Quake2DS Prerelease 1

[Maikel Steneker]

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Simon J. Hall has ported Quake 2 to the DS!

You'll need 16 MB RAM for it to run.

More info:

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.

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

 

[PBC]

Ummm woot? I hope this truely does work. Does the 3-1 fit the bill for RAM/Overclocking usage??

 

[pasc]

According to simon the 3 in 1 fits just fine and is the best for this job ! Luckily I bought on

.

Now to try this baby thx simon thats GREAT !

 

[PBC]

Bah EZV with 3-1 slot 2. I keep getting White top screen and red bottom screen with "Guru meditation error data abort" then abunch of code =P
As far as I know i followed everything correctly. Demo Pak in folder, which is in root. Tried auto detect, and selecting EZ pak. Tried all ram speeds...DLDI patched (i haven't upgraded the version yet) anyone esle?

 

[DjoeN]

Ppl with an official ram pack have to look out for an other option

The official ram pack only has 8mb of ram.

 

[Mangofett]

FUCK YEAH

Gonna try this out now

 

[Mangofett]

This is truly awesome... Its kind of sluggish, but so was Quake 1 at first!

I made a video... the game is very dark, so its kind of hard to see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSfpp0hc13M

 

[pasc]

In terms of homebrew it IS awesome but seeing how id soft ported quake 2 to psx and n64 it is not a impossible thing to do is it ?

 

[CockroachMan]

In terms of homebrew it IS awesome but seeing how id soft ported quake 2 to psx and n64 it is not a impossible thing to do is it ?

Yeah.. but iD has a team of high skilled people being paid to do that.. and they have access to everything in the game.. I think a lot of optimizations in the code and in the textures of the game are needed for this to run on the DS.. if iD wanted to make an official Quake2 port for the DS, they could easily do it.

 

[Malkav]

Bah EZV with 3-1 slot 2. I keep getting White top screen and red bottom screen with "Guru meditation error data abort" then abunch of code =P
As far as I know i followed everything correctly. Demo Pak in folder, which is in root. Tried auto detect, and selecting EZ pak. Tried all ram speeds...DLDI patched (i haven't upgraded the version yet) anyone esle?

I have a NDS Polar White + R4 DS (slot 1) + Ez Flash 3-in-1 (slot 2) and it worked fine (used retail of Quake 2), really it was an amazing job cause I´ve never imagined that Quake 2 could be ported to Nintendo DS due to the DS hardware.

Well try this ... in "select your RAM card" mark "Auto-detect", then in "select RAM speed" mark "Slow".

I know that you have an Ez 3-in-1 slot 2 but when the Quake DS was released the "EZ-Flash" option have not worked for me only the "auto-detect" worked (my slot 2 is an Ez 3-in-1) ... so I used the same "motto" for Quake 2 DS.

 

[Malkav]

Bah EZV with 3-1 slot 2. I keep getting White top screen and red bottom screen with "Guru meditation error data abort" then abunch of code =P
As far as I know i followed everything correctly. Demo Pak in folder, which is in root. Tried auto detect, and selecting EZ pak. Tried all ram speeds...DLDI patched (i haven't upgraded the version yet) anyone esle?

more info that I´ve forgot

in the last post ...

my \baseq2\ directory had the files & subdirectories below:

\players\ -> from retail version Quake 2 CD
\video\ -> from retail version Quake 2 CD, but since this build don't support cinematics I don't think you need this subdirectory
config.cfg -> this one I´ve got from "http://quake.drunkencoders.com/q2/downloads/config.cfg", aka, from the guy who made Quake 2 DS port
gamex86.dll -> from retail version Quake 2 CD
maps.lst -> from retail version Quake 2 CD
pak0.pak -> from retail version Quake 2 CD
pak1.pak -> from retail version Quake 2 CD

I´m using R4 DS v 1.12.

Hope this helped you, because the port is really amazing !!!

 

[PBC]

Seems I had to update my EZV version from 1.68 to 1.70 then it worked fine first try! JOY!

 

[Deleted User]

Why did my post get deleted? I'll write it again.

Seems to work well with a Supercard SD as the memory base but I got to a certain place and it said it could load a sound file. Might be a random crash, I'll try again and see.

 

[test84]

does mission packs work with this?

 

[stormwolf18]

Dupe

http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=74930

 

[Urza]

Dupe

http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=74930

Actually, this was posted before I got it on the frontpage.