Paintown current status

[Allene32]

This post will provide an update as to the current status of Paintown. Most of the things listed here should appear in the 3.4 release.

SDL Port – some people in the Dingoo community want to be able to play Paintown mostly because of its Mugen implementation. To accomplish this Paintown has to be ported to SDL because that is the defacto library that these new-fangled handheld things use. The port is going pretty well, everything works except for the joystick and music. Performance-wise SDL is comparable with Allegro 4 except for doing stretch blits (which Paintown does a lot of). Allegro 4 created an assembly routine at run-time to do stretch blits whereas SDL (I’m using the sprig library) just uses C code. In the future I will either try to port Allegro’s stretch blitting routine to SDL or find some other SDL library that is fast at stretch blitting. I did look at sdl_stretch but that just segfaulted when I called into it.
NES music – I added the sourcecode from the GME library which is capable of emulating many old formats of music, notably the NES format. I haven’t incorporated the library into the game yet so I don’t really know if it works, but it looks like it will be ok. With this addition someone could write a real river city ransom clone!
Mugen – well I haven’t fixed many Mugen bugs since the 3.3 release but I will try to implement more triggers and fix some physics bugs before the 3.4 release.
Other random stuff: I noticed the open pandora project has a request to port Paintown on their wiki so I looked into getting my ARM cross compiler environment set up again. A while ago I set up a cross compiler using the scratchbox stuff but that was flaky and now suffers from bit-rot. The pandora wiki links to a company called codesourcery whose main product looks to be embedded development software, such as cross compilers. They provide a free cross compiler for ARM so I downloaded that and built a statically linked version of Paintown that uses SDL. I have yet to test it, though, in qemu-arm but I’m sure it will work ok.

(I know there are no links in the text above, I might go back and add them later)