OpenBOR Dreamcast

[CGRemakes2]

I'm not sure how familiar everyone here is with Beats of Rage, but it is a great side scrolling beat-em-up engine. I have been working quite a bit with adding new features to the source code and have been able to get it to work for Dreamcast. However, a known issue with the DC port is that it will only play 1 sound at a time (not including background music). I am not familiar with the limitations of the DC, but I would think it would be able to play more simultaneous sounds than that. I don't know if it's a coding bug or something that can be fixed, but I figured I'd turn to those of you who know much more about DC programming than I do.

[BlackAura]

The Dreamcast has 64 independent sound channels, so you can play 64 sound effects at once, or 62 sound effects plus one stereo stream.

I don't know how BOR deals with it's sound output. However, the drivers in KallistiOS are pretty simple. You should be able to nick whatever code you need from there.

[ron]

I agree totally with BlackAura, some people in Spain are working with a project that is based over OpenHBor, and this will give at least some interest over OpenHBOR in Dreamcast.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

I'm someone who's really not familiar with all the recent happening in the Beats Of Rage world. I followed it for a couple months after the DC port first came out, but then I lost touch. When I recently started getting back into it and trying out all the new mods, I was really stunned by how many different versions of the BOR binary there are even for the Dreamcast, let alone PC. It's quite confusing really.

If it's at all possible I would recommend that your new OpenBOR release be backwards compatible with all the existing PAK files out there. So, for instance, if some mod PAK doesn't have support for this new kind of special where you press down,down,attack, the binary should just do nothing at all if it can't find a listing for that attack type in the PAK file rather than freezing or whatever.

Another thing that would be nice is if you could to include all the existing BOR source changes into your new binary. I know there was recently a memory conserving version released and there's also a few versions that have colored life bars that I don't think were part of OpenBOR, maybe other things, too.

Also, one entirely new thing I'd like to suggest is a statement in the definition of the life-draining special that says how much life is drained by the attack. This could be really handy; for instance, set it to zero and the button is now basicall a whole new sort of plain attack (kick, for instance) or set it to 100% and it becomes a suicide button (that wouldn't be useful for most people, but when I was into BOR back in the day I was working on a mod featuring samurai characters from different games and I got to thinking how cool it would be to have a seppuku button).

The coolest thing you could add to BOR for the Dreamcast, though, would be a PAK file menu. The binary could scan the root of the CD for any PAK files, list them and let the user select one to load.

Sorry, for giving you a bunch of suggestions you didn't ask for (I don't know the solution to sound effect problem), feel free to ignore them if they'd be too hard to implement or maybe even impossible, but it sure would be nice to have a single BOR binary on the Dreamcast that could handle every mod with no worries.


...word is bondage...

[CGRemakes2]

There are currently 2 (3 including the original BOR with no changes) versions being worked on (OpenBOR and DarkBOR). I have talked with the author of DarkBOR and he has agreed to merge the featuers in that executable with OpenBOR. OpenBOR is 100% backwards compatable. I play the original BOR with it with no problems (in fact, less problems because some of the bugs in the original have been removed in OpenBOR). Changes are also commented all throughout the source. I also documented the changes to the DC source (though needs some cleaning before I distribute it). The special's power requirement is already something that is customizable in the players .txt file. As far as the .pak selector, I think there already is a program that lets you do that (some sort of multi-boot DC program). I'm not familiar with how it works, but I'm quite sure it's been done.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

There are currently 2 (3 including the original BOR with no changes) versions being worked on (OpenBOR and DarkBOR).

Oh. I guess it seemed like there were more maybe because there's so many versions of OpenBOR floating around for the DC that aren't always labeled as such.

I have talked with the author of DarkBOR and he has agreed to merge the featuers in that executable with OpenBOR. OpenBOR is 100% backwards compatable. I play the original BOR with it with no problems (in fact, less problems because some of the bugs in the original have been removed in OpenBOR).

That's cool. Maybe it's always been like that, I wasn't sure, but just thought I'd mention it. Also very cool about DarkBOR, I'd heard of that, but I don't think there were ever any ports to the DC.

Changes are also commented all throughout the source. I also documented the changes to the DC source (though needs some cleaning before I distribute it). The special's power requirement is already something that is customizable in the players .txt file.

Do you mean that that's something that was already added in OpenBOR, or was it always possible even with the original BOR? I don't know how I could have missed it. Either way, it's cool. Maybe with that in mind I'll return to my mod one day, I already had two fully playable characters polished (Kaede and Jubei) and some work begun on nice backgrounds.

As far as the .pak selector, I think there already is a program that lets you do that (some sort of multi-boot DC program). I'm not familiar with how it works, but I'm quite sure it's been done.

Well, there's a couple different multiboot programs that can be used with BOR (Dream Inducer and Dream Hakker), but they're both somewhat problematic. At the very least they require hex editing the binary so that it looks for a different PAK file (i.e. B01.PAK instead of BOR.BAK) and sometimes there's even additional problems, especially with Dream Inducer which is the more user friendly program. A menu built right into the binary would be much simpler, however if you're not too familiar with Dreamcast programming, you shouldn't be expected to be the one to do it. Hopefully someday someone with DC prgramming knowhow will come along and add that as well as save support and also fix the sound bug you mentioned.

Anyway, sorry to make so many suggestions that seem to have already been resolved.


...word is bondage...

[CGRemakes2]

No problem in making suggestions. That's how things improve is to unite ideas/efforts. I agree, I'm not the most qualified to do the GUI for DC. There already is a GUI built right into the DOS version of OpenBOR, but there were issues in porting it so it is not in the DC version.

Specifying the power taken by the special is an OpenBOR feature, so you didn't miss it in the original, it just wasn't there.

There is also OpenHBOR that I didn't include in the versions being worked on, because that has been completely changed to a horizontal/vertical shooting game. I don't even rate that in the same category anymore.