Porting R'N'D to handheld/PDA devices
Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2006 3:08 am
Greetings!
I am interested in porting R'N'D to [primarily Linux-based] handheld/PDA devices. Actually, I also made a rough recipe for OpenEmbedded, and tested it under QEMU ARM emulator. It worked and runs, I'd even say well, except it's of course barely playable.
There're following issues with running R'N'D on devices in question:
1. Unfortunate default screen size R'N'D uses. It just *slightly* larger than standard 640x480, common best available for handheld devices. Why??? Was there some magic in having 17x17 tilesize?
2. Actually, previous note is just lazy grievance that it might work for just some of devices OOB. That's wouldn't help handheld port in general, as there're various screensizes, commonly lower than VGA. So, we're talking about dynamic sizing of game screen/window, and possibly dynamic resizing of sprites.
3. Keeping game data in uncompressed form doesn't scale well for handheld devices.
4. Why PCX is used for graphics?
So, I'd appreciate if the author described the attitude towards these problems - any chance some of the issues above being handled soon? If not, would be patches accepted? Any suggestions regarding window/tile sizing? Would just replacing constants with vars work in first approximation (leaving aside that hardcoded frame graphics, it would need to be dynamically drawn eventually too, of course)?
I also know that some of the problems above are being/were tackled, but it seems a bit slow/not very ordered, so to say. For example, screen/tile size matter must have been addressed at least partially with RoNDi, but it has that common story - binary only releases (which is violation of GPL by the way), then author's gone, source lost. And just diffing HerzAusGold's source against mainline shows that it will take some more time until that could be accepted into it.
Thanks,
Paul
I am interested in porting R'N'D to [primarily Linux-based] handheld/PDA devices. Actually, I also made a rough recipe for OpenEmbedded, and tested it under QEMU ARM emulator. It worked and runs, I'd even say well, except it's of course barely playable.
There're following issues with running R'N'D on devices in question:
1. Unfortunate default screen size R'N'D uses. It just *slightly* larger than standard 640x480, common best available for handheld devices. Why??? Was there some magic in having 17x17 tilesize?
2. Actually, previous note is just lazy grievance that it might work for just some of devices OOB. That's wouldn't help handheld port in general, as there're various screensizes, commonly lower than VGA. So, we're talking about dynamic sizing of game screen/window, and possibly dynamic resizing of sprites.
3. Keeping game data in uncompressed form doesn't scale well for handheld devices.
4. Why PCX is used for graphics?
So, I'd appreciate if the author described the attitude towards these problems - any chance some of the issues above being handled soon? If not, would be patches accepted? Any suggestions regarding window/tile sizing? Would just replacing constants with vars work in first approximation (leaving aside that hardcoded frame graphics, it would need to be dynamically drawn eventually too, of course)?
I also know that some of the problems above are being/were tackled, but it seems a bit slow/not very ordered, so to say. For example, screen/tile size matter must have been addressed at least partially with RoNDi, but it has that common story - binary only releases (which is violation of GPL by the way), then author's gone, source lost. And just diffing HerzAusGold's source against mainline shows that it will take some more time until that could be accepted into it.
Thanks,
Paul