Python on Nintendo DS

[Richard Tew]

An update to my Python on Nintendo DS efforts.

Summary:
- Working bug free port of Python for the Nintendo DS.
- Programmers wanted to help write extensions to expose the DS hardware
  to Python.
- Stackless Python supported, but not bug free.

When I last worked on it, it had several remaining bugs including a
broken zipimport, unreliability due to limited stack space and more.

I spent a statutory holiday on it and located and fixed all the bugs,
including the allocation of stack space and the problems with zipimport
(due to a misunderstanding about what seek function API I should
respect).  As it stands now, it seems pretty bug free.

Python itself running on the Nintendo DS with no access to the hardware
features (graphics, microphone, speakers, touchscreen) is not much use.
 As a text-based calculator it serves one purpose I guess. But to
really serve as a useful tool on the DS, it needs to expose these
pieces of hardware.  SDL is one option, as there is a reportedly buggy
port of SDL for the DS, and ideally as PyGame is based on SDL, a port
of that would hopefully be straightforward.

If anyone has an experience writing extension modules in C, and with
programming the DS hardware in C, and wishes to help flesh out some
form of library codebase to make this a useful port of Python, please
let me know! :)

Also, I switched to the Stackless Python code base.   The tasklet
scheduler locks up if invoked, but I haven't had the chance to look
into this yet.  But given that tasklets run and switch in the limited
scenarios I have tried, fixing the scheduler should be a matter of
time.

Richard