BatteryCheck ??? - Guess what I was working on....

Since I have been (trying) to port BatteryCheck to many systems already....guess what it's running on now!! :D

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Note: Textures are not done yet for the same reasons as DSi and PSP.....but it will be added in a few days hopefully. ;)


EDIT-1: Maybe it was less than a few days....but it did take my whole evening away to get the textures working! :D
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Of which most went into figuring out why the colors don't want to render correctly!!!:gun: I have tried any RGBA, ARGB, BGRA, etc...combination I could think of but it keeps showing up wrong!! :cry: Maybe I should not force the indexed colors and use 32bit RGBA just to see if it's the color values or the GPU initialization that's wrong.

EDIT-2: I have figured out what was wrong with the colors! :D Like I have said below the PS2 needs optimizations for it to work efficiently and apparently this includes the storage format of the color palette. I have been reading the GS user manual :lol:...and gsToolkit.c for so many times again and it was the manual that pointed out exactly how to store the pixels! And the gsToolkit.c had a small peice of code I could borrow that shuffles the colors around in the correct order! Looks perfect now!
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Archerite
@AmandaRose: Hahaha, I can see why you would say it looks like a 2600 game.:rofl2: The reason it looks like that is that on most consoles I have ported my game to it's much easier to draw a colored rectangle than it is to draw pixels to the screen. At least if you want to do it efficiently with the GPU of the console.

I have been wanting to write something for this mystery console ever since I got it to run homebrew! This screenshot is obviously the emulator and I have not tested on the actual hardware yet...but I do have the textures working now. sort of anyway :unsure:! I am getting the correct pixels from the textures and the sizes are correct...only the colors are messed up for some reason. :sad:

@alexander1970: You're missing a few but the Wii is the "main platform" in a way as that is the one I had released a preview for the first.

The GameCube is obviously also there as it's nearly the same as the Wii from a hardware perspective. And a month or two later I also released the 3DS version that inherited all improvements made to the Wii version. And ofcourse to make it easier to test something on my PC locally it also runs on Linux with OpenGL. :D

I was working on the PSP version a year ago but issues with the textures made me freeze that port for a while. A few months ago I wanted to try and port to the GBA using a different method....but limitations forced me to the DS and the DSi. Mostly for reasons of more memory and easier GPU with 3D capabilities. The GBA,DS and DSi have very similar 2D features though that I want to use later when the game actually runs a little better. The DSi port still crashes a lot for no good reason at times.

And because of the crashes I took another look at the PSP again and decided I had to make it work in a day! And I succeeded but just like the DSi the PSP has a limit on the size of textures at 512x512 pixels, and I was using 1024x1024px for a lot of them just because I could actually :D. But now I am slowly replacing that with smaller ones which actually should help also make the game engine more flexible and perform better on slower hardware....which the current mystery platform is in a way. ;)

I'll give a few small hint about the current mystery platform before revealing which one it is:
- Developers complained it was too complex to program for
- My view on point 2: It's true if you don't invest the time to learn the machine!
- I have mentioned this console before on my blog
- look closely at the title bar of the emulator window! :P

Wow, those hints were difficult to give without giving it away immediately! :D
 
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KleinesSinchen
Hard to develop… first thing that comes to mind is N64. But you did not mention this before and most of the time N64 games run in low res mode – which does not fit to the size of the screenshots.

PSP also has lower resolution… leaves PlayStation 2.
 
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Archerite
@KleinesSinchen : We have a winner! hahahha:D

It's indeed the PlayStation 2 I have finally put some effort in to try and make it work. From the specs I read in many documents the PS2 is very powerfull (for it's time ofcourse) but it requires a few tweaks and optimizations to take advantage of it. While the emulator says it's running at 60 FPS the game certainly is NOT!:rofl2: I have turned of a few layers and then it still runs at like 10fps in game play....and my engine does not compensate for it so it's slooooooowwwww! :shy:

You most likely remember me saying I have a bad coding style and that while it works...it's not actually written very well. The faster modern consoles are fast enough to hide most of the problems but the PS2 is not so generous. There are three main ways to show graphics and if I understood correctly from the limited PS2DEV docs I am currently using the slowest one of them.

It's just a matter of optimizing how my game engine handles the level and graphics data after it has loaded and parsed them from the files. Currently I use the same storage format in memory as it was in those files.

The N64 is on my "todo" list of retro consoles for some other day. ^_^
 
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Archerite
I have figured out what was wrong with the colors and updated my post with the details and a new screenshot. :D
 
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