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January 6th, 2008, 11:49 Posted By: wraggster
A feature i did a few years ago and one im going to repeat now is the DCEmu Interview, a unique idea in which questions are asked by me to the Whole DCEmu Community its a way to learn more about each others and find out what our interests are and much more
Todays Question is Whats the Greatest Homebrew Handheld? (Thats handheld not console, basically you have a choice of PSP, Nintendo DS, GBA, GBC, GP32, GP2X, Tapwave Zodiac, Nokia Ngage, Gizmondo etc
Give your Answer via Comments.
Remember to check out our DCEmu Interview Site to catch up on previous DCEmu Interview Questions
The DCEmu Interview - Question 1 - What Consoles Do You Own ?
The DCEmu Interview - Question 2 - Whats Your Favourite Console Of All Time
The DCEmu Interview - Question 3 - Whats Your New Years Resolution ?
The DCEmu Interview - Question 4 - What Got you Interested in Homebrew/Emulation ?
The DCEmu Interview - Question 5 - Whats the greatest Game Ever ?
The DCEmu Interview - Question 6 - Whats the Greatest Homebrew Console?
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January 1st, 2008, 23:11 Posted By: wraggster
A feature i did a few years ago and one im going to repeat now is the DCEmu Interview, a unique idea in which questions are asked by me to the Whole DCEmu Community its a way to learn more about each others and find out what our interests are and much more
Todays Question is What Got you Interested in Homebrew/Emulation ?
Give your Answer via Comments.
Remember to check out our DCEmu Interview Site to catch up on previous DCEmu Interview Questions
The DCEmu Interview - Question 1 - What Consoles Do You Own ?
The DCEmu Interview - Question 2 - Whats Your Favourite Console Of All Time
The DCEmu Interview - Question 3 - Whats Your New Years Resolution ?
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December 31st, 2007, 19:44 Posted By: wraggster
A feature i did a few years ago and one im going to repeat now is the DCEmu Interview, a unique idea in which questions are asked by me to the Whole DCEmu Community its a way to learn more about each others and find out what our interests are and much more
Todays Question is Whats Your New Years Resolution ?
Give your Answer via Comments.
Remember to check out our DCEmu Interview Site to catch up on previous DCEmu Interview Questions
The DCEmu Interview - Question 1 - What Consoles Do You Own ?
The DCEmu Interview - Question 2 - Whats Your Favourite Console Of All Time
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December 30th, 2007, 00:50 Posted By: wraggster
A feature i did a few years ago and one im going to repeat now is the DCEmu Interview, a unique idea in which questions are asked by me to the Whole DCEmu Community its a way to learn more about each others and find out what our interests are and much more
Todays Question is Whats Your Favourite Console Of All Time ?
Give your Answer via Comments.
Remember to check out our DCEmu Interview Site to catch up on previous DCEmu Interview Questions
The DCEmu Interview - Question 1 - What Consoles Do You Own ?
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December 28th, 2007, 01:55 Posted By: wraggster
A feature i did a few years ago and one im going to repeat now is the DCEmu Interview, a unique idea in which questions are asked by me to the Whole DCEmu Community its a way to learn more about each others and find out what our interests are and much more
First Question is What Consoles Do You Own ?
Give your Answer via Comments.
Remember to check out our DCEmu Interview Site where you will find interviews with the coders of all the major homebrew scenes.
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December 3rd, 2007, 03:48 Posted By: wraggster
One of my long list of work to do was to fix the html on pages on the Interviews site and today ive got around to that which now makes the site look tons better.
Im also going to start doing at least one interview a month of the coders from the scenes we cover.
Ive made the interviews site have comments on interviews now so that discussion of the interviews can now take place esp if something juicy was posted.
For the time being check out the full range of interviews here --> http://interviews.dcemu.co.uk/
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August 31st, 2006, 22:38 Posted By: wraggster
Today its our honour to interview the coder of Picodrive DS, which is a Genesis/Megadrive emulator for the Nintendo DS.
DCEmu Can you tell us where were you born, where you live,etc.?
