QUAKE2DS prerelease 1

February 10th, 2008, 14:42 Posted By: simonjhall

I said I'd never actually work on this game, but here I am releasing it!
So here it is, Quake II for Nintendo DS: http://quake.drunkencoders.com

To play the game you require a homebrew-enabled DS, and some kind of way of playing homebrew on your DS.
You also require a slot-2 card that has a minimum of 16 megabytes of RAM on it. When playing, you do not however need to place the data files and the program on your slot-2 card - if you also have a slot-1 card then you will have better load times if you play the game with both cards in use. You will still need to the slot-2 card inserted to make use of the RAM, though.

To install:
- make a directory named baseq2 in the root of your card
- copy the pak files from the baseq2 directory of your CD or Q2 install into this baseq2 directory
- download the config file from the web site and place it in the directory
- from the game archive file take the quake2.nds file, dldi patch it and place it in the root of your flash card
- plug in your slot-2 RAM card into your DS
- turn on your DS.

To reiterate - you'll get better performance if the game and it's data files are on something like and R4 in slot-1 than if you put your data files on your slot-2 RAM card. Unless your slot-1 card is a GnM...

Overclocking memory:
The performance of the game heavily depends on the speed of your RAM. Slot-2 RAM is very slow, but you can overclock it to make it up to 40% faster if you have the right type of flash card. When the game starts, try changing the speed option from slowest to slower or slow and see if the game starts ok. If it does then you're in luck :-)
Don't forget to try memtestARM to see more reliably if you card can be overclocked.

Lurchy gameplay:
If you experience delays when the game plays a sound for the first time, you should reformat your flash card with the largest block size that you can; I recommend 64k. This is because seeking within 250 megs of pak files is much faster when the block size is larger. Doing this will also improve your load times. Do it!

About the game:
- every level is playable in single-player mode
- there is no multiplayer
- nearly all graphical effects are done by the DS hardware
- there's auto and manual saving
- there's no mod or TC support (not my fault, I'm afraid)
- there's an on-screen keyboard as well as eight touch buttons (so you can bind functions to them)

The bad stuff:
- again, no multiplayer
- some levels are poorly coded and the performance will hit the floor (in particular security.bsp)
- GUI Z sorting is broken
- no sprite rendering
- some textures are misaligned
- cinematic rendering is disabled
- bits of the world will often pop in/out cos the DS GPU is SO overworked by this game! Some boss models have more polys than the DS can render in a frame...

Reasons I'm releasing this early is cos a) I'm too busy to work on this properly b) my computers all have faulty PSUs! c) most of my flash card readers have disintegrated!

Finally, if you enjoy the game and want the bugs sorted please drop some pennies on THIS LINK

Thanks for playing
Simon




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