Show HN: Cobalt – a pixel-art painting studio for the Nintendo DS

Little known fact, the original DS touch screen is pressure sensitive. I don't know of any games using this feature, but the Colors homebrew does use it! So the DS was a fairly convenient digital art machine for its time.

Flipnote has an active community on Sudomemo (https://www.sudomemo.net)

Thank you! The customizable tools give a surprising amount of power to the user for a relatively small amount of work (just a couple of basic editing screens). The most interesting outcome of all this is that the scatter and spacing parameters work equally well on the bucket fill tool as they do for regular brushes, allowing you to emulate white noise and similar when filling large areas.

Thank you! I'm really passionate about exploring this direction of computing, digging around in a bargain bin of discarded futures to find ideas worth pursuing.

It's such a good platform for running programs on. It's small, has plenty of grunt, and the dual screens are great for multi-window work.

Young users without payment methods do not sideload binaries on a Nintendo DS.

If you’re hacking with a Nintendo DS in 2025 you were most likely a teenager in the 2000s/early 2010s, and you most certainly have a payment method.

Agree that OP is underselling their work at $5 - the next big psychological barrier after $0.99 is at $9.99, might as well go there

There is an online demo: https://benbridle.com/projects/bedrock.html#cobalt

Actually, when I saw the $5 price, my first thought was: thank you for not making this a subscription.

There are free demos available on the store page for Windows, Linux, and Nintendo DS, so Cobalt can still be used by people who can't afford $5. Charging a higher price would make the program a lot less accessible, and charging nothing would be unsustainable, I can't live off attention alone.

The sketch layer is accessed with the 'eye' button in the bottom-right corner of the canvas screen. Clicking that button toggles visibility of the sketch layer and reveals three more buttons, and clicking the newly-revealed pencil button toggles drawing to the sketch layer instead of the canvas.

The decision to implement only two layers for Cobalt was a conscious one. The design of Cobalt is focused towards speeding up the user and helping them to finish their images, and I found that being able to go back and tweak each layer made it more difficult to commit to a final image.

The second revision of the Bedrock specification changed very little of consequence, but I should probably add a change note to the spec. The structure of the document was reworked, becoming a single long document instead of multiple smaller ones; some sections were reworded for clarity; the behaviour in some underspecified edge cases was made explicit; the assembler specification was cleaned up; reading from the action port on the file device returns error state instead of success state. I don't expect that any existing programs other than Cobalt will have been affected. The bedrock-nds emulator uses the second screen to run a second Bedrock program (the on-screen keyboard), it isn't exposed to the main program.

My intention for Bedrock is that it will never change going forwards, other than for minor clarifications, so that existing programs will continue to work on any emulator indefinitely. Have you played around with Bedrock before, or written a program for it?

Thank you!