Monday, December 31, 2007

Another Elite AGB/DS Update

A hectic few weeks in RL (I'm now a dad) have meant that I have not been able to dedicate much time to coding. However, I've ironed out the last few DS specific bugs in my port of Elite AGB and it is now playable. The only major issue left to resolve is the sound. The XM player that I wrote for the GBA version is incompatible with the DS by design, due to the hardware differences. I have integrated libntxm but it has a problem that causes notes to be cut short. The GBA sound effects use the GB sound hardware, which can be emulated on the DS using its PSG sound system. I got this working without too much hassle, but I get the feeling that it doesn't play nicely with libntxm either. The sound effects work when libntxm is not activated in the build, but adding it in causes the sounds to break.

I think the best option at this point is to remove XM playback - remove the crappy music ;-) - until I port my own XM player to the DS. This way I can make a release soon-ish before I get really sick of the whole thing.

9 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:06 pm

    I'll check this out when I get home from work. Looking forward to it. I hope you have posted the news on the DS sites out there?

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  2. Anonymous4:57 pm

    I've asked an admin(wraggster) at http://www.dcemu.co.uk to post a news item about Elite DS.

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  3. Congratulations on becoming a father. Looking forward to Elite AGB DS!

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  4. Thx! :-) I've got Elite pretty stable (but w/o music sadly) and want to release it this week if I don't spot any more show stopping bugs. It is "only" a GBA port - no DS features added yet apart from the 256x192 resolution change.

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  5. Just tried out the nds version; its looking sweet at the higher res! Hope you get some time and motivation to take full advantage of the DS features one day ;) Thanks so much for your work on this!

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  6. Anonymous6:47 pm

    A small delay in my checking it out. I was initially confused because download link is called elite_agb_-0.5.3.zip. I can not get over how smooth it is on the DS! My usual comment: user set button binds. I can not imagine you will find _any_ time to work on this for awhile, because you're now a papa! No kids myself, only a dog.

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  7. I do seem to have very little time! I have to make the most of what few spare moments I get. Lately I have been writing patches for Powder and getting back into updating Bunjalloo - I have more time to browse with the DS than with a real PC - but my productivity is not very high recently.

    Google-code doesn't allow renaming of files but I've updated the download description, so it should be a bit clearer for other folks. That's probably the fault of my package-and-upload script, which creates files that are named a bit to user unfriendly.

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  8. Anonymous11:28 am

    Hello,
    thanks for spending time on this wonderful project. Best regards.
    Mathias

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  9. Anonymous4:59 pm

    Are you going to make me beg like a dog for an update that allows fully configurable controls?

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