DreamCast port?

1timeuserDCemu · Post by **1timeuserDCemu** » June 12th, 2004, 2:57 am

Dont know if any of you own a dreamcast, or even care about it. I am a user from dcemu.co.uk and lately, we (the dreamcast scene) have been looking for new ideas for games, and cool ports. I ran across your game (i think of freshmeat.net) and i became very interested. If anyone is interested in doing a DC port, or if you would like to support a DC port for this game, give us a yelp at dcemu.co.uk.

Thanks!

Post by **Dave** » June 12th, 2004, 4:18 am

Hi there,

We'd certainly be interested in a Dreamcast port, although I don't think anyone on our development team has the skills, resources, or time to do it. But if someone was interested in doing it we'd support them however we could.

David

1timeuserDCemu · Post by **1timeuserDCemu** » June 12th, 2004, 4:50 am

Good to hear! I think you might find porting this to the DC alot easier than you might think :D

ziberpunk · Post by **ziberpunk** » June 12th, 2004, 10:55 am

It may be easy but I don't see it very clear. Some more info would be very appreciated. Which steps should be done for porting Battle for Wesnoth to DreamCast?

SDL is supposed to be already ported to DC, but no officially supported. Has you tested it?

Other SDL libs user for wesnoth work aswell with DC?

Which compiler is used for DC? GCC should work or any special framework is used?

Is there any free emulator of DC to test this all?

1timeuserDCemu · Post by **1timeuserDCemu** » June 12th, 2004, 3:58 pm

I dunno. I am not a coder you see, im just a fan looking for stuff. Please check out this link:

http://www.dcemu.co.uk/cgi-bin/yabb/YaB ... 1087024756

- I am sorry if i jumped the gun a little. :(

I will try to have some one with more experiance contact you.

Post by **Dave** » June 12th, 2004, 4:30 pm

1timeuserDCemu wrote:I dunno. I am not a coder you see, im just a fan looking for stuff. Please check out this link:

http://www.dcemu.co.uk/cgi-bin/yabb/YaB ... 1087024756

- I am sorry if i jumped the gun a little.

I will try to have some one with more experiance contact you.

It's fine, we appreciate the interest, and it'd be great if we could do it.

Personally I don't have a Dreamcast, although if someone was serious about making a port I'd possibly get one -- I also miss playing an old Dreamcast game -- Skies of Arcadia -- I once had.

Are there any decent Dreamcast emulators?

David

Christuserloeser · Post by **Christuserloeser** » June 12th, 2004, 5:02 pm

Hello to all of you!

Dave wrote:It's fine, we appreciate the interest, and it'd be great if we could do it.

I've posted about your project at our site:

http://www.dcemu.co.uk/cgi-bin/yabb/YaB ... 1087024756

...and over here:

http://www.dcemulation.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=51757

Maybe you should officially confirm interest in a DC port of your game over at both sites as there are some decent programmers around.

Dave wrote:Personally I don't have a Dreamcast, although if someone was serious about making a port I'd possibly get one -- I also miss playing an old Dreamcast game -- Skies of Arcadia -- I once had.

Oh, Skies of Arcadia is a really great game by the original Phantasy Star team

Dave wrote:Are there any decent Dreamcast emulators?

There has been a DC emu released currently. Please visit our website http://www.dcemu.co.uk for more info. A new version was released today.

The real thing is still better, I guess

Chris

1timeuserDCemu · Post by **1timeuserDCemu** » June 12th, 2004, 7:05 pm

Chankast (a great new emulator) has recently been released, sadly it dosnt seem to support sdl games. [u]But[/u] i believe i read somewhere that the most recent release of dcemu http://alumnos.utem.cl/dcemu/ has support for sdl and the main purpose of its development is for... well... development.

Christuserloeser · Post by **Christuserloeser** » June 13th, 2004, 8:50 pm

ziberpunk wrote:It may be easy but I don't see it very clear. Some more info would be very appreciated. Which steps should be done for porting Battle for Wesnoth to DreamCast?

SDL is supposed to be already ported to DC, but no officially supported. Has you tested it?

Other SDL libs user for wesnoth work aswell with DC?

Which compiler is used for DC? GCC should work or any special framework is used?

Is there any free emulator of DC to test this all?

I don't know about the compiler... Please visit the links I posted above to get in contact with our coders.

