EA to release WC, U7, etc for PSP..

[wintermute_turing_ai]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6155767.html

Before anyone cheers (like I did, prematurely), it's the SNES version of Ultima VII :\

Still though, there are some decent games in that lineup.

Now if only we had a PSP port of Exult..........

[octopusfluff]

I've debated, on more than one occasion, whether it'd be worthwhile to look into porting Exult to the NDS... Challenges include resolution (256x192 is not quite up to what Exult makes use of), memory (4 megabytes of core ram), input (No keyboard).

There's ways of working around these, though..
For graphics, ScummVM's approach was to have a zoomed out view and a zoomed in view. Two screens work well for this.
For memory, there are some storage solutions that provide 32 megabytes of ram through the cartridge bus, which is handy.. if you never ever need 8-bit writes (Does Exult use a lot of byte-sized variables? I haven't looked at the source since sometime around the 'map viewer' era, so if everything Exult does can be multiples of 16bits and word aligned, this is a non-issue), and don't mind the extra cycles to operate on that address space.
Input is less of an issue than the others, since touch-screen keyboards are pretty much old hat for NDS homebrew, and there's plenty of working examples on how to do it. I mean, how often do you need to /type/ anything? Character creation and save games come to mind.. Anything else?

.... not that I have the personal motivation to -do- this. But it looks to be within the realm of feasibility.

[MV]

All the good ones are snes ports. Ha ha. Even more reason to hate EA.

Any see the irony of this? Releasing nintendo ports of games on nintendos rival portable system?

[Garrett]

It's things like this that constantly remind me why I hate EA. Why couldn't they have swapped it for U6? At least U6's SNES version was fairly faithful.

I don't think the irony's all that strong though; we've already seen Sega Genesis games ported (badly!) to the GBA, not to mention NES Final Fantasy games on the SNES-descended PlayStation.

As for a DS conversion there's no use for the keyboard (other than shortcuts) after character creation. A simple toolbar could suffice for the missing shortcuts, and saves could be named in a generic manner.

The biggest problem would probably be the awkward screen dimensions. One solution would be to have you hold the DS on its side (like for Brain Age) thus enabling a relatively normal screen perspective. Gumps and movement would have to be restricted to the touchscreen, though, which makes the second screen pretty much useless except as a rear-view mirror of sorts.

[drcode]

Exult's a memory hog, and I think a lot of it is the program itself. There might be ways to pare it down by including less audio and scaling code.

But it looks like you have to be an official developer to create programs for the PSP.

[wintermute_turing_ai]

DrCode is right, sort of. You do have to have an official development kit to release official PSP apps.

Of course, that hasn't stopped anyone since people have built their own (legal) development kits and toolchains by slapping together toolchains buildable on linux/cygwin/osx/etc. The PSP homebrew sdk is pretty decent - I've been able to compile a lot of SDL-based games with minimal tweakage.

The problem I envision, at least for the PSP, is that porting exult is a fairly tremendous task in that there is just so much... code!

[drcode]

Yes it would be lots of work, and it's hard to justify. Of course, if EA would pay someone to do it...