--- title: Here we start, for the NDS. image: path: "/media/craiyon_020855_girls_playing_with_a_nintendo_ds.webp" thumbnail: "/media/craiyon_020855_girls_playing_with_a_nintendo_ds.webp" author: octt last_modified_at: 2023-09-30 --- This is the start of our story. We, simple scugnizzi, thanks to the Internet can now express everything we always wanted to share about one of the most successful handheld gaming consoles to hit our nation. In the era of the smartphone, with Web 3.0 and generative artificial intelligence being all the rage, it's easy to forget about the little miracles of technology that really shaped a generation of people, from the age of kids up to adulthood, that are now truly passionate of gaming and programming in part because of that. There's a lot of good reasons to remember the Nintendo DS. In 2004, in an heartbeat this gaming device popularized decent touch screens at an affordable price for even the casual user, that up until that point never saw such an input device: it was reserved to the owners of the fancy proto-smartphone or the serious PDA. In a compact size, the DS packed stereo speakers and 2 screens, an honest button assortment, and WiFi that allowed gamers to experience the inebriation of wireless competition, in the same room or around the world, even while on the road. Despite it being, like any Nintendo product, a closed console where no fun is allowed outside of the still really colorful boundaries set by the hardware house, the hacking community eventually sprung up, and it was inevitable that this event alone would have raised the popularity (and sales!) of the Nintendo DS even further: with the infamous flashcart, one could now run homebrew programs, created and shared freely by fellow DS lovers, and get the most out of their handheld. This is were we used to stand, and in retrospect we say it was so good, even better than what we thought at the time. Great adventures await us, as we go back in time by two decades. Subscribe to [the blog feed]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/atom.xml) to never lose any details of our things, and join [the Telegram group](https://t.me/gamingshitpost) to get a chance of being part of what we're up to in our spare time.