Opentyrian2x Alpha Released!

[Tobriand]

Kalimerou has released an early port of OpenTyrian for the GP2x. To quote from the decription on the archive:

QUOTE
Hi folks,

Glad to make my first port for GP2x

This is Tyrian, an old great shoot'em up for DOS. Now it turned up into OpenTyrian, since it's been re-implemented to use SDL (check project here : http://code.google.com/p/opentyrian/ , thanks a lot to them !). I just ported the engine, you still need the original game files. Pick them there, for instance : http://it.travisbsd.org/foo/tyrian/tyrian21.zip
Put them all in one folder, run opentyrian2x.gpe and enjoy !


The game plays beautifully in the default mode (386 detail as far as I can tell), although don't try and configure anything or load/save yet since you get stuck in the menus (usually when it's asking you to press a key). Also, as yet it is impossible to scroll when reading datacubes - but the game itself is a treat to play!

EDIT: Find OpenTyrian2x here in the archive.

EDIT 2: An updated release with saves working can be found here (29/11/07)

 

[___]

hey nice work! Looks promising. Everyone got excited over tyrian running on the gp2x through dosbox. Now I guess this is a way better solution. I have never played tyrian before and was too lazy to get dosbox running so this is probably a good chance to try it out.

Cheers!

 

[triksR4rabits]

To those who have yet to play Tyrian, I highly recommend giving it a spin; incredibly fun shump with a number of weapons, ships, etc to choose from.

<me jealous> wish I could get this going on psp </me jealous>

thanks to Tobriand for the info and Kalimerou for bringing this great game to the 2x!

 

[hsinn3r]

sounds great! probably my favorite shoot'em'up, the only game that lets you fly a carrot

 

[Megatog615]

Why are the .exe files included?

Excuse me if there's a few issues I don't understand.

 

[rlegault]

When loading the lower 1/4 of the screen is messed up. When I select "Start New Game" it simply exits.

 

[Zeladin]

Wow amazing, it'll be great with a bit of polishing. I didn't even know there was an open tyrian engine! Great work by Kalimerou in bringing us this classic at better than dosbox speeds!

 

[b._.o._.b]

When loading the lower 1/4 of the screen is messed up. When I select "Start New Game" it simply exits.

Upperscreen is messed up here.. and than hangs

 

[Kalimerou]

Wow amazing, it'll be great with a bit of polishing. I didn't even know there was an open tyrian engine! Great work by Kalimerou in bringing us this classic at better than dosbox speeds!

Hi all,

Thank you for your enthousiasm !
I uploaded a little update this evening, the game seems to be smoother.

@Megatog615 : The exe files you could find come from the original Tyrian, which was a DOS game. You unpacked them from the Tyrian archive, they're useless for OpenTyrian.

Here are the "menu bugs" :
- don't enter the "Options/Joystick" and "Options/Keyboard" menus... or you'll get stuck !
- the "Ship Specs" menu seems to hang, but you can get out by pressing the 'A' button.
- can't scroll when reading datacubes

For those who related hangs : could you please tell me a few things ?
- which firmware for your GP2x ?
- where did you get your Tyrian data files from ?

Since OpenTyrian relies upon SDL, I believe that conflicts between SDL versions might appear. Is there anyone to confim that ? This would explain what's been related above.
I compiled the sources of OpenTyrian with Open2x (static glibc 2.3.6), and statically linked with the SDL libraries. It could be worth it to try with a shared glibc toolchain. Please be patient some more days, I'll investigate this.

By the way, game load seems to be fine. But... how do you save your game with the original Tyrian ?

 

[Kalimerou]

I just remembered : the game logs some messages into the opentyrian.log file.
If OpenTyrian2x crashes, please check the content of that file !

 

[Tobriand]

Oh, a simple note (forgot to include it in the news post, and it didn't quite seem front-pagey in any event).

For those that are getting menu-only running, use the A button to select things, not the B one. The B button quits whilst at the main menu, though quite why, I've no idea. But don't press it unless you don't want to play for very long at all...

As for saving, it's only available in full game mode. Go to Options --> Save --> Select a slot, then enter name of save and press enter. It hangs for exactly the same reason that joystick/keyboard configuring would do, I imagine, namely that the GP2x buttons do not correspond to letters on the keyboard, and, in addition, nothing quite corresponds to Enter or Esc.

Simple hack solution: Bind L to any letter, and R to Esc. Saves wouldn't look nice, but they would be doable.