RyanB:I was born in central KY, USA, and continue to live there.
DCEmu What qualifications do you have?
RyanB:I have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics, and just started my Master's in CS. My day job is being
the sole PC admin for a small/medium business, where I handle everything from managing our LTSP install to developing and maintaining intranet web apps.
DCEmu What made you get into computers/consoles?
RyanB:My parents got me an Apple IIe when I was a kid, figuring it would "last through college". Obviously it didn't, but that followed up with
PC-clones and trusty old BASIC, which is what got me interested in programming. As for consoles, my first (and for a long time only) was the NES.
DCEmu What projects/coding have you done previous to your Genesis Emulator for the Nintendo DS?
RyanB:Mostly stuff for school and work that wouldn't be of interest to most people, or small personal projects. Things like compilers, video
processing algorithms, large web apps, 3D engines, general OSS stuff, and Linux kernel hacking.
DCEmu What inspired you to code a Genesis Emulator to the Nintendo DS and what difficulties did you have getting it to run properly ?
RyanB:People complaining about the lack of a good one, mostly. I think there were one or two Genesis emulator ports, but they ran at about 1fps.
Thankfully I had a great codebase to work from with Dave's Picodrive, so really the only issues I had initially were figuring out DS-specific things like graphics and FAT access.
DCEmu Can Full Speed and Full Compatability be accessed with your emulator in the future ?
RyanB:I think 30fps is a reasonable goal, though that may be able to be surpassed. Compatibility is already pretty good, although memory usage in the latest version appears to have broken some 3MB ROMs. The next release should have some support for large ROMs on Supercards and in appended mode (and hopefully save states for appended mode as well). I know everyone has been asking about sound, but realistically it's probably not going to happen unless it's running on ARM7 (running it on ARM9 semi-works, but drags emulation down to 6fps), and moving it over is not going to be an easy task.
DCEmu Whats the good and bad points about developing for the Nintendo DS?
RyanB:Good:
-developing for a portable console is just cool
-writing and improving low-level code is very educational
-with devkitPro you have a very familiar development toolchain if you've already used GCC
Bad:
-difficult to debug (though I think masscat has picked up the wireless gdb stub project, which is good)
-difficult to use both processors to their fullest
-limited hardware resources
-limited documentation
DCEmu What got you interested in development for the DS?
RyanB:I fooled around with GBA homebrew at the very beginning of that kind of thing, and had some previous experience hacking around on ARM stuff and it's an architecture I like. I owned a DS at launch, and sort of paid attention to what was going on with the initial efforts to get code running, but didn't really get in to it myself until after I
found out about devkitPro/libnds.
DCEmu Do you have any projects, that you would like to start for the DS?
RyanB:I have a couple of ports I'm interested in doing, right now I'm mostly waiting for libfat to get dirent support so that I don't have to rewrite file code. I don't really want to talk about them though and inadvertently discourage someone else from working on them, or get anyone's hopes up. I'd also like to do some original things outside of
just ports.
DCEmu What would you like to see ported to the DS and what is realistically the limit to what can be done?
RyanB:I think someone talked a while back about working on a port of Cave Story to the GBA, I'd like to see that actually finished and the source put up, as I think a DS version would be nice as well (to take advantage of the added resolution and buttons, for example). Realistically I think all kinds of things are possible, as resourceful
homebrew developers have shown time and time again. Of course there's certain technical limits to what can be done from a processing standpoint, but what that imposes as far as what can be done overall I would be hesitant to say, since human ingenuity can get around that to a small degree.
DCEmu How could the DS Scene be improved ?
I think there just needs to be some more documentation, collaboration, and momentum. There seem to be some new resources coming around that might help, but at the moment there's not really any good "bottom-up" documentation on programming DS-specific things such as video hardware, sleeping, and so on.
DCEmu Whats your favourite games from each console you have owned ?
