devkitPro 2024 donation drive

[WinterMute]

Raised $1639 of $2000 target so far. We have a few things we've been working on in the background that will be released over the course of this donation drive. Any suggestions for things you want to see or outstanding issues important to you are much appreciated.

As some of you may know already it's my birthday in june and I usually take the opportunity to solicit devkitPro donations. This year I've unfortunately had family and personal issues which have conspired to get in the way of keeping up with release announcements. I'm going to try to retrospectively add the missed release anouncements to the appropriate release topics over the next few weeks as time permits.

Since last year's donation drive there have been some 217 updates to library packages and 32 updates to tool packages. Some of these have been relatively easy, others have taken considerable time and effort to get working. Costs of living have increased surprisingly over the last few years and new costs have unfortunately been added. As always your generosity and patience in continuing to support the existence of our little ecosystem is very much appreciated.

If you like the toolchains and you'd consider buying me a beer if you lived nearby then please consider a donation. The Support devkitPro page has a nice list of (tongue in cheek) reasons to donate. We also have a Patreon Page too for anyone who would consider more regular support.

Some people no longer use the toolchains but have donated to express their gratitude for the career opportunities afforded to them thanks to the free availability of these tools and their ease of use. I'm always immensely grateful for these donations since they remind me that what I do does have a positive impact on the world despite the negativity aimed at me from some quarters.

Whatever you decide, thanks for using the toolchains and making all the cool homebrew I love to see

Generally I'm not that great at blowing my own trumpet, or even sometimes believing I have a trumpet to blow so it's always good to hear from people who appreciate the work that's gone into making these toolchains what they are. Messages of appreciation and support are just as welcome as monetary contributions.

We now provide 263 libraries and 37 tool binaries with more added all the time. Using pacman as a package manager across linux, windows & macOS has enabled fantastic infrastructure that allows homebrew developers to get on with writing software for all the Nintendo game consoles we support.

[Gearmo3DS]

Thank you for being awesome, I love how smooth and straight-forward the tool-chain is to use.
It made me fall in love with 3DS homebrew development and it became very important to me.

[WinterMute]

Thanks to your incredible generosity we've moved well past the initial $500 goal to $1639 so we've decided to run a bit longer with $2000 as a stretch target. We could do with a fair bit more than that to cover a few bills and perhaps pay someone for some work we need done on the site so we may have a couple more stretch goals on the way. As always to those who donate and subscribe via Patreon you have our eternal gratitude.

I've managed to catch up with the updates we've done for March, April and part of May as well as trying to stay on top of those release announcements since August. We've also partially caught up with the roundup posts on Patreon. There have been 30 updates to the approximately 300 tools and libraries we maintain and more on the way. The gentoo instructions at wiki/devkitPro_pacman have been updated and, over the next few days I'm intending to add some musl based distros - void and alpine where we've been playing with support.

Next thing on the list is probably putting together some cmake templates to use the devkitPro provided infrastructure we've been working on for a while which may also help motivate us to work a bit more on some documentation and fiddling with editor setup. Recently we've been playing around a bit with clangd support in Sublime Text and VS Code as well as investigating neovim after someone asked how to set it up there. Neovim was a painful experience for people used to non modal graphical editors so we have little intention of going back there so don't be getting too excited. Here's the project I'm currently playing with for this.