I saw someone was making updates to the NDS build as recently as last October. Is it currently in a working state?

I compiled it and tried to run it on my system but it fails when it tries to load the kbd.bin (yes, I have the /angband/nds directory in place).

It is not functional. In case you haven't seen it, here is the pull request that resulted in the recent changes, with some comments that describe the state of the port.

Thanks! I had not seen the PR.

Well, I decided to mess around trying to get it to work. This evening I was able to get it to work up until the end of character creation before it blew up loading the main game.

I was interested in playing on the NDS after playing the excellent new Android port but not liking how cramped my hands get playing games on the phone. While the NDS is much easier on the hands, what kills it for me is the screen resolution. In order to fit on the 256x192 display, the font has to be 3x8, making it ugly and hard to read. So, sadly, I don't think I'm going to continue to try to make it work.

As an enterprise Java coder, messing around with C and embedded hardware was fun though. I'm new to Angband, and, at this point, I think I may have spent more hours trying to figure out how to get the NDS port to work than playing the actual game...