Exult Forum

Given that Exult has been successfully ported to a multitude of platforms, I thought I'd add another to the list that should be considered: the Sony PSP. There are a variety of homebrew games and apps already available for it, and many of those prove that the PSP is a viable platform for all sorts of game genres. ScummVM is a great example of a port-done-right.

Considering that there is a homebrew SDK out there for the PSP (as well as an excellent homebrew userbase) - would anyone be interested in a port of Exult to this platform? Are there any conceptual reasons why Exult cannot be ported to it?

[Edit - Colourless]

Chemical has announced that A PSP Port has been made and can be found here:

http://www.thefoodsucks.com/archives/75/

[/Edit]

How much RAM is available in a PSP? Is there an emulator one can develop for? Also, who has one?

Conceptual problem #1: Mouse control. Sure it can use the inbuilt controls, but using a control pad in place of a mouse is just frustratingly slow. EG: I want the cursor at a certain point now instead of pusing and holding a direction key while waiting for the cursor to scroll on over.

I believe that the PSP has 32 mb of ram, although we should keep in mind that it is able to run "The Curse of Monkey Island" with scummvm, which must demand far more than that on a Windows-based machine.

As a response to MV - the analog directional control on the psp (left side) makes an excellent pseudo-mouse. ScummVM is a good example of decent mouse control with the analog stick.

Ok, fair enough. Maybe I just need to see it for myself then. But if you say it's ok, then I'll be all for a port over. ATM, the only reason I want a PSP for is GTA: Liberty city stories. It's time to expand that one reason.

Only trouble is Sony does not support homebrew for the PSP sure you can hack into the system to run homebrew but in doing so you need an older hackable firmware as sony releases more and more firmware updates and more and more games require the latest firmware less and less people will have access to a PSP capable of playing Exult.

that is until they develop a mod chip for the psp...

Doesn't the PSP take one of the standard flash-memory cards? Pretty dumb of Sony not to allow 3rd-party software.

sony will only allow authenticated code to run from memory stick, hackers have found out ways to get around this to allow homebrew (3rd party software), sony has combated and released upgraded firmware to plug these holes and now with games actually requiring you to upgrade your firmware like the new Grand Theft Auto. Its only a matter of time before the homebrew community loses its appeal since nobody will actually be able to play any of the new games for it.

that's one reason i certainly won't be buying a psp.

-ultimaIX

While both of those posts are 'true' in some sense, they're misleading at best. Yes, sony does issue firmware upgrades that prevent unsigned code from being run on the system. However, there are plenty of apps out there that allow you to either: (a) switch between firmware revisions at the click of a button (so you can run either homebrew or new psp games) or (b) run new psp games on old firmware, although I don't know how they do it.

That's certainly no reason to not buy a psp. There are many other better reasons not to buy one:
- it uses proprietary sony memory sticks
- the game library is pretty limited
- homebrew hasn't made a ps1 emulator for it yet
- memory sticks are limited to 2gb so far, and they're not cheap.
- it uses proprietary 'UMD' format media. I don't think anyone has come up with a way of burning it yet.

Given all that, it's the best handheld console out there IMO. It has a 3D GPU, the homebrew community is *excellent*, the dual processors are capable of running @ 333 mhz, it has native USB support, the battery life is incredible, the screen quality is far better than any other handheld media player out there, etc etc.

Now, back to the task at hand - Exult for PSP. Now that we've established that there is at least a little interest in it - where should I start? Can anyone that's ported Exult to a different architecture make some suggestions? What libraries are required? Is there a readme or techdoc I should be reading first? I'm not the world's greatest coder, but I have done a few simple ports. I'm probably not the best person for the job, but I'd like to give it a shot and try making a little headway with it. It might make a good sf.net site of its own, so that others can assist with the port if interested.

further up someone mentioned a scummvm port, I' d start with that and see how that was done.

your number one task is to be able to cross-compile for the PSP. Then, compile zlib, libsdl and exult (in order). That should do it!

Artaxerxes

I'm not much into PSP programming and not interested in that, but I bet that there's a zlib/gcc compiled already for that architecture, and at least some unofficial hardware specification guide: it's alwasy better to understand how the porting should work low-level first, even if an SDK is already available for it.

