Cave Story plans

Even though I can’t continue work on Cave Story for the GameCube as a hobby project, that doesn’t mean it’s a dead project.

I have a port of Cave Story I’ve been working on, to basically get a clean cross platform layer in there. What I’d like to do is get a port up and running on another platform, but in terms of other platforms, my options are somewhat limited at this point.

I’m thinking either iPod Touch/iPhone (even though I don’t yet have a Mac or an iPod Touch/iPhone) or even a console download service if I can get permission from Pixel and AGTP, work out all the legal garbage and whatever else.

There’s a whole load of hurdles to get over if going that route, so it’s just a pipe dream at the moment.

NDA’d in 3… 2… 1…

Regular readers, subscribers (or stalkers!) may remember that I moved on from homebrew PSP development when I gained access to the official docs and development hardware through my work. Because my employer had signed a non-disclosure agreement for Sony, I couldn’t keep homebrewing and still guarantee that I wasn’t inadvertently leaking Sony’s uber-secret technical details to the general public.

I then moved on to GameCube development, as in work we weren’t doing anything for Nintendo hardware and I didn’t have to worry about those kinds of conflicts.

Until now that is, as we’ve just become registered WiiWare developers.

While we’ve not started development on any WiiWare titles yet, it’s probably just a matter of time. I’m really excited about the prospect of doing some cool stuff on the Wii, but I can’t help but feel a bit bummed out that yet another homebrew door has been closed.

It’s easy to feel angry at my employer about this, but really it’s not their fault. Sony and Nintendo’s attitude to developers is to blame here. But that’s a rant for another day.

If any readers would like to continue work on any of my projects, please let me know.

I’ll see if I can fire out a quick release of something before it’s too late, but no promises okay?

Cave Story GameCube reaches the intro screen

I’ve been a bit quiet about Cave Story progress, so I thought I’d make a short post about it.

Before I begin, I would like to ask news sites to please not copy and paste my posts verbatim into their news stories, as this prevents me from editing posts or making corrections.

But anyway, like Simon Parzer’s GP2X port, the GameCube port uses SDL underneath. GameCube SDL is now a work in progress in the devkitPro CVS repo, and with the help of WinterMute and the other devkitPro guys it seems to be coming along great.

Audio, threads and timers are really not implemented at all in GameCube SDL yet, so there’s a lot of Cave Story (mainly audio) which had to be disabled in order to get the GameCube version up and running past initialisation.

Here are a few pictures to sum up progress:

The game gets to the intro screen, but crashes shortly after. I’ve got some ideas about what the problem could be, but I’ve not got the time to look into it right now. Perhaps when my uni workload dies down a bit.