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DS Flash Equipment > Wishful thinking

#52638 - Mr. Picklesworth - Thu Sep 01, 2005 4:27 pm

Is there a chance that it could be possible to get Riven working on a DS with a CF adaptor? The only reason I'm asking this is because it seems very likely that the game uses script files in a big way, and perhaps someone has figured out how they work. (Thus, writing the main program wouldn't be too hard).
I'm asking this because I have intended, for quite some time now, to play through the Myst games, but I feel a need to play them in some kind of consecutive order... Unfortunately, the resolution of the images in Riven is too low for me to stand playing. (640 x 480 on an lcd monitor that only properly displays 1280x1024. Not a nice thing.)
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#52646 - cybereality - Thu Sep 01, 2005 5:09 pm

The possiblity is 0%. Riven was a 4 CD game which would be insane to compress onto the DS. Even if you got a 2 Gig CF memory card, its doubtful you could load that much data on a single ROM. Plus you have to concider RAM. DS has 4MB of ram total. That means that unless you use some sort of special virtual memory swapping it would be extremely difficult to have full motion video running. You would need to design some sort of engine that could stream the data right off the CF card. Then assuming you get all that working, you still have to re-code or port the entire game. Maybe you might be able to port the original MYST since that used only a slide-show of pre-renders with some sort video sequences. But dont expect it to be a faithful port. Many things would have to be edited or cropped for the DS screen.

BTW, if you can't stand the resolution on you home PC, how do you expect to deal with the DS's resolution? Doesn't make too much sense to me.

// cybereality

#52647 - tepples - Thu Sep 01, 2005 5:22 pm

cybereality wrote:
you use some sort of special virtual memory swapping it would be extremely difficult to have full motion video running. You would need to design some sort of engine that could stream the data right off the CF card.

If the makers of the default GBA Movie Player firmware managed it...

Quote:
BTW, if you can't stand the resolution on you home PC, how do you expect to deal with the DS's resolution?

It's probably the LCD pixel doubling and/or inability to run in a window that Mr. Picklesworth can't stand. I wonder why people claim that 640x480 doubled to 1280x960 looks so bad.
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#52662 - crudhacker - Thu Sep 01, 2005 6:47 pm

Mr. Picklesworth wrote:
Is there a chance that it could be possible to get Riven working on a DS with a CF adaptor?.


Like cybereality said, probably not. You're best shot is to try porting Myst because it is way smaller than Riven. Exile would be a neat port (even though not possible) speaking that u could use the touch screen as a mouse.
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#52758 - M3d10n - Fri Sep 02, 2005 8:23 pm

RAM shouldn't be an excuse. There was a Saturn version of Riven, and it ran in vanilla Saturns, without RAM expansions. I am not sure if the game art was downsampled to 320x224 (usual Saturn resolution), since it still used 4 CDs and the Saturn could do high res for such slow paced stuff.

The problem would be fitting all the art assets into 128 MBytes. Downsampling everything to the DS resolution would greatly reduce the size of the assets, but probably not all that much. I assume the original game didn't use much compression for the images and audio, maybe that could help.

#52759 - tepples - Fri Sep 02, 2005 8:33 pm

M3d10n wrote:
The problem would be fitting all the art assets into 128 MBytes.

Bigger CF and SD cards are available. A few online stores have Sandisk 2 GByte (16 Gbit) CF cards for 180 USD plus S&H. Or is there a hard limit of 128 MBytes on the native DS card interface?
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#52792 - deltro - Sat Sep 03, 2005 5:33 am

If someone ported VNC, and hacked the wi-fi, you could play it.

#52816 - Alex Atkin UK - Sat Sep 03, 2005 3:59 pm

Im baffled by people who seem to think VNC can handle video - it cant.
I have tried extensively to stream video using VNC in the middle but it just doesnt work fast enough. If it did I could even play GTA over VNC as it DOES run but the screen updates are VERY slow. Id love to know why when its possible to encode video in realtime and yet VNC just cant do it, you cant even force it to do it - its just too slow at rendering the screen and its a shame on a 100Mbit network.

Anyway more on topic, I doubt the DS is powerful enough to handle VNC very well especially considering the above points. Plus we know nobody can get WiFi working anyway.
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#52835 - cybereality - Sat Sep 03, 2005 7:50 pm

The reason that VNC cannot handle video is due to the fact that is sends uncompressed graphics to the terminal. If someone wanted to code a VNC-DS the best method would be to have the serverside application (running on home PC) to downsize the screen capture and compress that, to allow for smoother motion. If you wanted to see a small section at full resolution the VNC server would only send that area to the client, not the full screen. Video compression could be adjusted by the user to allow for faster updates or high quality picture. But even at that, don't expect to play any kind of game besides solitaire. Also, I dont think VNC supports directx full screen games anyway.

#52836 - tepples - Sat Sep 03, 2005 8:06 pm

cybereality wrote:
Video compression could be adjusted by the user to allow for faster updates or high quality picture. But even at that, don't expect to play any kind of game besides solitaire.

Or minesweeper, right?
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#52844 - deltro - Sat Sep 03, 2005 9:16 pm

They were comparing riven to myst, I don't remember myst requiring much of a framerate.