For the last year or two I have been working on a homebrew project to recreate a fun little platform game called: BatteryCheck. My version of the game is actually using my own multi-platform game engine (which still has no cool sounding name) and I have working preview's in my other threads for the Wii, GameCube and 3DS already. I did also work on a PSP version that has it's own thread but it's not released as a preview yet since it's not finished. The PlayStation 2 has been on my todo list for a while and a few weeks ago I decided it was time to actually make it happen!
Back in 1998 there was a campaign to promote recycling batteries in the Netherlands and part of that was a PC game on CD-ROM you could get if you brought 15 batteries in for recycling. It was based on the same engine as Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and therefore uses the same file formats for the Tileset, Levels and Sprites. About 10 years ago the game was released as Freeware by the publisher but they removed it after a while. After some digging I found one of the companies that worked on the game and I contacted them. The game is licensed as Creative Commons but I need to ask them which specific version. I did get permission to share their download page where the game is listed but they warned about it getting removed in the future. I posted the link and instructions to download in my other thread (here)
I have written my own installer that can take the downloaded ZIP file and extract the game files from it. I have not ported that installer to the PS2 yet but the idea is you place the ZIP on a USB drive and it can install the files on a MemoryCard or the USB drive. Currently I have copied the files manually to a virtual MemoryCard to use on the PCSX2 emulator. And I did the same on my real memorycard for testing on hardware. The whole reason I got intterested in the PlayStation 2 again was the release of FreeDVDBoot but it's going to take a while before I would be supporting that as an option. In any case the DVD image would have to be made by the user since it requires the gamefiles to be on the disc and I can not redistribute those files for legal reasons.
Here are a few screenshots I had posted before on my blog:
First success of booting the game without the actual graphics.
Later graphics where loaded but the colors were wrong for some reason
And here the colors are fixed! Turns out the palette colors needed to be swizzled a bit.
And here I got it running on my real PS2 fat
While it's really awesome I finally got it running on the PS2 now my gameengine is far from efficient...or optimized for that matter. I know for sure the PS2 can handle this game and I hope to get it rendering in it's full 60FPS glory but I have no idea how long it will take to get there. The effect of not being optimized is that gameplay is REALLY slow and feels like 20-25FPS at the moment. All other consoles so far have run the games perfectly smooth without much change in the rendering code. There are quite a few reasons it could be running slow but the PS2 is a really complex machine.
Thanks for your time
Back in 1998 there was a campaign to promote recycling batteries in the Netherlands and part of that was a PC game on CD-ROM you could get if you brought 15 batteries in for recycling. It was based on the same engine as Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and therefore uses the same file formats for the Tileset, Levels and Sprites. About 10 years ago the game was released as Freeware by the publisher but they removed it after a while. After some digging I found one of the companies that worked on the game and I contacted them. The game is licensed as Creative Commons but I need to ask them which specific version. I did get permission to share their download page where the game is listed but they warned about it getting removed in the future. I posted the link and instructions to download in my other thread (here)
I found a "Let's play video" on youtube and had posted that in the other threads as well so here it is. The play the entire game showing both levels and the end boss....so it has a few spoilers in it
Just to be clear this video is NOT of my version of the game engine.
Just to be clear this video is NOT of my version of the game engine.
I have written my own installer that can take the downloaded ZIP file and extract the game files from it. I have not ported that installer to the PS2 yet but the idea is you place the ZIP on a USB drive and it can install the files on a MemoryCard or the USB drive. Currently I have copied the files manually to a virtual MemoryCard to use on the PCSX2 emulator. And I did the same on my real memorycard for testing on hardware. The whole reason I got intterested in the PlayStation 2 again was the release of FreeDVDBoot but it's going to take a while before I would be supporting that as an option. In any case the DVD image would have to be made by the user since it requires the gamefiles to be on the disc and I can not redistribute those files for legal reasons.
Here are a few screenshots I had posted before on my blog:
First success of booting the game without the actual graphics.
Later graphics where loaded but the colors were wrong for some reason
And here the colors are fixed! Turns out the palette colors needed to be swizzled a bit.
And here I got it running on my real PS2 fat
While it's really awesome I finally got it running on the PS2 now my gameengine is far from efficient...or optimized for that matter. I know for sure the PS2 can handle this game and I hope to get it rendering in it's full 60FPS glory but I have no idea how long it will take to get there. The effect of not being optimized is that gameplay is REALLY slow and feels like 20-25FPS at the moment. All other consoles so far have run the games perfectly smooth without much change in the rendering code. There are quite a few reasons it could be running slow but the PS2 is a really complex machine.
Thanks for your time
Last edited by Archerite,