Downsize the assets...

[Dan Forever]

For the games that use too much memory to work on a ds (Such as Full Throttle), would it be possible to open up the asset files and resize them to a size more befitting that of a handheld console screen? The original graphics are designed for a PC with a screen resolution of something like 320x240 (or is it 640x480?). Would this process free up enough memory to allow the games to be run, and make the games that already work, run smoother?

[agentq]

The games ScummVM supports all use different graphic formats and pack them into archives in different ways. There is only a loader for most of these formats, but no tools to create or modify them. To scale down the images, we'd need to create a tool for extracting the assets, and something to convert them into a usable format. After scaling them down we'd have to convert them back to their original format and rearchive them. So a lot of new tools would be needed, and this would have to be done for each engine, sometimes multiple times, because the different version of each game (DOS, Windows, Mac, etc.) often use different graphics formats.

Theres also the issue of the game scripts which position everything in the right place, theese would all have to be changed for the new screen resolution.

And what about text? Scaling the text down to 50% would most likely make it unreadable, it's bad enough with the 320x200 games. If you wanted to not scale the text, you would have all sorts of text layout and wrapping issues as the text would be much larger than the game expects.

The 320x200 games would not really benefit from this, because the DS resoltion is 256x192, not too much lower, but the 640x480 games would.

So, basically, if you were to port one or two games to the DS as a full time commercial team for a commercial release, you could cope with all these issues, but it can't be done in the context of ScummVM.

Hope this expains it for you.

To see how this could be done, see the commercial port of Broken Sword 1 that runs on the GBA. They did a pretty good job at making it look great.

[Dan Forever]

thanks for the informative answer.
However, with regards to your point on text - is it not already being resized as it is? Just at run time rather than...I'm wanting to say during the build but that applies to code..."redevelopment"?

[agentq]

The text is drawn into the framebuffer as-is, the whole screen is scaled down.

That's why the text can look so horrible in some cases.

If you tried to do that with a 640x480 screen you would end up with 3-pixel high text which would be unreadble.