RyanB:NES: High Speed
Game Gear: Sonic Triple Trouble
Genesis: Sonic the Hedgehog
SNES: Chrono Trigger
GBA: Ninja Five-0
PSX: Vagrant Story
N64: Super Mario 64
DC: Soul Calibur
PS2: Tekken Tag Tournament
Gamecube: Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
Xbox: SSX 3
DS: Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!
PC (not a console, but I'm including it anyway): N
DCEmu Finally which of the Next Gen Consoles interest you the most and why ?
RyanB:Although I was pretty close to buying a 360 a little while ago, I realized I don't really spend that much time playing new games anymore
and chose not to. I think what they've been talking about with XNA and hobbyist development is interesting, but I'll wait and see what really happens with it. The PS3 kind of falls in to the same category. I'm pretty interested in the Wii as there seems to be some focus on more casual gaming there, and I'll probably wind up buying one at launch or preordering if Nintendo ever announces a date.
Thanks for the interview
wraggster
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August 28th, 2006, 23:34 Posted By: wraggster
Introduction
Exophase is a newcomer to the PSP scene and what an entrance, to release a Full Speed GameBoy Advance emulator on your first day is an accomplishment like no other and the response from all corners of the PSP Scene has been breathtaking. So what better way to get to know more is for the webmaster of DCEmu to come out of retirement to interview Exophase.
Heres the latest DCEmu Interview:
Wraggster: Can you tell us where were you born, where you live,etc.?
Exophase: Born in Cleveland OH, USA. Right now I'm in Bloomington Indiana.
Wraggster: What qualifications do you have?
Exophase:Bachelors in computer science, going for a Masters at the moment.. no real work experience, although I've done a lot for the retro game creation system "MegaZeux."
Wraggster: What made you get into computers/consoles?
Exophase:I didn't actually own a computer until I was around 12. It's difficult to explain why, but long before that point I had a strong desire to know how computers work and how I could work with them.
As soon as I got my first (a Pentium 75MHz machine) I wanted to figure out how to program, by
naively opening up random executables in notepad and staring at awe at the mess of characters
that I thought someone must have hand inputed to make this thing. Anyway, I guess you could say
I was always interested in computers in some way.
As far as consoles go, that's pretty typical for all of us, although I didn't own an NES when everyone else did. First I had was the original Gameboy back in 1991 - someone let my mom play Tetris and after that she just had to have one. Eventually I got an NES and the other consoles (at budget prices) followed, like TG16 (good times..) and SNES at the very end of its lifetime.
Wraggster: What projects/coding have you done previous to your GBA Emulator for the PSP?
Exophase:Aside from projects for school (some of them kinda big and scary, like operating systems) I've mainly just worked on MegaZeux, as mentioned previously. gpSP is my first real emulator.
Wraggster: What inspired you to code a GBA Emulator to the PSP and what difficulties did you have getting it to run properly ?
Exophase:I wanted to do a GBA emulator because I figured it could be done, but that it'd take more than just a straight port of VBA. I've been interested in dynarec for a long time and from what I knew about ARM (GBA's CPU) I figured it'd be a great candidate for dynarec due to the large amount of decoding overhead necessary in interpreting it (at least in ARM mode, not so much in
Thumb mode). MIPS (PSP's CPU) was also an attractive target for a RISC recompiler. I had a lot of
other crazy ideas for GBA emulation involving the video code that mostly thinned out, I'm not sure
how much any of them would have worked out. Anyway, GBA seemed like one of the more in demand platforms to be emulated on PSP, and it'd make PSP that more comparable to DS which has native GBA playing capabilities.
Of course, there have been many difficulties, not much about this project was straightforward for
me. I spent hours comparing my debugger to the debugger of one of three other emulators (depending on the game), trying to find where mine goes wrong. Of course, I would have had a much harder time without such mature emulators to compare against. This was all on the PC, long before an initial PSP build was even made. I was always pretty intimidated about moving to PSP because I knew it'd be that much more difficult to debug. I only got a dynarec running on it by doing it in a very systematic fashion, starting with a rather weak but more platform independant approach that wasn't too difficult to port to MIPS, then eventually tuning the MIPS code into what it is now. It's
pretty similar to the approach StrmnNrmn took with Daedalus.
