X-com: Ufo Defense V1.0.0

[M-HT]

Hi,

the final version of X-COM: UFO Defense for the GP2X is finished.

All thanks for the touchscreen support (and complaints about it) go to Senor Quack.

A bit of warning - music playing is slowing things down more than expected. The worst place is the intro. I can't get it to run smoothly with music playing no matter what.

List of changes:
* renamed configuration file UFO.cfg to Ufo.cfg
+ working intro
+ added a sync call after saving a game
+ working sound
+ working music

changes by Senor Quack:
+ F200 touchscreen support for both left and right-handed users.
+ Battlefield scrolling and geoscape rotation macros.
+ Battlefield "View Level Up/Down" macros.
+ Geoscape "Zoom In/Out" macros.
* More flexible button remapping.
* Few minor bug fixes: Cursor movement no longer sticks when game is paused and cursor is moving.
+ Made sample and music volumes independantly adjustable
+ Added direct adjustment of GP2X volume through /dev/mixer

X-COM: UFO Defense v1.0.0 on the gp2x archive

 

[Manjuu]

Awesome! Now not only with sound & music, but with touchscreen too!

Thank you very much, M-HT & Senor Quack.

 

[senquack]

M-HT's post makes it sound like the music makes the game unplayable, but that's not the case at all. RAM timings do help a bit but even without, I play the game at 200mhz all the time and it is perfectly playable and sound never skips even with touchscreen.

Also: a lot of the work going to touchscreen is usable by F100 users, too! You can now scroll the battlescape and rotate the earth very easily pressing the L-trigger while moving the stick. You can also use L-trigger and Vol Up/Down to zoom the geoscape in/out and move up and down view-levels in the battlescape sequences.

F200 users can look in the readme for their controls, since they are different for left and right-handed users. I find the game is actually more playable with the touchscreen and the new macros versus playing it in Dosbox on a PC with a mouse!

 

[Hooka]

W00t! Yeah, that's awesome guys!

 

[M-HT]

M-HT's post makes it sound like the music makes the game unplayable, but that's not the case at all. RAM timings do help a bit but even without, I play the game at 200mhz all the time and it is perfectly playable and sound never skips even with touchscreen.

It certainly wasn't my intention to say that the game is unplayable with music (except maybe the problems in intro), just that when you compare the game with and without music the difference in speed is noticable, but the game is still fully playable.

 

[Megagun]

This sounds great!

Can't wait to give this a little spin when I get home. Too bad I don't have an F-200 though.

 

[PoisonedV]

Awesome. I just bought X-Com off steam (I had never actually bought it before, just pirated etc) so thats a load off my chest. ive recently re-acquired a gp2x through dark and devious methods, so ill check it out, thanks.

 

[Unfathomable Depths]

Thank you very much for this.

Awesome work

 

[sepulep]

M-HT, pretty impressive..I would swear that this is the smoothest way to play xcom I have seen
about the music: I think it makes a difference which timidity patch set you use, there are different sized versions going around with different tradeoffs between quality/size (and hence work for the cpu)
two small questions:
- did you include a fix for the difficulty bug that was present in all the official xcom patches?
- is it possible for unstrechted video to be centered in the y direction ( such that there is a small black strip below and above instead of only a big strip at the bottom, this looks so much better)???

 

[M-HT]

about the music: I think it makes a difference which timidity patch set you use, there are different sized versions going around with different tradeoffs between quality/size (and hence work for the cpu)

I only know about one set (the one on the sdl_mixer page), so that's the only one I tested.

- did you include a fix for the difficulty bug that was present in all the official xcom patches?

No, unless it was included in the copy I own. Can you provide a link to the fix ?

- is it possible for unstrechted video to be centered in the y direction ( such that there is a small black strip below and above instead of only a big strip at the bottom, this looks so much better)???

I'm not sure if it's possible without a lot of work, but I'll take a look at it.

 

[sepulep]

QUOTE
No, unless it was included in the copy I own. Can you provide a link to the fix ?


well, the only method I know to correct this is with xcomutil:

XcomUtil - Ufopedia

I think it writes directly to one of the executables..

 

[Megagun]

Wow, consider me impressed.... This works great!
Had to copy over the timidity.cfg file and add in that dir line, though, since for some reason I was never able to get timidity to work, even if I extracted the archive to the root of the SD card...

I'm impressed with how nicely it actually plays. Scrolling the battlefield/geoscape is laughably easy with the Ltrigger shortcuts.

Ofcourse, there are still a few things left that might make this even better, such as the ability to move between X-com operatives nicely using a shortcut command, or the ability to easilly switch between timescales when in the Geoscape (this might require some pixelhunting though to determine what the timescale is currently set to)..

Either way, brilliant work, guys! I never thought that music and sound would ever arrive after the first release of this 'port', but I guess I was very wrong!

 

[ledow]

I've also just bought the whole X-COM collection on Steam, even though I'm sure I've already got most of them somewhere. But £2.99 for the whole series that you can put on a modern PC without tinkering and take them to any machine you log onto... that's gotta be worth it. The £2.99 was a special deal for the whole set, though, so they probably aren't doing it anymore. Interestingly, the Steam ones work by running under DosBox 0.72 (but you don't see anything but the flash of a window title unless you poke around in the game folder).

The thing that gets me about replaying games such as this... I can remember first playing this game in a darkened room. You loaded up your new game, spent a little time configuring things (or, if you were like me, used one of a myraid pre-built CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT options from a boot menu that gave you enough conventional RAM without sacrificing mouse/CDROM drivers etc.). You started the game, got that opening menu sound and clicked around a bit. It was mesmerising. You got that spooky music, got into a mission and you start creeping your units out of the dropship.

You spot an alien, shoot it, it runs off. You spot another, shoot it, it dies. But the thing was, then an alien would pounce behind you where you didn't even know it was, on one of their movement turns and fires a loud shot at you and kills you. It might only be 11KHz sound through a tinny old Soundblaster and the graphics might only be cartoonish through a 320x240 display but it scared the crap out of you the first time.

That atmosphere can be hard to recapture.

I can remember Doom having the same effect. Quake was a quantum leap ahead again. Syndicate... wow. Abuse... scary! But with their rubbish graphics and tinny sound, they created an atmosphere that could scare the life out of you. Modern games don't seem to have this as much. Half-life 2 is the closest I've seen - that can be some scary atmospheric stuff - but the sounds didn't do much for me. But you always remember that first sound of the alien clacking in Doom, or the Gauss Gun in Syndicate, or the alien screaming in Abuse, or the atmospheric music in UFO.

I'm looking forward to trying this on my GP2X when I next get the chance, but I'll have to dig out my headphones first!

 

[pubzombie]

cheer guys its gonna be a few days before i can get round to having a go - mygp2x is at work. but this is going to a great one to play on company time.
thanx for your time and effort
Pz

 

[Tag5]

Many thanks M-HT for this awesome port. I don't get much sleep at nights now. Always playing on this game in bed until 0200 and getting up at 0600 on week nights. The weekends are for sleeping! Loving this game and hoping that Terror from the Deep will be following soon!