Any Xcom Ports?

[sindrome]

Im new to the forum but ive had my GP2X for a long while now so apologies if this ones been discussed before.... :blink:

Being a total Retrogamer-head ive been slowly collecting all my favs from years gone by but dont seem to have any from the classic Xcom series.... is there a decent port for this game out there anywhere? Or is someone working on it right now?

I found a thread dated 2006 saying someone was going to attempt a full port but nothing since. I know that a decent PS1 conversion of ENEMY UNKNOWN: TERROR FROM THE DEEP & UFO was released but cant find the roms for the PS1 emulator! This proves that the games can be run on a joypad so a GP2X version should run awesome

:rolleyes:

 

[senquack]

Porting means re-writing portions of source code so that a game will run on another machine. There's no way to port X-COM because there's no source code.

Someone once took the open source multiplayer XCOM-1 tactical recreation, UFO 2000, and extended it very far so that the entire game was pretty much re-created, albeit only on Pocket PC. I never played this version, heard it had a few problems, but as far as I know the source for that effort was never released.

Your only hope is to wait for Pandora and get the Amiga or DOS or PSX versions working at a playable speed on it.

It's either that, or someone extreeeeeeeemely smart, like M-HT, who was behind Albion for the GP2X, will dis-assemble the original DOS binary and after a herculean effort convert all X86 code to ARM, and intercept the calls to PC hardware and DOS and handle them instead with calls compatible with GP2X. Wouldn't hold my breath, but M-HT proved that method was possible with a DOS game of that era with Albion.

 

[PokeParadox]

It's actually a game I quite miss, so if someone can do it, please do it. I'm aware ports require source, however, so I won't be holding my breath... roll on Pandora when we have enough CPU to play it emulated in some form.

 

[Guyfawkes]

Theres UFO: Alien Invasion at http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/ which is open source. The game is still work in progress and maybe too high spec for the GP2X, Pandora should run it fine though.

 

[sindrome]

Cheers for the info Senor Quack, shame it sounds like a enormous excercise which means its extremely unlikely to be seen on the GP2X The Xcom franchise is awesome and it would be such a shame not to see its legacy continued on a new platform like the GP2X.

I guess ill have to locate the PSX version... Can anyone point me to a good PSX rom/iso site as i cant seem to find any, ive spent hours looking!

With the likelihood of sounding a total noob.... whats Pandora?

 

[Manjuu]

Better not ask for links for ROMs, warez, & the like in the forums.

As for Pandora, check the Pandora section of the main forums, and also visit this site: http://www.openpandora.org/

 

[PokeParadox]

Cheers for the info Senor Quack, shame it sounds like a enormous excercise which means its extremely unlikely to be seen on the GP2X The Xcom franchise is awesome and it would be such a shame not to see its legacy continued on a new platform like the GP2X.

I guess ill have to locate the PSX version... Can anyone point me to a good PSX rom/iso site as i cant seem to find any, ive spent hours looking!

With the likelihood of sounding a total noob.... whats Pandora?

Yeah it's not permitted to give ROM links. But they are really not that hard to find. just use google and type what you are looking for... Or if you actually own some playstation discs you can copy your own into ISOs.

 

[icurafu]

Theres UFO: Alien Invasion at http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/ which is open source. The game is still work in progress and maybe too high spec for the GP2X, Pandora should run it fine though.



According to the requirements it will be a very tight fit on the 128MB memory. Will require some reengineering.

 

[Klepto]

I've played the Amiga version of UFO on the GP2X, very slowly and with disk swapping. That was a long time ago and I know Amiga emulation has improved since then. It is possible and may even be playable now. DosBox may be a better option, I know UFO would run on a 486 with 8MB of RAM, so if Tyrian can run through DosBox then I think the first two X-Com games have a chance.

Good luck!

 

[sindrome]

Ive just had a look at UFO Alien Invasion and must say that its an excellent tribute project to XCOM. Very slick graphics, smooth to play and superb sound/music, if this is available to convert onto GP2X then i think its a project that has to be done!

From whats posted above am i right to say that the GP2X cant run a program larger than 128meg?
(the UFO Alien Invasion upacks into 491meg on my hard drive on the PC)

 

[icurafu]

I was posting based on the Pandora. GP2X has no hope at all.

 

[Blah]

Well that's disk space, you are only limited by the size of your SD card. So the amount of disk space it takes up is ok.

On the FAQ where the "system requirements" are listed, that's not the definitive system requirements, only the lowest spec PC they've tested on. Its 3D though, so that makes it damn near impossible (it would be a hell of a lot of work to modify it to use one of the renderers we have, and even then it might not work), if it weren't 3D I think it'd be easy.

I think we have 64mb of RAM, some of it is taken by linux and other things.

As for the Pandora, I imagine this wouldn't be that hard to port to it, although I don't think it'd be able to run full detail @ 800x480, but I've seen stranger things.

 

[ledro]

-- Removed my own redundant comment --

 

[Tobriand]

I know UFO would run on a 486 with 8MB of RAM

It actually ran on a 386sx 16MHz, and I'm fairly sure (though not entirely certain) that Terror From The Deep also worked. Did require 8Mb ram though...

 

[schmidget]

Hi. I'm new to the forum, but I thought I might as well post of my experience with running the PlayStation version of XCOM. Just yesterday, I received my GP2X in mail. The first thing I did was acquire a copy of XCOM UFO Defense and replace all of the videos from the disc with a very small "blank" videos (since the videos don't really matter anyway ). This effectively brought the filesize of the image from a good ~650MB to ~25MB. Some of that 650MB was video with a lot of it being a whole lot of nothing. Then I put on a few emulators including PSX to test my luck with XCOM.

I started up psx4gp2x and ran the image with the CPU @ 250MHz and Ram Timings ON. It took a while to "load the BIOS" but the image did run just fine. The game runs much the same speed-wise as the original. The globe view is still slow, though the framerate is a comfortable 25-30fps. The sound is choppy like many games, its only remedy I've discovered so far is to reduce the PSX clock to about 40%. This seems to make everything graphically less responsive in general, so I'd recommend just playing without sound.

The land based missions have a solid enough framerate, the only hard part is trying to play without a mouse. Getting used to the controls is particularly difficult and may require some guessing to discover what buttons do. I'm still working on making the game play fast enough to include audio, but that is a large enough task in itself.

I'd say the PlayStation version of the game works surprisingly well on the GP2X with only minimal tweaking, but you have to have a bit of patience to discover the controls to the game.