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?

GameCube, GP2X and Quake 2

It’s been a while since I bought a GP2X and I’ve not done much coding for it. Partly this is due to the firmware start-up time — it takes about a minute to get from the Makefile copying the ELF onto my SD card to actually running the build.

I don’t know if this is a Linux problem (not too likely) or a GP2X problem (rather more likely), but a 30 or 40 second start-up delay for a portable game playing device is completely insane. I don’t know how GPH sleep easy at night!

But anyway, for a while I’ve had a GameCube port of Quake 2 in the works. It looks like it’s going to run fast enough but as usual with Quake 2 ports, memory is a problem. I’ve stripped out some memory hogs and tried to shrink down some allocations so while I’m fairly sure Quake 2 for GameCube will happen, I can’t make any promises.

In order to make Quake and Quake 2 development easier, as well as their GameCube versions I maintain a Win32 SDL version of both games. This lets me quickly compile and test platform independent changes without messing around with SD cards or adaptors or waiting for devices to boot.

Given that the GP2X comes with SDL installed I thought I’d quickly adapt my GameCube Makefile for a GP2X version and see how well it ran.

SlowCPU is sloooowwww!

The GP2X has no FPU and Quake 2 does a fair bit of floating point maths, even in the innermost span renderer. The end result is a frame rate just over 5 frames a second (compared to the GameCube’s “easy” 50 FPS).

The Cube is so cute and cuddly, but inside its cheeky purple shell lives a beefy monster!

Anyway, I noticed a few easy performance fixes and by making some changes managed to pretty much halve the time taken to render world spans on the Win32 build. I would imagine the GP2X build won’t see nearly that improvement though as I’ve not yet done any fixed point conversion.

I’ll leave the details of the changes for another time.