Wraggster: Can the Dynarec be used in any other Emulators ?
Exophase:It might be possible to use it for other platforms that use ARM7TDMI, although the memory interface would have to be revised, as well as the translation mapping functions. Moving to ARM9 would be a bit more work and anything with an MMU would be a headache as well. For other CPUs I don't think this would do much for anyone, even as a reference.
This is all assuming that MIPS is a target. Other platforms can be targeted (as x86 and MIPS are
now), but because of how the dynarec is designed it works best when the target platform has
significantly more registers than the one you're trying to emulate.
Wraggster: Can Full Speed and Full Compatability be accessed with your emulator in the future ?
Exophase:Hm, I don't think any emulator really achieves full compatability. I know the compatability can probably be improved... right now I'm not handling self modifying code as robustly as I should be, changing that might help things, I don't really know yet. I'm also not handling some things like code executed from VRAM. I know for sure that there are a number of dynarec bugs; the interpreter
has much better compatability (and is of course much slower). I'd say the interpreter has around
85-90% compatability, so hopefully one day the dynarec will approach that.
As for speed.. there are still things I can do to improve it. There are some techniques that I
believe will decrease the size of emited code which can improve speed massively if it's enough
(anything to improve icache performance). For games that use the BIOS heavily or games that use
a ton of interrupts (like FF awn of Souls in battle or Sword of Mana) HLE BIOS may offer
significant improvements. Beyond these things there are some things I can try to load balance
between the two CPUs on the PSP and utilize the ME's faster eDRAM. I don't think that the added concurrency (running different pieces of code at the same time) will offer much but having double the cache and better memory may.
Wraggster: The release of this emulator has been compared to the shock of Ultrahle and Bleem, emulators that werent thought possible until they were released, are you proud that your the first to get a decentplayable GBA Emulator out there ?
Exophase:Heh, well, I'm just glad that at least some people can play some games well. I know it was nice being able to play Castlevania: Circle of the Moon for a while when I had nothing else to do.
Wraggster: Making the emulator open source is great for everyone, do you envisage ports to other consoles or is the code too specific for the PSP ?
Exophase:The dynarec is very PSP specific, and in the current version the video, input, and file I/O code has PSP specific versions, but it'll still use SDL/stdio for non-PSP builds. If anyone wants to
port it to other platforms I can give them my x86 dynarec backend, which is much easier to port
to other platforms but will be much less efficient than the MIPS one. Writing a dynarec for a
different platform is still a lot of work, and my dynarec model isn't really best for all platforms (it was somewhat written with MIPS in mind).
Wraggster: Whats the good and bad points about developing for the PSP?
Exophase:Most developers use psplink, which would probably be a huge good point, but I don't use it so I don't know. All in all I don't think developing for the PSP is that much different than
developing for anything else. The PSP hardware does have some pros and cons... when working with
gpSP I think these have been relevant:
pros:
Fast hardware bilinear filtering, this is good for pretty much every emulator
Very fast VRAM that you can read from and write to
cons:
Very little cache for the CPU (no L2 cache)
LCD blurs dark colors
Scratchpad RAM doesn't make for a good addition to cache, it's too slow...
No MMU
Wraggster: In your opinion whats possible on the PSP in terms of Emulators, Media Players etc, bearing in mind you have just released a Full Speed GBA Emulator ?
Exophase:PS1 emulation, but we all knew that one because of Sony's upcoming emulator. When I first heard PSP's specs PS1 and N64 emulation immediately came to mind, although I think I underestimated N64 emulation a little, the CPUs aren't quite as similar as I hoped (PSP has a 32bit little endian CPU with only single precision FPU), but perhaps these differences aren't too big of a deal. I think StrmnNrmn will continue to impress us there, and someone besides Sony is bound to do a great PS1 emulator (not me ).
As for media players... the ones out now are pretty good, right? I don't exactly, but I think they're doing a good job for what they have. Eventually someone should reverse engineer the PSP's video/audio acceleration chips and we'll have media players on the same level as the firmware ones, if they're not already at that level.
