3DO games and homebrew

u/Yuki September 16, 2015, 09:30:59 PM

Quote from: Streetwalrus on September 16, 2015, 09:25:24 PM
Quote from: Juju on September 16, 2015, 09:04:59 PM
OGG Vorbis is way better, anyway.
Yeah, it's a great compromise between lossless and high loss formats like mp3, since it allows higher bitrate and better compression ratios with better quality, and it's much smaller than flac.

Plus it's free and not patent-encumbered!

u/novenary September 16, 2015, 09:32:18 PM

Yes, which is the best part about it.

Also lol, we should stop derailing a derailed thread.

u/Dream of Omnimaga September 17, 2015, 01:39:31 AM

That reminds me, I am curious about which languages the 3DO support and if something like WalrusRPG would run on it? Would it need to be loaded onto a CD-ROM?

u/novenary September 17, 2015, 09:10:54 AM

It should be able to run, as long as a C++11 compiler is available (iirc not).

u/Dream of Omnimaga September 17, 2015, 03:57:12 PM

I see. That said, I guess we would need to check the 3DO forums and investigate. Maybe @gameblabla might know more, though?

u/gameblabla September 17, 2015, 04:58:39 PM

The only compiler available for 3DO does support C++ but not C++11.
I told StreetWalrus that using C++11 was not a good idea for portability but they made their decision...
For C++11, i would need to compile at least GCC 4.7 and target arm-coff.
The only other alternative to C/C++ is ARM Assembly and it's a slightly higher revision than the Nspire. (Armv6 vs Arm5vte)

There are still problems with the graphics libraries too.
For example, reusing existant graphics does not work with them, argh...
~~I think the guy who made the Space Invaders clone for 3DO using my examples found a workaround though...~~
EDIT: He did not...

If all the mentioned issues are fixed then WalrusRPG should be possible, yes.
The 3DO has 2MB of RAM and 1MB of Video RAM and a resolution of 320x240 for NTSC and 320x288 for PAL.
Hopefully, WalrusRPG will be light on resources...

Last Edit: September 17, 2015, 05:10:38 PM by gameblabla

u/Dream of Omnimaga September 17, 2015, 05:01:11 PM

I didn't know there was a difference between C++ and C++11. I think it's best to keep things portable, but I guess it's their call.

And 2 MB of RAM is impressive for the console's time.

u/Lionel Debroux September 17, 2015, 05:14:53 PM

C++11 was a major, much-needed upgrade from C++98/03, and made C++ a much better language. Likewise, the next major upgrade (C++17) shall make C++ a much better language (likely modules, possibly compile-time reflection / introspection, etc.).
C++11 support coverage in GCC was already acceptable in GCC 4.6, which I started leveraging for my main project at work in late 2011; GCC 4.7 added support for e.g. non-static member initializers and several other niceties. Of course, four years later, GCC 4.7 is hopelessly outdated and unmaintained.

u/novenary September 17, 2015, 07:37:54 PM

Quote from: gameblabla on September 17, 2015, 04:58:39 PM
I told StreetWalrus that using C++11 was not a good idea for portability but they made their decision...

We switched over to c++11 months ago, we're not going to go back on that as we already use a number of its features (which makes development much more comfortable). Our primary target is the Nspire and bare metal ARM toolchains are well supported (GCC 5.2 is available). Our other targets for now are desktop OS's supported by SFML and possibly the GameCube and Wii for which GCC 4.8 is available (I'll look into building a more recent toolchain though).

Quote from: gameblabla on September 17, 2015, 04:58:39 PM
The 3DO has 2MB of RAM and 1MB of Video RAM.

That's way too small. We don't use a lot of memory at the moment but it's expected to skyrocket once we add game content. We rolled our own "technologies" for this game which are mostly suited for the Nspire, and it involves memory-hungry things like decompressing data and storing large maps and textures in memory. If it ends up fitting then great, but I don't expect it to.

u/Dream of Omnimaga September 17, 2015, 08:35:39 PM

It probably depends how advanced your engine is. Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy III for the SNES ran on a 128 KB of RAM console, but the cartridges had extra chips inside and the SNES had video memory.