(a) switch between firmware revisions at the click of a button (so you can run either homebrew or new psp games)

- sorry but this is not true! there is a program that is a downgrader which downgrades from 2.0 to 1.5 but its a bit more complicated that simply pressing a button, and you forgot to mention there is a risk that doing this will "brick" your PSP unit (making it nothing more than a paperweight)

(b) run new psp games on old firmware, although I don't know how they do it.

- true to some degree, as I said the newer games Like GTA coming out DO REQUIRE you to update your firmware....there is no known homebrew fix for this or is likely to be one.

All the new games, (like the recently released Grand Theft Auto) will have inbuilt firmware checking, this firmware checking is hard coded into the games, so I'm pretty sure this is going to be one hell of a mission for homebrew developers to come up with a way around this...if not impossible...there is currently no way of playing this game on a lower than 2.0 firmware, that is a FACT. But you can bet your bottom dollar that all games from now on will contain this firmware checking or a more advanced version of it and soon there will be games that will require firmware 2.x...so bye bye homebrew

Previously you could swap UMD's to trick your psp past the firmware checks for the games or download a piece of homebrew which pretends your firmware is higher than it is.....you could even play backup iso images from memory stick which apparently runs 8x faster than from the UMD,

Only firmware 1.0 1.5 (and 2.0 without kernal mode, so not as much homebrew developed for 2.0) latest firmwares such as 2.1 and 2.5 CANNOT PLAY ANY HOMEBREW!!! AND CANNOT BE DOWNGRADED!!!

firmware 2.0 also has the ability to be downgraded to 1.5 so more homebrew options. this was achieved through an exploit in the inbuilt tiff viewer alowing for running of code inbuilt into the tiff images. this was swiftly fixed by sony with the 2.01 firmware...

So what I predict will happen to this system is people with 1.5 firmware will get tempted with games like GTA or Final Fantasy XVIII and update...

Sony has filled the holes in its firmware I doubt there will be any more exploits for the latest firmware at least not to the extent that 1.5 has been cracked.

- homebrew hasn't made a ps1 emulator for it yet

The homebrew scene IS currently developing a PS1 emulator! at the moment it is early in development and only runs at 5 fps.

please note that developing a ps1 emulator to play at full speed or at least playable on a PSP will be an incredible task considering the homebrew scene hasn't even polished off a full speed Super Nintendo emulator. mine plays at about 80-90% speed.

- memory sticks are limited to 2gb so far, and they're not cheap.

true but you can buy a 4gb hard-drive for it...

and in future they will develop 4gb memory sticks..

The PSP can handle up to 4gb in capacity for memory sticks so prehaps the problem will be in 5-10 years time when they have 8+ gb. getting them to run on it.

- it uses proprietary 'UMD' format media. I don't think anyone has come up with a way of burning it yet.

why would anyone NOT buy a psp because you cant burn to the same format as what it plays games on?

nobody stopped buying SNES because they couldnt make there own cartridges?

please get back on topic now. How to port Exult to PSP.

Dominus, Artaxerxes, WalterM .. thank you for the informative suggestions. I've already downloaded a fair bit of the available PSP dev kits, so hopefully I can take a crack at it soon. There is an excellent coding community (ps2dev.org) that has a wealth of information on the PSP's hardware routines that I'll have to read through - their wiki seems to be the best place for the moment.

I'll post something in this thread when I've got a better understanding of the task.

I have one of those little PSPs but I'm not sure if it's a good idea to port Exult ... Okay I've used ScummVM on the PSP and it's remarkable work.

But still, the problem is that the audience is very limited (in numbers) and bound to decrease overtime as people are more or less forced to update their PSP firmware to be able to play newer games that by now do a lot more than a simple version number check.

Sony is very aggressively pushing agaist every software project trying to run code without an authorized signature.

So think it over before you port. It might just end up not being played at all because at some point only hardcore homebrew users will be left - those who own 2 PSPs, one for homebrew and one for commercial games. Or those who just don't care about commercial games at all (very few).