Wraggster: What got you interested in development for the PSP?
Exophase:I was interested long before PSP was released, even though I've never done console/handheld dev before. I was hoping Sony would release something like this for a long time and PSP pretty much matched my expectations exactly, at least on paper. The fact that it was exploited pretty quickly and it's so easy to get stuff on it (without any mods or extra hardware) made it too appealing to pass up.
Wraggster: Do you have any projects, that you would like to start for the PSP?
Exophase:Nope. This one's gonna keep me busy for a long time >_>
Wraggster: What would you like to see ported to the PSP and what is realistically the limit to what can be done?
Exophase:I don't really have anything in mind. Honestly I'd like to see more original works for PSP than
ports. But, for people porting, they need to bear in mind that PSP is not a 333MHz Pentium 2, so
they shouldn't necessarily expect that level of performance from a straight port. The CPU is only
single issue and it has far less cache, but far faster main RAM and other useful resources that can be taken advantage of.
Wraggster: How could the PSP Scene be improved aside from the obvious that Sony want to stop it at all costs ?
Exophase:The scene looks pretty good by all accounts, there's a lot of active news and development. It's definitely one of the more active console dev scenes.
Wraggster: Whats your favourite games from each console you have owned ?
Exophase:This sounds like a really hard question.. okay, I'll try:
Atari 2600: Seaquest
Gameboy: Link's Awakening
TG16: Bonk's Revenge
NES: Kirby's Adventure
SNES: Chrono Trigger or FF6
GBA: Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
Gamegear: Shining Force: Sword of Hajya
Lynx: Blue Lightning (okay, that was like the only game I owned)
PS1: (this is really hard) Xenogears or Suikoden 2.. maybe SaGa Frontier 2
PS2: Suikoden 5
Wraggster: Finally which of the Next Gen Consoles interest you the most and why ?
Exophase:I don't know if I'm going to buying any of them any time soon, what with my current trend of buying maybe one game a year, but from a dev standpoint PS3 looks the most interesting. It
might be the most open to dev for (ironically) and it has some really complex hardware that should be challenging to work through. XBox 360 will be somewhat open to dev for too, but at a yearly fee (which sounds a bit much to me) and with more straightforward but less interesting hardware. Wii is of course the more affordable and unique one, but probably won't be as interesting to dev for if/when anyone figures out how. Also, everyone's going crazy over the emulation of older games on Wii but we've all been doing that on other
platforms for ages, right?
Thanks for the excellent interview for the PSP Scene
wraggster
Please do not steal this interview for your site, please link only
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comments - Last Comment By JKKDARK
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August 13th, 2006, 23:39 Posted By: Kaiser
You guys asked for it and we are here to deliver. Its StrmnNrmn.
Kaiser: I feel truly privileged to interview you StrmnNrmn. Thanks for giving us some of your time. I'd like to start this off by asking you to tell us a little a bit yourself.
StrmnNrmn: I'm a 27 year old guy living in London, UK. I currently work as a quantitative developer for a large investment bank in the city, but this is a recent career change for me. Before changing jobs I had spent 5 years as a console programmer at a well known UK games company. I've found since changing jobs I tend to have more free time in the evenings, which is why I've been able to put so much effort into improving Daedalus recently. Besides work and programming, I enjoy running and try to play football regularly. I also play a lot of games
K: What education and or qualifications to you currently have?
StrmnNrmn: I have A-Levels in Maths, Chemistry, Biology and Physics and a BSc in Computer Science from York University. Since graduating I have 5 years of console (mostly Xbox) and PC development experience (but sadly just one
released game )
K: What got you into video games? and what was your first experiance with them?
