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6h 59m 59s logged

Today I did something I genuinely did not think I would be able to do.I revived an old Nintendo DS homebrew project.The goal was not to remake YouTubeDS, but to bring the original project back to life so it could be preserved and used as inspiration for future projects like InternetArchiveDS. The journey was much harder than I expected.At the start, I had a folder full of old source code, but the world it was built for was mostly gone. Libraries were missing, build files were outdated, and the project depended on old versions of tools that were no longer set up correctly. I spent hours digging through Makefiles, finding missing dependencies, rebuilding libraries manually, and trying to understand how everything connected.There were so many moments where it felt like I was one error away from giving up. I had to rebuild parts of the devkit environment, compile libraries like libfat again, fix linker issues, repair paths, and figure out why the final ROM packaging step kept failing.The most frustrating part was that the code itself was fine. The challenge was rebuilding the entire devkitpro system around it.After around 14 hours of debugging, something incredible happened.The build finally completed.I copied the ROM onto my DSi, launched it, and saw it load exactly like the original compiled version. No extra steps, no broken menus, no weird crashes. It was the exact moment where every tiny fix, every error message, and every hour of searching suddenly became worth it.Seeing old code from years ago come alive again on real hardware was an amazing feeling. This project reminded me why I love programming: sometimes the biggest victories come from solving problems nobody else sees.

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