I had a great time at the 2024 Fall Hackathon Sponsored by the GMU Health Informatics AI club. I really want to thank the club and especially Dr. Linda for setting everything up and her infectious personality.

My goal was to complete as many applications as I could using a Nintendo DSI, SD Card and Laptop. After hearing about the announcement and seeing the wonder flyer I set about researching how best to accomplish my goals without reinventing the wheel. A little digging and I found a C++ library for compiling games called Devkitpro. The documentation for this library is… hard to find. But this should be an issue as we can upload the code from the library into an AI chat bot and query the functions this way. Or the old fashion fun way or reading the source code.

I found some issues with pathing when trying to complile code from outside of the devkit pros directories. So moving forward i stored all my files within the c:\devkitpro installation folder. Sometimes adjusting your path and adding environment variables cannot fix issues within an environment. With the initial hello_world compiled and testing on DSi hardware i was ready for the hakathon. So I packed up my case with any tools I might need and headed to GMU.

Unfortunately, i couldn’t find any coworkers that where interested. But luckily an excellent group of classmates showed up and helped for an ingenious team. As a group we where able to complete a bunch of challenges from the score card. I personally worked on a medical advisor game and diagnonstic detective. I think i will review the code in another post.

In conclusion I had a great time. Im excited that so many bright other students are in the program that I selected and I look forward to working with them on future projects. I loved being in a coding challenge it was fun to code again its been about 3 years since I have played around with C++. The creative juices are flowing and I hope to curn out a personal project of two over the winter break.

Thank you to anyone who reads this!
Best,

Nate