StrmnNrmn: My dad used to teach computing at a local school and used to bring home computers some weekends and holidays. They had all sorts of computers like the RML 480Z (http://vt100.net/rm/), the Dragon (http://www.6809.org.uk/dragon/gallery.shtml) and of course BBC Micros and so on. I used to play all sorts of games on them, but they were mostly just simple educational titles. A few years later one of my friends got a ZX Spectrum and I knew I just had
to get one of my own. When I was around 10 I got a ZX Spectrum +3 and have fond memories of playing classics such as the Dizzy series, Rainbow Islands, Operation Wolf etc. I suppose this was when I first started to program. At the time it was mostly just copying in listings from the back of 'Your
Sinclair' but as I got older I began to write my own simple games and programs. I think I've always preferred writing games to playing them.
K: Can you go into detail about your previous forrays into homebrew and emulation previous to the PSP?
StrmnNrmn: I've not really done much in the way of homebrew before the PSP. I did convert Daedalus to run on the Xbox a few years ago, but never felt confident about releasing it. I've been working on Daedalus for many years now. I started developing it at my second year at university (probably around 1998) with the encouragement of my housemate (hello cms108 Progress has been pretty inconsistent over the years. I go through phases of getting quite involved with the project and make many improvements over a few weeks before my attention turns elsewhere. Since releasing the PSP port I've had no problem maintaining my interest though - I think this is in part due to changing to a job where I work more regular hours.
So I've not really done much else in the way of homebrew. I have release a number of other programs in the past though. Without giving away too many details, if you've installed Winamp over the past few years, you may have seen some of my other work without realising it
K: What/who got you into the PSP and in-turn developing for it?
StrmnNrmn: One of my good friends 71M (http://easy-monkey.co.uk/) is behind most of my dealings with the PSP. It was after playing around with Lumines and Ridge Racer on his import PSP one day that I decided to order one. A few months later 71M started playing around with the pspdev toolchain and he persuaded me to check it out. I actually got Daedalus ported around September or October last year, but it was 71M that finally persuaded me to release it publically earlier this year. So thanks 71M!
I want to take this opportunity to thank the guys at ps2dev.org for all their hard work on the pspdev toolchain. It's fantastically well made and maintained.
K: What was been your favorite homebrew app or game to date?
StrmnNrmn: I actually don't get to use that much homebrew as my unpatched v1.0 psp is almost always hooked up to my PC for development. I don't tend to run any homebrew on my other psp as that's usually patched up to whatever version of the firmware Sony have decided to distribute with their latest releases.
That said I do use Raf's PSPRadio quite often as it's awesome to be able to listen to Shoutcast streams anywhere in the house. I couldn't end this bit
without plugging some of 71M's projects - namely FileAssistant++ (http://psp-news.dcemu.co.uk/fileasistant++.shtml) and his newly released Trigonometry Wars (http://www.easy-monkey.co.uk/TrigWars/)
K: we all know and love Daedalus but do you have any plans to create/port other emulators or homebrew for the PSP or any other platform for that matter?
StrmnNrmn: Daedalus PSP is taking up pretty much all of my spare time/energy at the moment. I think there's a long way to go yet with Daedalus before it comes close to achieving its potential. I want to do the best possible job of it that I can which means giving the project my full attention. Maybe you can ask me that question in another year
K: Have you learned much from your peer PSmonkey and his development of Monkey64? If so what?
StrmnNrmn: PSmonkey has been great. I think people assumed that there was some kind of
rivalry between us, but any kind of competition has been mutually beneficial. I'm really excited to see how he gets along with his newly acquired 64DD (I'm very jealous) 
K: How far are you planning to take Daedalus in the future?
StrmnNrmn: I want to get to the point where the most popular dozen or so roms are running at full speed with sound and no compatibility problems. I'd also like to see much higher compatibility across all roms in general (including
graphical issues and save game support) There's a lot of work to do before I get to that point, but Daedalus will get closer to that goal with every incremental release.
K: Do you have any favorite fellow PSP coders?
StrmnNrmn: I've already mentioned PSmokey and 71M. If it wasn't for the awesome work of the guys at ps2dev.org there wouldn't be a Daedalus PSP so I've got to thank them. TyRaNiD has done an amazing job with PSPLINK, and without that developing Daedalus would be a lot more painful.
K: What do you keep on your own PSP?
StrmnNrmn: About 100 or so roms
K: What words of wisdom would you give to an aspiring homebrew coder?