Apart from that it would be cool to be able to play Exult on the PSP. About the controls - you'll have to think up something more intelligent than just using the analog nub for mouse pointer movement.

* The directional pad should directly control the Party walking.

* Analogstick should emulate mouse.

* Holding L while moving the analog nub could put the cursor into some kind of jump/sticky mode that lets you more quickly point it on any item/thing/person. This will greatly help, even though some may say it's cheating when you're supposed to look for hidden items.

* Holding R should be used just to give every other button a secondary function like time, position, whatever.

* Face buttons would use/attack, switch battle mode on/off, whatever.

* Start could open a Menu.

Select should open a screen for managing characters and items. The inventory should now be handled as a whole screen, and items should be locked to a grid and not be stacked in chaos). It should allow exchanging items between characters and splitting up money, etc.

Maybe Sony (or EA) should do an 'official' port. I wonder if U7 would look okay compared to modern games on the PSP.

Yep I agree, a MUCH better platform to port to (for handheld ultima VII) would be GP2x
Which is an open linux based handheld device with enough grunt to run exult, and a community of programers. Homebrew is not only encouraged on this device but is the ONLY software for it as no commercial developers are developing for it. So a huge community of programmers...not saying that the PSP doesn't have a huge community of developers, it does but considering sony's stance on homebrew is not going to be avaliable to the majority of PSP owners in the future.

As cool as an official port would be, its not going to happen. The PSP is capable of modern "PS2 quality" graphics and its just not going to be financially worth it, considering the few hardcore ultima fans which would essentially be the only target audience. Also as pointed out by Jammet a considerable amount of time is involved to rework the controls to actually make the damn thing playable.

Why is Sony against homebrew development on the PSP? Couldn't they easily prohibit people using their tools from releasing commercial software without a license?

> Why is Sony against homebrew development on the PSP?

Simply because it knows that most of people would not use this ability to run things like Exult and ScummVM but to play pirated versions of commercial games....
So the easiest solution for them is to disallow running any user software...

Mirek

The only "right" way to do this on the PSP is to buy an official dev-kit and have the software properly signed. And that is way too expensive for anyone of us to afford it. And why spend so much money on that anyway?

The GPX2 is more suited to such a port, but again - has a very limited userbase (in numbers). I'm guessing that there are less GPX2 out there in the world than PSPs that can run homebrew.

Boils down to the same problem.

"The only "right" way to do this on the PSP is to buy an official dev-kit and have the software properly signed. And that is way too expensive for
anyone of us to afford it. And why spend so much money on that anyway?"

It's important to note for those who might get the wrong idea, the official devkit itself won't allow you to sign anything with it, only Sony can. You must submit your product to them at the end of the development cycle and they take care of encryption/signing.

and this would just not be possible with Exult. Exult is only the engine which does nothing without the data files and those are the property of EA.

hmm I have an idea...

exult has been ported to the amiga AND the psp already has an amiga 500 emulator!

does exult run on an amiga 500?

I cant really answer that but Commodore pulled the same kind of crap, that Sony is with the PSP, with the Amiga. That'ed be quite an irony if someone got exult to work on PSP that way. lol

You can emulate Dosbox on PSP, it does run Ultima 7, although unplayably slow.

http://psp-news.dcemu.co.uk/pspdosbox.shtml

I wonder why they didn't use actual Dosbox source but the ancient 0.60 one.

Wow well thats a start! Pity its not playable.

In the weekend I tried to get exult working on the Basilisk II port which is a mac OS 7.5.5 emulator, with the mac port of exult. didn't have much luck but was more with the fact I couldn't work out how to work Basilisk properly

I got exult on there as a disk image and Basilisk recognized it but couldn't work out what the exacutable file is to run or Basilisk couldn't recognize it.

Also I wasn't sure if the mac port would even work on mac os 7.5.3, anyone know?

have also got an amiga emulator on my PSP but haven't been able to find the exult port for the amiga can someone tell me a link as to where i can find the port, so I can test this idea? all the links i've found on the net are broken

Pretty funny running an emulator inside an emulator.

0.60?! Bah, that couldn't run hardly anything, and what did work was slow! Or maybe because 0.60's so feature-light it was more feasible considering the PSP's rather limited specs? Hm...

