice to start.

Seeing that a moderator appears to agree, but the development team has yet to respond, I'll do my best to attach an example or two showing how to use Ext. Palettes, just to take the workload off them a little bit - perhaps they will be good enough to include them in the next release.

You are always welcome to submit examples. If it's good, we can add it to the official examples (perhaps with a little tweaking). Just provide a link. I personally prefer gist or a project on github.

In that case, here's example #1 - Extended Palettes for Tiled Backgrounds:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sudabydt20104fm

GitHub is all nice and dandy, but not when all you're really showing is a few lines of code. I included two batch files to facilitate Compiling and Cleaning, simply because make'ing via CMD is a bit of a pain and a .bat file weighs next to nothing.

I hope it's up to coding standards, I'll add more once they're ready (meaning with Sprites and with different BGTypes).

I added a new example. I left in the graphics conversion so you can see the grit options used. I even went so far as to make it work with a non-zero palette slot number. Showcases doing it on both the main and sub engines, too.

I see that we had polar opposite approaches - I snipped my code to the bare minimum wheras you created a behemoth .

In any case, I noticed that there already is an Ext.Palette example for Sprites within the examples folder, so I suppose that covers it. It'd be nice if the thread was renamed to reflect its current content, just to facilitate finding the examples.