StrmnNrmn: It's worth remembering that whatever problem you're having it's likely someone has already come across it before and solved it. Join the ps2dev.org forums and share information and advice with other coders.
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August 11th, 2006, 08:13 Posted By: Kaiser
It was a little rough but I managed to get the whole conversion done in one sitting.
What do you guys think?
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July 25th, 2006, 00:51 Posted By: Kaiser
Our next entry into DCemu's summer series comes from another resident of DCemu by the name of Deniska. Deniska is known as the PSP homebrew gaming king and has released such quality games as KETM.
Kaiser: Thanks deniska for allowing me to interview you. I've been a fan ever since the first version of KETM. As usual I'd like to start this off by asking you to tell us a little a bit yourself.
Deniska: My name is Denis. I am 34 y/o. Although originally from Moscow, Russia, last 14 years I live in New York, USA.
K: What education/qualifications do you have?
Deniska: I work as a software developer for a pretty big firm, developing web based applications. I have a degree in computer science.
K: What was your first video game experiance?
Deniska: Some 20+ years ago I ran across some zx80 based pc from Yamaha at school, running a pretty cool 2d shooter ( I forgot the name). That's then I realized I needed my own computer. Since not too many of them were available in Russia at that time, I put together my own version of Sinclair's ZX Spectrum and pretty soon was playing Commango and 1942.
K: Do you have any past homebrew programs previous to working in the PSP scene?
Deniska: I wrote a couple of java games for my symbian smartphone, SX1, from Siemens. One of them, an Arcanoid clone, called Javanoid :-) was ranked pretty high by JARS... Then, I lost that bulky phone during waterskiing and stopped writing code for it...
K: What/who got you into the PSP and in-turn developing for it?
Deniska: I was pretty excited when kxploit/Hello_world_psp came out, but PSPSDK realy triggered me in to trying to compile something for PSP.
K: Mind telling us your first homebrew game/app for the PSP?
Deniska: Kenta Cho's Noiz2sa was the first game I ported. I always liked that small and somewhat strange shooter. I desided to port it to PSP so I could play it on my way to work. It took me a while to finish the project, since some of the currently available calls and libraries were simply not there at that time. I got a bit creative with Noiz2sa, changing the color scheme, rotating the game 90 degrees, adding background, etc. Technically, it was not a straight port, but original author did not mind. It all worked out for the best and Noiz2sa won the 1st prize on one of the DCEMU coding contests. I still sometimes play this game on a subway.
K: What was your favorite past homebrew project?
Deniska: Probably KETM. Although the original linux version had a pretty cool 2d engine, it did not shine much, mostly due to bad graphics and lack of level data. With some help from bourbon_bot I turned this game in to a pretty good 2d shooter for PSP with 5 levels, tons of enemies and powerups. The funny part is that the original author back-ported it linux.. He said he liked my version better :-)
K: What current projects are you working on or plan to start on in the near future?
Deniska: Mapviewer takes up most of my time now. The link below has some details about this project:
http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=29040
K: So what homebrew/apps do you keep on your own PSP?
Deniska: Currently, I only have IRShell, PSPLink, Noiz2sa and KETM. I had to delete everything else for now, since I am experimenting with numerous maps for the mapviewer and they take up a lot of space.
K: Do you have a favorite coder?
Deniska: I don't really want to pick favorites, but there are ~20-30 people (and I am nowhere near them) who really shape the PSP hombrew scene. Some of them get the credit they deserve and other don't. I think that the creators of psptoolchain, PSPSDK and PSPLink should get more recognition.
K: What do you think about the PSP scene in its current state?
Deniska: Obviously, the scene is blooming now, with all the downgraders, custom firmware and custom chips available. This all draws a lot of new and talented people. Almost every day some new good game or application comes out. As for the fans - most of them are great, although some act a bit childish. A little more courtesy and respect would definitelly help the scene...
K: As for commercial gaming which consoles, games and/or genres do you find yourself playing the most?
Deniska: I have a few games for x | |
