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High_Treason
March 26th, 2009, 02:11
Hi, im new on these forums, so i apologise if im in the wrong place or say something that people dislike - i dont mean to do either of these things.

I recently found that Bero (I think he's registered on these forums actually) ported Duke Nukem 3D to the Dreamcast, which was cool.

However, the port did have some problems such as the speed and only being able to play shareware episode. I recently discovered the source code to his port and started poking it about (i have a fair amount of experience with the build engine) and discovered that the speed is easy to fix and that with better memory management, it should be possible to use the full .grp (Like if it worked, distribute the binaries but not the .grp file) because the original atomic edition ran in an 8Mb of ram computer.

However, although i think i can do some good, my computer is incapable of compiling anything at all, no matter what it is or what environment, the machine locks as does my other one and my dev. rig has given up.

Thus i wonder if it is possible that somebody else might be willing to compile the altered source code when i have finished adjusting things in there, if not then that's no loss, i just want to know before i spend time messing with it.


Things that i've already looked at and thoretically fixed:
Timing (Game should run at correct-ish speed)
Text (Some of the missing text)

Things i want to fix (more demanding stuff):
Save Games (Never tried using saves on a DC before)
Controller (Should be possible to use joypad or map joypad to keyboard buttons)
Memory (Use less memory, i think it is trying to load the whole .GRP into ram which the original doesn't do)

Darksaviour69
March 26th, 2009, 02:14
thats the problem with bero's source codes, no one have been able to compile them, he used some weird environment... I'm sure some of the eggshead quzar or bluecrab could explain better

quzar
March 26th, 2009, 03:03
Yes, one of the problems with Bero's sources (very similar to those found in many very early DC homebrew, and in stuff by Chui) is that he used a customized library set and did not give lots of details as to the changes that he made.

So it would be more than just compiling, first the sources would have to be 'ported'/reworked to be compatible with a modern version of KOS/newlib. Only then could changes be applied.

In short, it's a lot of work, and although it would be interesting, time would probably be better spent re-porting it from scratch rather than working from an intermediary.

High_Treason
March 26th, 2009, 18:07
Ah, so it wouldnt compile anyway?
What i meant when i said i cant compile anything is i literally cant compile anything, in any environment or compiler, no matter what source code it is or who made it, my computer always just locks up, same for my other one, even had other people look at them before and tried replacing all sorts of hardware and software.
I'll try building another dev. rig out of scrap and see if i can compile something, then i might have a look at how hard it would be to re-work the code or just port from scratch.