Complex solution: Auto-generate names when selecting a save based on the level you're on, not using the text-entry dialogue box at all.

As far as I know, you can't save in arcade mode, but unfortunately, full game is a lot more fun (I think - I like buying my weapons rather than leaving them to chance, and generator/shield/ship upgrades add a lot to the gameplay).

It would also be nice to have something bound to Esc in level to bring up the menu and effectively pause the game. That gives you access to internal volume control, and, hopefully, speed and detail switching. Assuming those are integrated into the remake already in the first plae (they may not be, of course).

 

[Kalimerou]

Wow! I can see your great experience at playing Tyrian

I agree with you, it would be great to be able to scroll cube data, and to bind Esc and/or Enter.
What do you think of +/- for scrolling up/down, Start to Enter and Select to Esc ? I'll try to do it. But first of all, there's a bigger trouble with the OpenTyrian crashes

 

[Tobriand]

As a quick fix, yeah, +/- for scrolling etc. sounds good, although bear in mind that people expect volume buttons to change the volume!

An eventual (and better) solution would be to temporarily bind the down direction to the down arrow whilst datacube reading and up to up respectively, then re-bind them to whatever their default state is when leaving the window.

Alternatively, find the bit that says down/up move the window respectively and replace the expected keys with whatever it is that the joypad down/up count as. If that makes sense. Same could apply for everything else except probably the save function...

 

[Alghazanth]

The pc best shooter ever made imho ; really very exciting to see this project.

I remember myself opening games' jukebox and listening to awesome midi-type musics of the game for hours

Great work

 

[rlegault]

Ok so my problem was using the B button, using A works great. Now the only problem is the lower 1/4 of the screen is messed up. I have a f-200 with Firmware 4.0 and I got the game from the link that was provided. It's exactly what I was looking for, this game kicks ass!

 

[Thunor]

Ok, my first attempt to get this working resulted in seeing the splash screen, then seeing a greenish corrupted splash screen and a hang. The bottom part of the screen was also corrupted.

I found another Tyrian on the net ( http://www.486games.net/game.php?id=83 ) and this time it worked although the bottom part of the screen was still corrupted. I expect that if people are seeing the greenish corrupted screen and then it hanging it's because they don't have the "right" version of Tyrian.

I believe I've discovered the reason for the corruption on the bottom part of the screen: it's an issue with GMenu2X. Try exiting GMenu2X back to gp2xmenu and run the game from there; the corruption disappears.

Funny thing is I downloaded the opentyrian source two months ago, compiled it on my Linux box and it didn't work because now I know that I had the wrong version of Tyrian. I just looked at the source again and noticed that there's already a joystick.c with some GP2X code in there and the joystick works on my Linux box. I would have thought it would have been quite painless porting this to the GP2X and it looks as though somebody was already attempting it.

Hope this helps.

Cheers.

P.S. Even though I know that A is ENTER and B is ESC I still keep pressing B on the main menu Might be a good idea to make it B for ENTER and X for ESC.

[EDIT]
The first post and the opentyrian website link to a set of Tyrian 2.1 data files that the opentyrian developers recommend possibly for a very good reason i.e. they work

 

[b._.o._.b]

Ok so my problem was using the B button, using A works great.

Yep, that was my problem too... :blush:

 

[emphyrio]

There is a black bar at the bottom of the screen, is this because of the resolution?
If so it may be preferable to have black bars at bottom and top (like wide screen on 4:3 aspect TV).

Apart from that (and the things mentioned earlier) it's running great!

 

[Kalimerou]

There is a black bar at the bottom of the screen, is this because of the resolution?
If so it may be preferable to have black bars at bottom and top (like wide screen on 4:3 aspect TV).

Apart from that (and the things mentioned earlier) it's running great!

Sorry, these black bars have been reported by a bunch of people... and I noticed only yet that I'm also concerned
Actually, I don't know. That black bar on the bottom of the screen is here from game start to the end, so this could be related to the resolution.

 

[Kalimerou]

I manage to make a shared build using the official GPH toolchain. It uses the GP2x internals ! SDL and glibc 2.2.5 are provided by the firmware.

I have to say that this version runs faster. But, in the opposite, the sound now has big troubles. And it doesn't even remove the black bar on the bottom... <_<
Anyway, this version *might* fix some of the reported hangs.

If anyone is interested, please get it from here :
http://unismetz.free.fr/site/fichiers/open...an2x-shared.zip