Nicky Boum PS2

February 13th, 2011, 02:58 Posted By: wraggster

News/release from pedroduarte0

Here you can find my PS2 port of Nicky Boum, a popular game among Amigans, from the NickyBoumPSP port by deniska, from of the original Nicky Boum engine rewrite by Gregory Montoir.
The controls are:
Left analog stick for movement, ‘X’ button for fire (hold it for ‘boum’), ‘O’ for jump, L1 for skip level, L2 for quit current live, R1 for adding all bonuses, ‘Select’ for pausing and ‘Start’ for quiting game. Any USB keyboard compatible with the PS2 is also supported.
The original game has some aparent bugs and it was not extensively tested, but it’s not my intention to fix any of the original engine bugs or missing features. Please expect not much future releases from me.
Download here:
NickyBoumPS2 v.0.2.0a binaries and sources

In long verbose words:
For the brave ones who decided to read this part, I’ll start explaining why Nicky Boum and how this port it came to reality, mentioning its ups and downs.
So it all happened when I tried Nicky Boum PSP from deniska from http://deniska.dcemu.co.uk/nicky-boum-psp-111236.html. This is a port of the popular Amiga game called Nicky Boum which I never played to say the truth, although my long past as an Amiga user and gamer, but I know it to be very dear among Amigans.
When I first looked into its sources, the first thing that striked me was the relatively small number of small source files, the fact that’s a pure SDL game port and with almost 0% PSP specific code (as far I remember, it only sets the PSP CPU frequency). So, I saw in this port an excellent oportunity to get a PS2 port of the game for the hungry PS2 homebrew scene and also a fast way to test the current health of the ps2sdk SDL libs, compatible with my limited free time.
I did the port itself in less than one hour. After this time time period, it was already compiling and a .ELF was born into this world. After fixing some issues with file IO specific to the PS2 and the host: device for debugging, I was not much surprised by the result: A blank screen and no sound what so ever.
So what was the problems, then?
First the blank display: The function SDL_UpdateRect is used to redraw the display but accordingly to the SDL documentation, “Makes sure the given area is updated on the given screen. In other words, it makes sure any changes to the given area of the screen are made visible. The rectangle must be confined within the screen boundaries because there’s no clipping“.
On the other hand, i’ve also read the description of the SDL_Flip() not used at the sources: “On hardware that supports double-buffering, this function sets up a flip and returns. The hardware will wait for vertical retrace, and then swap video buffers before the next video surface blit or lock will return. On hardware that doesn’t support double-buffering or if SDL_SWSURFACE was set, this is equivalent to calling SDL_UpdateRect(screen, 0, 0, 0, 0). A software screen surface is also updated automatically when parts of a SDL window are redrawn, caused by overlapping windows or by restoring from an iconified state. As a result there is no proper double buffer behavior in windowed mode for a software screen, in contrast to a full screen software mode.“
So, it happens the ps2sdk SDL lib compiles using SDL_USE_HW_SURFACE=1 defined at the Makefile, so apparently SDL_UpdateRect(screen, 0, 0, 0, 0) makes no effect. I replaced it by a SDL_Flip call and wonder of the wonders, I’ve got a gameplay image. Apparently, SDL_UpdateRect is enough at the pspsdk.
And I’ve got literally a display image, not an animation, since the gameplay is completely freezed… What was wrong then? So, the program flow is stalled after a SDL_Delay call, which should take a specified limited amount of miniseconds, not an unlimited amount. Unlike the pspsdk SDL port, the PS2 SDL port requires explicit initialization of the timer used by SDL_Delay, how could I know this? Adding a SDL_INIT_TIMER tag to the SDL_Init unlocked the gameplay!
The sound is working but shitty. It seems to be an effect of broken task switching but yet there is sound, unlike my previous experiences with ps2doom. High frequency sounds like speech and high pitch sounds seems more affected than lower frequency samples, such as the explosions. What most suffered with this was the music play, and this would be intolerable, specially for those who have good memories of playing this game in the past on other platforms. I managed to avoid having to debug SDL sound routines (more than not fun, it would be very time consuming with the current primitive debugging tools for the ps2sdk) by using another approach: sdlmixer mod play works fine, so I commented the original music play routines and replaced by sdlmixer calls. I gave the player the option to select only sfx or music during gameplay and put sdlmixer pumping the original songs I’ve got from modarchive.org (the songs at the data folder doesn’t seems .mod files compatible with sdlmixer).
To finish it I just needed to adapt the controller sources to cope with the PS2 specifics (a USB keyboard is also supported, thanks to ps2sdk SDL, by the way), tweak the sdlmixer lib to output slight more volume to the mod play, use romfs to embed all the data files into an .ELF and release to the public.
By the way, I decided to included some game files as in the Nicky PSP archive from the link above. If there is some request to remove them, I’m glad to comply.
The conclusion is that the PS2 SDL ports are not 100% healthy and even the simple standard example may show its problems. I’m glad for the folks that ported SDL to the PS2, don’t take me wrong. Unfortunably, it seems interest on the PS2 platform as homebrew is very low measuring from the number of the active coders and I don’t have the opportunity nowadays to fix all that is needed to fix.
Enjoy it.
(Project’s home : http://code.google.com/p/cosmitops2ports/)

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