Gp2x Game Development Update

[skeezix]

I'll read the thread, but I worry.. its easy to say "has a port of", but the real quesiton people ignore or forget is.. "good port?" I'm famous for saying "we can run quake on a vic 20, but how good?" .. porting things to a linux target is easy; porting to GP2x at its basic level is likely just a 'recompile' for a lot of things.. so 30 seconds work. The harder part is actually improving the port to run and perform better (run fast, and use local controls better), and adding good UIs (instead of depending on command line, say.)

So when they say "Quake port", do they mean the 2 hour quick job, or do they mean one that actually takes advantage of the device?

ie: DOSBox will _not_ run well _At all_ unless someone does a lot of work on it. So are they just mentioning it, or do thjey _mean_ it? The answer defines a lot.. are they rtying to rope people in, or are they doing the right thing?

(Certainly, listing GBA is gutsy given Nintendos stance.)

But I'll go read the thread now

jeff

 

[skeezix]

DOSbox on the PSP works: I know that someone succeed toinstall windows 95 on the PSP thru DOSbox.

Why it wouldn't work on the GP2X?

​

DosBox on the PSP (333MHz) ran a few frames a second. It wasn't usable.. it merely 'ran'.

jeff

 

[Alpha2]

US copyright law only applies in another country if that country chooses to recognize it, which some do just to keep goo relations but I'd think it's a troublesome process to chase after every single over seas infringment case.

That said Nintendo's emulator patent holds very little weight because it dosent clearly state you can't make an emulator for "X" Nintendo hasn't "created" any emulators to patent they only made up a process and said if you use this process we can sue you. Even then the list states VBA (Visual boy advance) which is as far as I know running arond the net in no less than 3 different flavors. No one's stopped those and there's no way anyone can stop this one.

GPH can't be held accountable for what independant people do even if that patent was anything to be worried about, all they did was make a machine and tell us what other people have calimed to be working on to use on it.

 

[scarface]

I hope the gunbound clone is ready for launch.anyone else play gunbound?

 

[skeezix]

Nintendo's patent may or may not have any weight (law only exists once you've been to court and found out).. but Nintendo have some. I've bent over for them a few times and had producst cancelled or booted out of stores.. why? Because its Nintendo..

1) Who wants to get sued and deal with court, and potential loss?
2) Certainly, _others_ don't want anything to do with it. ie: A website might drop the emu to avoid getting in trouble, just as stores dropped my product to avoid getting into trouble.. or risking N's wrath. Imagine.. N says 'you can't sell our console or games, because you're violating our patent', etc..

Gets messy fast

jeff

 

[Alpha2]

That assumes that GPH sells the Emu. No one is selling it, hell aside from telling people it exists GPH probably haven't even touched the thing. Nintendo could sue them but it'd be a waste of time GPH's lawyer ()who they'd be a fool to do any buisness at all without) would simply look up every other court case of the same type and the suit would get thrown out in a week.

The developer of the Emu is another story they can claim he's infringin on intelectual property but by the time they can even find the guy to issue a cease and desist a billion copies of the mulator could be out on the net and work continued by any number of interested Emu developers assuming the source is also made availible which is probably what happened with VBA.

It's sure as heck what happened to the GBA emu for the GP32, and gamepark was never worried for a second on that.

 

[Poobik The Hare]

DOSbox on the PSP works: I know that someone succeed toinstall windows 95 on the PSP thru DOSbox.

Why it wouldn't work on the GP2X?

​

DosBox on the PSP (333MHz) ran a few frames a second. It wasn't usable.. it merely 'ran'.

jeff

​

shite, another reason to not want a GP2x

 

[TelcoLou]

I have to admit, when I read about DOSbox in development, I nearly crapped in my pants.

SO, is it really a pipe dream? Is there no hope that it could run older games like, for example, X-Com or some older Ultima games?

/ 10

 

[K0K0NUT_h3lmut]

I hope the gunbound clone is ready for launch.anyone else play gunbound?

​

Yeah, i was excited when I saw that too. It makes sense that it is being devved because Gunbound is made in Korea. Even if these games/ports are crap it's a good sign.

