Speaking in a recent interview, Doom creator John Carmack commented that he has had a great time working with the Nintendo DS to develop his first project for the platform — Orcs and Elves. Carmack called the DS the “most fun platform” that he has personally worked on, but noted that it’s a shame that Nintendo does not officially sanction homebrew development on the platform.

It was probably the most fun platform that I have personally worked on. The early consoles that I worked on (SNES, Genesis-32X, and Jaguar) had fun hardware and full documentation, but a lousy development tool chain. A lot of later consoles had much better development tools, but they started playing secretive with the exact hardware specs, at least around console introduction time.

While there are a few nooks on the DS that aren’t documented, they weren’t things I cared about, so to me it was almost perfect. It is a shame that homebrew development can’t be officially sanctioned and supported, because it would be a wonderful platform for a modern generation of programmers to be able to get a real feel for low level design work, to be contrasted with the high level web and application work that so many entry level people start with.

Yep, agreed. Would be nice to see a WiiWare-type program for the DS as well.

John Carmack on the Nintendo DS [IGN]

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