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Author Topic: Interesting little ROM...  (Read 8269 times)

ficedula

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Interesting little ROM...
« on: 2005-06-26 14:27:47 »
Some of you guys may be interested in this:

http://ficedula.uwcs.co.uk/sylph.zip

You'll probably want a GBA emulator, although I tried it on real hardware a while ago and it worked. Don't expect too much to come of it, though...
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Alhexx

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Interesting little ROM...
« Reply #1 on: 2005-06-26 15:57:17 »
OMG! :o
Fice!
You're still alive?

Yieee-ha!
It's really fine to see you again. I hope this won't be your only post for the next time...

As for the ROM: Fortunately, I've got a GBA emu at hand, so I gave it a try.
It works, however, there are some minor graphic problems...

 - Alhexx

 - edit -
Unfortunately, my homepage server seems to be down, that's the reason wy neither my avatar nor the link can be found...
I've uploaded the file to mirex' trashbin and updated the link...
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James Pond

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« Reply #2 on: 2005-06-26 16:40:17 »
... Is this what I think it is?

Omg Fice I think I could kiss you!


EDIT

Aww, I thought it was playable!

No matter though, It just shows its possible to start putting a bit of FF7 on another system...
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ficedula

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« Reply #3 on: 2005-06-26 17:23:22 »
Playable? Unlikely, I'm afraid ;)   Although you can play some nifty tricks on the GBA, it'd be a big big hack to get FF7 on there.

The DS is a lot more plausible; I just don't have any sort of devkit for my DS, but I do for my GBA/SP. Of course, I have the time to work on neither, so there you go...


Alhexx: Yeah, there's a few issues with it, still. Not sure whether it's my field background decoder or GBA code that's a fault, could be either. The transparency layer is a right arse to get onto the GBA; I've only got 64KB of VRAM to play with.
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James Pond

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« Reply #4 on: 2005-06-26 22:19:39 »
Well... If somone manages to get FF7 on a DS or a PSP I will buy one of those consoles. Just for it.
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Roxas

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« Reply #5 on: 2005-06-27 01:52:53 »
Haha! Man that's awesome to see.  :)

Playable or not, its cool. 8)
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Anakin

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« Reply #6 on: 2005-06-27 09:00:40 »
Awesome!

Does anyone know where the data for Sephiroth's field model character lie?
You'll be a life saver :love:

Thanks
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Cyberman

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« Reply #7 on: 2005-06-27 13:38:33 »
LOL hey fice.. looks like you used 15 16 color palletes and 3 background layers.. what's BG2 being used for? It looks like you are using it with the alpha blending to give an illumination affect. The tiles appear to be all of the 16 color variety.  I'm assuming the nice fuchia area's are places that sprites belong (IE background animations).

Well good fortune with it :D  I think the hardest part is putting anything moving on it.

My conclusion was with FF7 on the GBA is that 1) you would need external hardware (to the GBA) 2) You would have to have external media for the GAME (IE SD or CF card) 3) you would have to reprocess all the movies (To MP4 video streams or the like).  4) music could be handled by the GBA (mostly).  5) the GBA cart would have just the basic game engine in it and use the media cards to run the actual game.

Ahhh well. It's doable just dubious if it's worth it :)

Cyb
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Cyberman

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« Reply #8 on: 2005-06-27 13:49:43 »
Quote from: Anakin
Awesome!

Does anyone know where the data for Sephiroth's field model character lie?
You'll be a life saver :love:

Thanks

PC or PSX version? :D
In the PSX version Sephiroth is in the BSX file related to the scene data.   You might find it in the NIVGATE* BSX files. Just remember the BSX files only contain vertex and bone information, the actual textures I think are in FIELD.TDB. Also it's likely you can find young cloud in there as well.

Cyb
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Anakin

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« Reply #9 on: 2005-06-27 15:10:29 »
:oops: I'm sorry, I was asking for PSX (as you guessed correctly!)

do you by any chance know the offset also? say in any of the NIVGATE BSX files (I don't know many things but I have the "Gears" and I hope I will manage to decypher something... :D )

Thank you!
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ficedula

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« Reply #10 on: 2005-06-27 18:21:41 »
Cyberman: Yeah, BG0 is the 'far' background, BG1 is the 'near' background (tops of houses, etc) and BG2 is the transparency layer for special effects over the top of that. It's all 16-colour tiles because there isn't enough VRAM for anything else. There's not really enough VRAM even for that ;)

The major problem with FF7 on the GBA would be: no hardware 3d support. And at 16MHz, it's hardly fast enough to get very far in software, either.