 

[TandeM]

1. Game SDK with GCC 4.x
2. Genesis/Megadrive/MegaCD
3. Sound core, Doom porting, SNES
4. Neo-Geo
5. Quake engine porting, 3D work
6. NES, SMS, MSX, GBC, GB
7. Others: Utility development for ARM
8. 3D graphic library, 3D engine and examples
9. Naruto 3D porting, New 3D racing game(like wipeout), Gunbound clone
10. MAME, PSX, Dos Box(PC emulator with MS-DOS)
11. Build SDL/Lib C cross compiling toolchain, VBA32(GBA emulater)

So, I had a thought. Well, more like rampant speculation...

The only reason I can think of these projects being listed in such a haphazard order (i.e. Doom and SNES together, GBA and SDL/Lib C, etc.) is that these are the projects of 11 different devs/dev teams. Surely when you put NES, SMS, MSX, GBC, and GB in one sentence there's only one person we all think of... :rolleyes:

 

[skeezix]

I have to admit, when I read about DOSbox in development, I nearly crapped in my pants.

SO, is it really a pipe dream? Is there no hope that it could run older games like, for example, X-Com or some older Ultima games?

/ 10

​

DOSBox "as is" certainly will not perform well at all; it runs like crap on a 600MHz most of the time...

But DOSBox isn't really efficiently written; an ASM CPU core would help a lot, as would rewriting a lot of its other busy parts.. and making it dual CPU could help.

So no one can say.. maybe it could be useful, but hard to say.

jeff

 

[robox]

I think to have most of the emulators mentioned in the thread run at a reasonable speed most of the emulators may have to rewritten may be from scratch to support both cpu. I dont think any of the emulators currently ported are multi threaded so basically they are gonna rely on one 200mhz cpu to do all the work.
Looks like we might have to wait for one talented coder to come along before we can have flawless snes emualtion on the gpx2.

 

[no_skill]

regarding this i hope gph is as smart as to build sdl to use the second cpu for drawing, sound mixing etc.

this would instantly make sdl based games benefit from it.

 

[JaqMs]

Even though DOSBox is already ported to PSP and is going to be to GP2X, I don't see how reliable it could be since many programs require other files on the computer and a keyboard would probably be needed for most/all games.

 

[Tobriand]

Dosbox would most assuredly be cool, though as has always been said, we'd be lucky to get anything above (imo) an 8Mhz 386 with no sound hardware emulated. If that. Although bear in mind there's still a lot of games that would run on such a machine. If we even got *that* far... but hey, I can hope

Re: Emulation and the big N, I've always been rather confused about why precisely companies like nintendo make such a fuss about emulating games on another system - at least, as long as the consumer buys a real copy. If a big company endorsed emulation instead of eschewing it, they could actually stand to make quite a lot. Why? Its simple. For every console one of the big boys sells, they lose money. They get it back on games sales - so if they could get away without even producing the console (but still make money from the games) surely they'll make more money?

I mean, obviously, they'd need an appropriate copy-protection system in there, possibly alongside some kind of digital fingerprinting in the rom (I don't like the idea, but I see the point from a business point of view), but I don't see why the theory doesn't work.

One reason iirc they don't do this is the idea of a consumer owning old games and being satisfied and therefore not buying new ones. Fine, but again, if you're actually selling the games (as opposed to us all getting them off archives across the net), then you're still selling games. People will eventually get tired of them and buy something else. There's not really much greater risk of people not buying stuff than previously - at least, where handheld systems are concerned; I might own a GBA (in point of fact I don't) and choose not to buy a DS or a GBA2 or a DS8 because I'm happy with my GBA games. If I then DO decide to buy a DSx, Nintendo lose money. But the point at which I buy a DSx is the point, presumably, when I'm tired of my GBA, and therefore I'm likely to buy more games.

If I then want to play my GBA games, in the current model, I go and get my GBA out of the drawer and play them. In the alternative model, Ninty sells a GBA --> DSx "romifier" device (which basically acts like the standard cartidge copier kits you can buy from LikSang) and make money from me there. Furthermore, they continue to sell GBA games (which presumably at this given point in time are much cheaper to produce), possibly at slightly less than DSx games, but with an equivalent profit involved - and no further development costs.

Unless its simply too late, you see my point - there's actually a lot of profit to be made by endorsing emulation officially, but cripling the resultant rom in some fashion (either locking it to a single device, or fingerprinting it as mentioned).

But of course, the big companies don;t see it like that. Which is a pity - might make for an interesting period if they did.

