GP2X ports

by Simon Parzer

So, what have I been doing lately? I ported two excellent games to the GP2X platform.

The GP2X is a next-gen handheld, like the Nintendo DS or the PSP. The only difference is that the GP2X is more a homebrew platform than a commercial gaming console. It runs on Linux, and the hardware specs, as well as developer SDKs are freely available.

Anyway, first I ported Alex the Allegator 4, one of the best Jump'n'Run games. It's open-source and it uses the Allegro library which is available for the GP2X, too. Was not very hard.

Because the first porting project was so successful I decided to do something like that again, this time a bit bigger. Cave Story is a great Japanese platformer, maybe the best freeware platformer ever released. This one was a bit harder. As it isn't open source I first needed the permission and the sourcecode from the original developer. Luckily I found someone who already had implemented a great deal of the game in SDL, which is supported on the GP2X. All I had to do was fix up a few issues with signedness and struct alignment (some parts of the Japanese source were very messy, took me a while to hunt down all errors) and implement some DirectSound functions, as the original port uses DirectX for everything.

Now I'm done with those two and it feels great to play some of my favourite games on my GP2X. My ports also excited many of the community members, so I have something to feel proud about, even if my work really came down to a recompile after fixing some issues.

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