nibOS Alpha

Chapter 2

First start

What the first start does, how long it takes, and putting your first games on the card.

On this page

What you see🔗

  1. About 1.5 seconds after the power button, the DSlot logo is on the top screen.
  2. The first start only: nibOS makes the games partition, NIBOS-DATA, over the rest of the card, and formats it. It takes a few seconds more than later starts. If the power goes while it is doing this, it carries on where it stopped at the next start.
  3. If you wrote a provision.toml, it is applied now (or rejected, with the reason on the NIBOS partition: Installing).
  4. The DSlot edition shows the shelf on both screens, about 5 seconds after power-on on later starts. The base edition shows a console on the top screen and a keyboard on the bottom one.

On a fresh card Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are off, except that Wi-Fi comes on by itself when provision.toml named a network. Turn them on in DSlot’s menu, or with nib wifi on and nib bluetooth on in the console. Each radio then stays as you leave it, across restarts. On the DSlot edition the network comes up only when something needs it, to save battery; on the base edition it comes up at every start, because SSH is its way in.

Putting games on the card🔗

A new card has no games, so the shelf has nothing to show yet. To add some:

  1. Turn the DS+ off (hold power, then Power off) and put the card in your computer. It shows a drive called NIBOS-DATA.
  2. Copy your games into the right folder under Roms: DS games in Roms/NDS, Game Boy Advance in Roms/GBA, and so on. The full list, with the BIOS files some systems need, is in Games, BIOS and saves.
  3. Eject the card, put it back in TF1, and turn the DS+ on.

DSlot makes a folder for every system it has an emulator for, each with a _README.txt saying what goes in it, which BIOS it needs and where its saves go. Its first start after you add games reads every new game once to make its cart and box; later starts are quick.

You can also copy games while nibOS runs, over the network (The console and the base edition), or put them on a second card in TF2; a game copied onto a card appears on its page about a second after the copy finishes.

nibOS doesn’t come with any games. Play games you own, or the many free homebrew games made for these systems.

Then🔗