Do bear in mind that the emulators for the old software, I'm assuming, would be officially written, complete with the horrible crippling DRM built in, as opposed to homebrew from a community like ours. I'm not arguing for homebrew (much as I love it, I *can* see a company losing money by endorsing that - its just, imo, worth the PR boost), merely for the official use of emulators.

 

[jmetal88]

If DOSBox will run at any decent speed on GPx2, I'll be puttin' Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (the shareware version) on it ASAP.

 

[reallynotnick]

well Tobriand, if you look at how the revolution can play NES SNES and N64 games by emulating them.... I think they have got the best of both worlds. You still pay for the games and all, plus it is pure profit (no box, case, cartriage, or middle man) and it can play your old gamecube games!

 

[Alpha2]

A company will never endorse Emulation as it's done today because the only way they can make money off these old games is if they control the supply if these games. Because Roms are now so easily availible already the feeling is that the games are already a hard sell so they try to make more money off licencing the games to other companies to release in limited quantities such as the TVgame Joysticks or the 6 in one Sega Genesis controller.

They licence out the games to be used in other devices but they'd never call them roms either because of the stigma attached to the name. Retro games or classics are what they go by, and they are released in the most profitable packages possibly to maximize all the money they can get. They cant do that if they just randomly say "Here's a thousand games just pay us for what you use!" because that takes away the value the same way haveing a million of what should be a rare comic book reduces the value.

You might say "Then why is nintendo pushing the Revolution as a Emu box?" I'm unsure but I can say it's a big risk that they probably think they can take because they expect to be a 3rd place runner. Make it a visible machine that runs all their old games and maybe it'll stem the tide of people running across the net using their games freely? Maybe. Anyone that knows how to get them at all already has every NES game they want for free on a PC emulator though, same with SNES... N64 is a little more questionable as not all Emulators for it work and some are a bit funky at times. But it could actually increase the level of pirated Nintendo games when people learn that the stuff they're buying from Nintendo online for a probably small and reasonable price could be gotten for no money at all with a quick google search, and eventually this service they set up could become a money looser as they find they don't get enough money back from it. But anyway the point is that it's a risk and not one that most companies are willing to take when they can just as easily try to starve people into snatching any morsel they decide to toss out their window to people waiting below, and that's why they wont endorse "roms" but WILL sell you a "classic" for 40 bucks.

 

[Tobriand]

I must say, I hadn't heard of Nintendo releasing a console that endorsed emulation, but I suspect that probably to some extent fitst the model I've suggested.

So far as why they're doing it (quite apart from the presence of profit if done "right"), I'd say its more to push the ethics of emulation into a much greyer area. After all, if an emulator is official, then you ought to use it, as opposed to the homebrew one, right? At least if you're supporting the company in question (which imo Ninty doesn't really need, but hey).

Furthermore, if they play their cards right, they might even be able to release (after everyone who's going to buy the Revolution has bought it) a set of official emus for other competing consoles, all based around their own game-sales model - essentially hijacking either Sony's or MS's kit - both increasing their own profits and reducing their competitors at the same time (since if a given consumer is buying a game from Nintendo that's years old, they AREN'T buying the latest PS3 one). Now THAT would be sneaky - although might lead to interesting legal issues when obtaining the license in the first place.

Do bear in mind that what I'm suggesting in the original post is NOT a suggestion to Ninty to simply give out a thousand games and ask for payment for what people use, though.

 

[Endymion]

Nintendo doesn't tend to make such risky moves on their consoles such as Sony. Maybe you buy your GBA carts, but I assure you most people who run the GBA emulators don't. Same thing with P2P + Bittorrent. You can't really say it goes either way for sure because it doesn't. People DO pirate, but there is also evidence that these people contribute to the artists, companies, etc anyways, but I think that Nintendo has to think about it and realize that it won't really hurt their sale if they let somebody make an emulator for another handheld, they should just make incentives to make it work out for Nintendo, enless of just barring everything. For example I think Sony should sell SDKs and unlocked PSPs for very high, albeit reasonable prices. This way Sony still gets profits from people who only want the device, and does't lose any game profits because these people wouldn't ever bother with them anyways no matter how much shit Sony throws at them. In the end you have productive developers for a console that could in turn sell more games under Sony's licensing and make Sony more money. Everybody wins, and America would have less retarded skillless people around.