One of our scene's coders has shown interest, but he's not sure with the programming language that's used for parts of Battle of Wenoth:

quzar wrote:well i dont know how many c++ libs it uses, but it uses classes (as opposed to structures) and therefore would require a lot of work to port to DC.

Chris

Post by **Dave** » June 13th, 2004, 9:08 pm

Christuserloeser wrote: One of our scene's coders has shown interest, but he's not sure with the programming language that's used for parts of Battle of Wenoth:

quzar wrote:well i dont know how many c++ libs it uses, but it uses classes (as opposed to structures) and therefore would require a lot of work to port to DC.

Wesnoth uses C++, and fairly modern [1] C++ at that.

If there is no way to port games that use C++ to Dreamcast without porting them to C first, I would honestly say that it's too much effort to even consider.

David

[1] Well 1998 ISO/ANSI standard anyway

Post by **Dave** » June 13th, 2004, 9:09 pm

Dave wrote: If there is no way to port games that use C++ to Dreamcast without porting them to C first, I would honestly say that it's too much effort to even consider.

Well, unless someone has a tool/compiler that will compile C++ to C. This is what the original C++ compiler, C-Front did. Not sure if there are any such compilers still commonly available though.

David

Christuserloeser · Post by **Christuserloeser** » June 14th, 2004, 1:57 pm

Other DC devvers have shown interest in your game:

http://www.dcemulation.com/phpBB/viewto ... 871#537871

MetaFox wrote:
quzar wrote:i already read that on their website, but unless someone converts it to C from C++ then it is pretty unportable. Its not another one of those simple SDL ports.
Well, not necessarily. sh-elf-g++ will compile for the SuperH. KOS wasn't built with C++ in mind though, so you'll get incompatibilities when linking to kos.h. When you link to just SDL.h you'll be fine - you just won't get audio or joystick support, as those have to be linked to the includes from kos.h to work. You can get around this by linking to external libraries though (such as libronin, or Neil Cortlett's library from BOR for Dreamcast, or taking out the necessary functions you need from KOS), like I was doing with an unreleased build of rawDC.

Edit: Here's a quote from Troy (aka GPF):

http://www.dcemu.co.uk/cgi-bin/yabb/YaB ... 1087024756

its not a matter of C++ not working on the dreamcast its more its an incomplete set of libraries. There are no stream class support (so no cout/cin etc.) Alot of the functions such as vectors can be found in the dreamcast port of STLport.

also the SDL_net lib has not been ported to the dreamcast. I don't know much about this game is it multiplayer on the same machine or just across a network?

also depending on the size of the graphics would have to be evaluated, since the limited memory of the dreamcast.

It is possible to rewrite the missing functions with C code or to use supported C++ classes.

Most of the SDL ports I have done, and have seen done require just a Dreamcast Makefile, and other dreamcast specific changes ie cd path, controllers etc.. But there are some exceptions.

Troy

Chris

Woodwizzle · Post by **Woodwizzle** » June 14th, 2004, 3:33 pm

I know nothing of the dreamcast, but I do know it is designed for television displays and I don't think it has Hi-Def output so isn't it limited to a resolution of 640 or 720x480*? Wesnoth currently requires a minimum of 800x600. That being said, I do wish I could run wesnoth on my really really old box that only supports 640x480.

*NTSC displays scan 480 lines down but I believe the horizontal resolution varys.

Post by **Dave** » June 14th, 2004, 3:45 pm

Woodwizzle wrote:I know nothing of the dreamcast, but I do know it is designed for television displays and I don't think it has Hi-Def output so isn't it limited to a resolution of 640 or 720x480*? Wesnoth currently requires a minimum of 800x600. That being said, I do wish I could run wesnoth on my really really old box that only supports 640x480.

*NTSC displays scan 480 lines down but I believe the horizontal resolution varys.

Wesnoth can run on any resolution you want without too much trouble -- you just have to make a theme for it, so it knows where on the screen to lay things out. Naturally if the resolution becomes small enough, it starts to become rather difficult to cram a decent amount of information onto the screen.

David

Christuserloeser · Post by **Christuserloeser** » June 14th, 2004, 3:48 pm

Yes, the Dreamcast has no HDTV output, but VGA

Still not a higher res than u've mentioned.

If you're able to get a DC somewhere, give it a try - lots of nice games and unbelievable cheap atm!

Chris