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?

Multiple topic catch-up!

Phew, looks like Quake GameCube was pretty popular. As of now, it’s been downloaded 362 times. Who knew there were so many GameCube homebrew fans!

There’s all kinds of discussion going on about it on various forums and as much as I’d like to respond to all the queries, all those forums are just way too much to keep up with. So what I’ll do is cover the main points here.

Some folks have quite reasonably supposed that there won’t be any more GameCube homebrew from me because my Wii isn’t capable of running SD Media Launcher any more. The good news is that I do my development using a regular purple GameCube connected to my PC via a TV card. I think I would go insane if I were using the Wii as my main development console. It takes so long to start up and get into GameCube mode!

I really should have put a new post up here when I released Quake, as many sites have copied and pasted my last Quake post into their news items.

Additionally, I really should have put up a screenshot. Many sites used screenshots from GLQuake or highly modified Quake engines to illustrate their news posts, which is a shame because the shots they used don’t represent what the GameCube port looks like.

In terms of gameplay, some people don’t like the way the view centres itself vertically if you start moving. I think this is a Quake feature rather than a GameCube port feature and there should be something useful (“lookspring”?) in the options screen if you want to disable it. I like it on, so I never thought about it.

It’s unlikely that I’ll be doing any updates on Quake soon, mostly because I’m getting stuck into a new project at work and annoying network card issues have caused me to lose some schedule time, but partly because I’m pretty happy with Quake and there don’t seem to be any glaring issues that need fixed ASAP. That’s a first!

Anyway, I’m glad people seem to like the port and hopefully there’ll be something else for you in the coming months.

As I was concentrating on Quake, the GameCube ports of SDL or Cave Story haven’t really progressed much since I wrote about them last.

Simon Parzer has been working on the SDL port of Cave Story. He’s been doing a great job implementing a mixer for sound effects and music. We’re sharing the same Subversion repository so he can port to Linux and GP2X while I port to GameCube.

The GameCube port of SDL is going okay. The only problem I see is with the audio system. SDL won’t convert audio properly when the frequency change isn’t a power of two. Unfortunately the GameCube plays only 32KHz and 48KHz audio, which isn’t very common, and SDL won’t convert correctly between those frequencies and the usual suspects like 11KHz, 22KHz or 44KHz. This is due to be fixed in SDL 1.3, but until then I’ll need to write an on-the-fly rate conversion routine.

After I get back on schedule with work I’ll pick up SDL again. I hope once SDL is released that the flood gates will open for loads more GameCube ports. The scene seems a bit bare. I think the recent GameCube homebrew contest at DCemu only had one entrant!

The Cave Story port uses SDL

Last time I mentioned writing a common abstraction layer for Cave Story as an intermediate step to getting it up and running on the GameCube.

I decided on SDL for handling as much of that layer as possible. This has a few advantages:

• I can test the port on Windows.
• I don’t have to write so much code.
• The process of porting to other platforms is simplified.

There are quite a lot of references to RECTs throughout the code, which I don’t yet want to convert to SDL_Rects. That may sound silly, but SDL rectangles are stored as “left, top, width and height”, whereas Windows rectangles are stored as “left, top, right and bottom”.

It’s not a large difference, but while converting a few snippets over to the SDL way isn’t at all difficult, the number of RECT references is large enough to cause a few evenings worth of tedious and error-prone work, which I would rather skip! I just want to get the game up and running with as few far-reaching changes as possible.

So instead, I convert RECTs to SDL_Rects at the last second, just before blitting.

But anyway, there is one glaring hole in my longer term plan. As far as I am aware, there is no stand alone GameCube port of SDL. If believe there’s a version for GameCube Linux, but not a stand alone library. Fortunately, porting the parts of SDL I use to the GameCube probably won’t be much more work than I would have had to do anyway.