Posted By: wraggster
simonjhall the excellent coder who has brought an amazing port of Quake to the Nintendo DS has today gave some details of his work of bringing Quake 2 to the DS, heres the details:
Ok, just an update on this (dunno why I'm doing this!)
Thought I'd get off my arse this weekend and check out the Q2 code on my PC. I've not done a lot of work on it in the last six months, besides fix the load times. They were so slow that working on it is completely unproductive, as you've gotta sit around and surf the net for three minutes until you can get it to crash again!
Anyway, here's some info for those who care
- the game now takes about a minute to load (once the program has started)
- the world is now rendered with the DS' 3D hardware; the framerate looks very playable
- I'm an inch away from getting texturing in
- no models, GUI, etc
- the proper palettes are in (hence I can now nearly texture), as are the game fonts
- I've got the RAM usage down to a pretty low level. The existing system required an MMU and (virtually) allocated memory in a crazy way. One problem I had before I sorted this out was that I could *just* squeeze a demo into 32 + 4 megs. After looking into it I realised that 70% of that memory was actually going to waste! The *demos* ought to run in ~10 meg of RAM now.
- it's 8-bit write hell, and I'm gonna have to go strb hunting to sort that out!
No promises, but there's a chance I may actually work on this properly :-)