#8155 - toonwolf - Thu Jul 03, 2003 10:12 am
First of all I'm not a programmer. So please go easy on me...
I'm just wondering if someone can explain how to port a pc game to GBA. Do you have to remake the whole thing or can you "convert" it. Take for example Wolfenstein 3D or Doom II - how was that done?
#8159 - jenswa - Thu Jul 03, 2003 1:26 pm
Actually i don't know this either.
But i think nintendo must have some sort of porting system
for their snes2gba port, but i don't know it.
And for doom/wolvenstein, i think they build the engine
for the gba and then convert all scripts in their engine.
but i don't know for sure, so someone else might have
better thoughts, or know it.
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#8160 - jcpredator - Thu Jul 03, 2003 1:40 pm
Unless I'm mistaken the GBA doesnt have DirectDraw or Direct3D. Just that fact alone and having to convert a PC game makes it not simple in my opinion. I have never tried to do this but to me it sounds like you would have to convert all or at least most of your PC code to GBA code.
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#8164 - niltsair - Thu Jul 03, 2003 2:48 pm
When well planned, a game has the high level stuff (the dynamic game) and low level stuff (the access to the support's hardware). So in theory, the high level only use the low level API meaning that oen would only have to re-write this low level codes and the entire game would work. In theory. It doubt very much this is how in happens though, there's always tweaking, and in some case it's just impossible (lack of memory, speed,...) and use of particular sotware/hardware capability non-available in the new console (3D hardware, etc...)
I'm rather new to this thing, so someone with more experience could confirm, add to what i said.
#8224 - Arek the Absolute - Fri Jul 04, 2003 8:50 pm
Well... As a bit of a reminder, I doubt that Doom was honestly a PC to GBA port in this case. I'm not familiar with the differences in versions, but it just makes more sense to me that the GBA version of Doom would be a port of the existing SNES version.
But on the topic of the question... I see no reason that PC to GBA ports would be very simple at all. As has been stated, the GBA has no incarnation of either DirectX or OpenGL, or even the Win32 API or any other APIs that are commonly involved in PC development. In porting any game, therefore, there are a lot of complications. The main graphical engine, and every other part of the game that directly involves the hardware, as it seems to me, needs to be completely rebuilt. The GBA by its own nature has various restrictions and capabilities that do not exist on the PC, such as sprite sizes and attributes. Once this is rewritten to work on the GBA, other stuff can be ported into place much more easily, however. Most maps, for example, as well as scripts, or anything else the game may involve, are more than likely to be more or less ready to use as is.
I'm probably just repeating what's already been said, but I can always hope I've added a bit of detail. :) The important thing is that communicating with the Gameboy Advance is quite different to communicating with the hardware of a computer, and these differences make it a pretty ugly task. Processor power isn't the only thing that keeps most PC games newer than.... cripes, ten years or so... off the GBA.
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#8236 - tepples - Sat Jul 05, 2003 1:58 am
| Arek the Absolute wrote: |
| Well... As a bit of a reminder, I doubt that Doom was honestly a PC to GBA port in this case. I'm not familiar with the differences in versions, but it just makes more sense to me that the GBA version of Doom would be a port of the existing SNES version. |
The GBA version of Doom was actually a port of the version for the Atari Jaguar.
| Quote: |
| The GBA by its own nature has various restrictions and capabilities that do not exist on the PC, such as sprite sizes and attributes. Once this is rewritten to work on the GBA, other stuff can be ported into place much more easily, however. |
For example, after I had ported the graphics engine (which had been designed for portability), it took me about three hours to drop the gameplay code from Vitamins for PC (a Dr. Mario clone, part of freepuzzlearena) into Vitamins for GBA.
| Quote: |
| Processor power isn't the only thing that keeps most PC games newer than.... cripes, ten years or so... off the GBA. |
Some single-player 2D games have been made for the PC in the last ten years. What keeps more recent single-player 2D games off the GBA is copyright, when a publisher refuses to authorize a GBA port.
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