Any news on official Nintendo DS Port?

chrisis · Post by **chrisis** » Thu Jan 26, 2006 4:51 am

Hello!

Just a quick question: There was a posting some time ago about negotioations going on with the scummVM-coder for the nds (http://scummvm.drunkencoders.com) about making his port official. Are there any news on this if/when this will happen? The reason I ask is, that as far as I've read on his site, at the moment it only supports the Lucasarts games - that's really great, of course, I love all of those! However, I would be really glad if it would also be able to run the STS games and Gobliiins on it - it seems, at the moment it doesn't.

Or is the NDS-port just too different from everything else, so this would be too hard to be maintained on a shared codebase with the rest of scummVM?

I'll get a NDS soon (and the tools for running homebrew software on it) and I'm really excited to run my old games on this neat device - so an official port would be really great - I already love scummVM on my PC!

bye,
christian

Ender · Post by **Ender** » Thu Jan 26, 2006 5:18 am

Theres no real technical problem in integrating the port.

Its just that agentq (author of the port you mention) doesn't seem particularly interested in making it an official port... Of course, I can't speak for him, but thats the gist I got.

I do have a partly-functional port based off the official CVS, but I haven't had the time to clean it up for committing. Unfortunately, the unofficial port is quite messy and has several hacks that would never make it into the official tree, so its not quite a simple matter of making a diff and committing it :)

When an official port is committed, it certainly won't be as featured as this port... The team is officially against including Zip support for gamedata, and the zoom features are implemented with a pretty big hack that would probably have to wait for the completion of the Small Devices Backend (see the wiki).

chrisis · Post by **chrisis** » Thu Jan 26, 2006 5:30 am

Hello Ender, thanks for the quick reply!
Yes, I did read the wiki, NDS isn't mentioned there though (on the list for the small devices) so I just thought I would kindly ask

.

It's great to see that you haven't given up on this and, I promise, I will not be impatient

and, maybe, one day I will be able to play all of these mid-90s adventures on the DS. In the meantime I will just stuck to my home computer.

I'm no programmer, unfortunately, so I won't be much help, but, hey, you all do damn great work!

bye

Post by **sev** » Fri Jan 27, 2006 12:26 am

Ender wrote:Its just that agentq (author of the port you mention) doesn't seem particularly interested in making it an official port... Of course, I can't speak for him, but thats the gist I got.

I have no slightest idea why do you state that. I was conducting negotiations with Neil and from the very beginnign we geared to official, clean and correct (TM) merge of the port. Then you stepped in, and the process delayed.

Neverthless, Neil informed me that he already merged his port and did it almost (see below) right.

Ender wrote:and the zoom features are implemented with a pretty big hack that would probably have to wait for the completion of the Small Devices Backend (see the wiki).

This is a good start for it. Now Neil does this via hooks. Still, since it is OSystem change, I suggested him to discuss it in devel first. So I hope we will have chance to carefully review this. There are 2 hooks now, one is to let backend know running target and another is coordinates for speaking actor for auto-zooming.

Ender · Post by **Ender** » Fri Jan 27, 2006 1:28 am

Thats good news.

Although I don't know how asking for a few progress request updates could delay anything :)

Anyway, the replies to these, which I remember discussing with you on IRC, was the basis for my comment earlier. But as I said, I couldn't speak for him, it was just my impression of priorities.
I'm glad to hear he has found time to merge with CVS.