Either way I'd say it would be easier to port Exult directly than to make an ultra-stripped DOSBox build and attempt to get it up to speed. Maybe when the inevitable PSP2 rolls around...

There is now a GTA Loader to allow limited homebrew on all firmware (Even those that cant be downgraded)

AFAIK, there is no development library for the PSP. That makes developing for it pretty hard.

Also, homebrew kits are of questionable legality, (it is called 'hacking' for a reason folks), as well as copying U7, and as anyone here should know, Exult doesn't deal in things of questionable legality.

At least IRL ^_~

"Is that Virtuous, Avatar?"
~ Wizardry Dragon

An edit to my post above: there is no *freely available* development library for the PSP. You require a license, just like any other console. It's how the console makers make the big bucks.

~ Wizardry Dragon

http://hitmen.c02.at/html/psp_links.html <-- Maybe something among those links can help. I've read that there actually are some homebrew development tools and/or libraries available.

But then again, I think the PSP thing was discussed before...

Yes, but Sony has stated that do not support development of 'homebrew' PSP kits, and will presue legal action against anyone found developing them. (There was an article on slashdot a bit back that cause quite the little uproar.)

Is it moral/ethical/right? I dunno. But as is, I'd rather not find my favourite programming project in legal trouble.

And anyways ... what purpose would it serve to have it on the PSP? It'd just be a little novelty really. Linux/Mac/Amiga is a matter of supporting the platforms that users are using. What'd the point of having it on PSP?

~ Wizardry Dragon

PSPSDK
The PSP Software Development Kit (PSPSDK) is a collection of Open Source tools and libraries written for Sony's Playstation Portable (PSP) gaming console. It also includes documentation and other resources developers can use to write software for the PSP.
PSPSDK is distributed under a BSD-compatible license. See the LICENSE file for more information

http://ps2dev.org/psp/Projects

Dude, not to be offensive, but why can't this thread just die?

Exult PSP would = possible legal problems. And I for one am not eager to see Jeff & crew get their a**es sued off.

--------
Peter M Dodge aka Wizardry Dragon
Lead Designer
Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands

Because its a valid project... Its no more a source of legal problems than other homebrew projects such as PSPRadio and the more controversial ones such as isoloaders, etc.

You didn't read that second sentence did you? Also an illegal project is not a valid one

That said, Exult is open source, if you want it that bad, do it yourself.

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Peter M Dodge aka Wizardry Dragon
Lead Designer
Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands

If the team doesn't want to touch it that is fine.

However, releasing source code written with an open-source library is not illegal.

The XBox development scene has similiar issues, since most homebrew XBox games and applications can only be properly compiled with a licensed XBox development kit, which most people don't have.

So it is illegal to distribute binaries compiled illegally with an unlicensed development kit. However, releasing the source code is perfectly legal, and sourceforge will even host the project.

Exult has been ported to the XBox in this very method. Again, it is illegal to distribute the XBox Exult binary, but the source code is fine.

I don't know if the XBox Exult was done by the Exult team, or someone from xbox-scene.com

I don't care a whole lot as I can't afford a PSP at the moment. (Buying a house and raising a kid sadly take precedence). Even if I had a PSP, I'd rather play Exult on a PC rather than use PSP/XBox type controls.

Any XBox conversion was not done by the Exult team, or even with their knowledge, I don't think.

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Wizardry Dragon
Lead Designer
Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands

Its an unofficial port that I was awear of, spoke to the developer of a few times and helped him out with a few sticking points (such as SDL). Didn't directly help with the devlopment and didnt want to either as it was made with the Stolen XDK. The only thing that I did was port SDL over to using DirectX8 interfaces and using Direct3D instead of DirectDraw that I did using the normal DirectX8 SDK.

is it available on the
AMAZING INTERWEB

I dont think, that there are "possible legal problems"...look at all the other homebrew...like quake 1/2 or even games from lucasarts..I think you should at least reconsider the thought of doing it

No offense, but what others do and what you think don't really count in this matter. If you were a lawyer and you could tell us without a doubt then it would be something different.

did you actually bother to READ this thread?