ndspacker is a wrapper tool used to build Nitro ROM files from an input ARM9 ELF and a donor
ARM7 file from an official ROM.
- A copy of GCC binutils built with the prefix of
arm-none-eabi-, or LLVM binutils - ndstool
At some point in the future these will be eliminated entirely and replaced with native parsing and packing.
Make an ndspacker.toml file in your project directory, with contents like so:
# Arbitrary, two-letter code. Doesn't affect anything.
maker_code = "01"
# Arbitrary, four-byte code. This isn't used by anything except for identification.
# First character can be A/B/C/T/Y (generic NDS game), D (DSi game)
# Last character can be 'A' (for English), 'J' (for Japanese), or 'P' (Other)
game_code = "ENAE"
# Up to 12 bytes of ASCII for the game name. Doesn't affect anything.
game_title = "ndspacker"None of the actual values matter, they're just used for identifying your ROM in its header. Then,
run ndspacker <path to ARM9 elf> <path to ARM7 ROM or ELF> and it will spit out a rom.nds
in the current directory.
Only ELF ARM9 images are supported, but for the ARM7 this can either be an ELF image or a donor Nitro ROM to take the ARM7 from. If no ARM7 is specified, then a stub infinite loop ARM7 will be included instead.
The ARM9 must be linked at the start of main memory i.e. 0x2000000.