Storage space used to be a problem, but if you have a GBAMP - and I do - you can use CompactFlash cards with the GBA. It's only in the past week or two that anybody's managed to interface to it from homebrew code, but still - that means the storage space I have available for data has suddenly gone up from 8MB to 256MB ;)

...but without hardware 3d, you're never going to get FF7 on there. The DS is a better bet ... I should have a compatible wi-fi card within a week or two, that'd let me program for that. Although I still doubt I'd get anything done on it ;)
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Darkness

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« Reply #11 on: 2005-06-27 20:02:07 »
how about the PSP? :)

I'm getting tired of playing Sonic 2 and Bejeweled on it.
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ficedula

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« Reply #12 on: 2005-06-27 20:08:45 »
Well, first of all, you could buy me a PSP. Then you could slap Sony Europe about a bit until they actually release it over here and I can buy games for it. And you'd have to get me the necessary equipment to develop for it. Finally, you'd need to buy my friends PSP's too, so I can play multiplayer games.

Then maybe I'd do some dev for it. But probably not ;)

(This is why I own a DS: Doesn't require me to spend a lot of money, and I know other people who actually own one, so multiplayer games are not just a wild fantasy...)
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Alhexx

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« Reply #13 on: 2005-06-27 22:15:33 »
When halkun started that "new FF7 engine" thing, I thought of porting FF7 to the gamecube... however, this would have a lot of problems...
I'm not sure about the other consoles, but the cube uses motorola byte ordering, so all original resources would have to be "byte-swapped"...
And there isn't that much GC dev stuff out there to write an own game engine, without having to write lots oif code in assembler...

And the last and most important problem is:
People would need a modded cube to run that, since it's not possible to burn cube discs...

PS: If you really start writing something for the DS, let us know:
Two of my friends have the DS :D

 - Alhexx
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KojiroTakenashi

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« Reply #14 on: 2005-06-27 23:51:55 »
No 3D? You sure?

What about the 3D that the Tony Hawk games pull off? You'd just only have 3D for the Fields...not the battles, minigame, or World Map.
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Cyberman

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« Reply #15 on: 2005-06-28 05:05:28 »
Quote from: KojiroTakenashi
No 3D? You sure?

What about the 3D that the Tony Hawk games pull off? You'd just only have 3D for the Fields...not the battles, minigame, or World Map.

3d is possible on the GBA yes.  However without hardware things will be SLOW.
Other problems include limited internal memory (256K WRAM 32K IRAM).  The only way I thought of do it is using an FPGA with DSP macro blocks to handle the 3d, add on mobile SDRAM and fill the full 256Mbits of RAM.  Media information ends up on a SD card which itself is pluged into a CPLD.  The CPLD handles the JTAG interface, memory maping, and SD card boot up.  The game engine is programed on start up into the FPGA through the JTAG interface.  Fortunately you can DMA data too and from the ROM memory and you can set the speed easily.  The biggest challenge is to make a simple engine for generating the 3d that can fit into an FPGA.  Part of the 32M of ram would need to be used for the FF7 game engine. The remaining would be for 3d information and handling texture data etc.  Each frame can be rendered inside the FPGA (independant of the processor) and sent to the VRAM via DMA for each frame.

That's really apart from a different platform all together the only way to do it with the GBA.

Cyb
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Micky

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« Reply #16 on: 2005-06-28 07:30:04 »
Quote from: Alhexx
I'm not sure about the other consoles, but the cube uses motorola byte ordering, so all original resources would have to be "byte-swapped"...

Byte swapping is a lot less of a problem than people make of it. And you can always load your resources, pick the data you're interested in and byteswap it.
You normally need to do a bit of conversion anyway as vertex buffer formats or texture formats rarely match.
Quote
And there isn't that much GC dev stuff out there to write an own game engine, without having to write lots oif code in assembler...

Not to turn this into an offtopic cube discussion, but most of that is now possible with libogc.
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ficedula

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« Reply #17 on: 2005-06-29 20:55:16 »
*bump*

I've updated the download on my site (same URL - http://ficedula.uwcs.co.uk/sylph.zip )

Transparency's working better now ... press Start to turn animations on/off. (A/B/Select turn the layers on/off totally).

Also, hit R-shoulder to load a different level up, just as an example of how it can be done - although the level in question needs to be scrolled a bit before you see anything ;)
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