The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

right now I am trying to port star control 2 to PSP.... though I haven't been able to find a solid source that I can use to build a make of a pbp file... if I could find it then I would be able to release star control 2 on PSP....  basically I wasn't quite sure and kind of in a hurry and wanted to contact someone who has access to it but wasn't quite sure where to look... can anyone help me out??????? Thanx alot if you can~

I really wanted to reply to this one, and really didn't at the same time because I realized the extreme simplicity of the answer and didn't want to be mean to someone who didn't know. (under 10 posts I usually try to go easy on.)

Here's the whole answer:

Friend, you don't seem to realize where you are and what you've got here. You are on the boards for the UQM, and StarControl 2 Remake. More importantly, an open-sourced StarControl 2 remake. The project started with the original code but forget about that. Go to the download page, download the game, and you will have the source for a perfectly functional, perfectly faithful, and more up-to-date (code wise) version of what you are looking for.

Enjoy and let us know when you're done making the port. I know there are several people here who'd wet themselves to have what you're proposing.

you know if you were to actually 'look' around the website you would find the source to whatever version of UQM, i'm pretty sure you don't want the actual SC2 source code because that was written for the 3DO (which i want anyways).

but just because your in a 'hurry' i'll give you a link that directs you to the most recent version of the source

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=59452

now what you do is scroll down till you see: uqm-0.5.0-source.tar.gz
which is a tarball of the 0.5.0 source of The Ur-Quan Masters

all you had to do was ask nicely and not type in caps  ;)

All caps is not appreciated here, especially in topic names. I've edited your topic.

Although a little bit of searching would have lead you to the source code in a minute, as you're in a hurry, let me help by pointing out the the most recent source code. It can be found in cvs (http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=59452).

When do you expect to have the PSP port done? As you're in a hurry, do you think you would have it done by the end of this week? Or even sooner? I'm looking forward to it.

As am I. Wow. UR QUAN on the PSP! That would be amazing!

i have the 0.5.0 game and have been trying to work with out there... though... there are still a few thing I need to try first... I'm not sure if I've tryed that source package yet or not but will try it out... I guess I should have been more clear on the process that I'm doing in order to port it.. I'm basically using a a kind of pspdev program which helps to make a pbp file... but its kinda picky and doesn't want to work with me... I haven't been working on it long but hope to get a least some work in the right direction soon though.. if not the whole game at first, at least the melee game for starters... if there are any good programmers out there that feel the calling to lend a helping hand then great I'm all up for some steering or actual team work to get this thing going... I"ll try the source code that was posted to try to see if I can get it working... 

You're really stressing my ability to be civil here.

Let me explain. Do you think you're the first person to want UQM on the PSP? Or perhaps you think you're the first to have the pbp developer. Maybe you think you're the first to be willing to "work on a team."

That you're excited and tring to get this into the pbp of the PSP, I'm happy for you. But let me ask you, have you developed anything in pbp? If you have, good. If not, get on it. Make some simple original content first.

Now, enthusm can overcome experience, but realize a few things. 1, you're going at this most likely alone. 2, it's taken a team of experienced programmers years to bring UQM to this point. 3, I'm not against you, I'm behind you spiritually 100%, but see 1.

damn i typed a nice reply and tryed to previw it but it had an error and everything went away.. oh well.. anyways, I'm not the only one who has a developer tool for psp... i'm not sure how much you know about psp hacking but things like this have been out for a while... (pspupdates.com) the program is simple and uses a toolchain to do a bunch of stuff... without saying all the programming and code it does, I can sum it up as convering a file for use on psp; specifically a source code... like the starconrtol 2 source code... and since its been ported with open source, all the hard work has been done for me already... I found an xbox port with a key config *the most important part I think because how can you play if you can't control anyhing* and now that only leave the game itself... I've gotten some progress done but its not realeaseable yet as its not running yet... though there may not be a lot of people intrested in doing a port of star control 2 to PSP there are a lot of people who find it nessisary to hack their psp and would play this just becasue its homebrew so to speak... so I'm sure I can find someone who is willing to help me to get this onto PSP... its only a matter of time, though it doesn't matter if people want to help or not... I'll do it by myself if I have to...  ;D

staar, people here may be a bit more helpful if you could explain what you've done clearly. Reading your last post, I find myself wondering what exactly you've done so far and how. For example, what toolchain are you using? What have you done with it so far? What is this "progress" you've "gotten done" so far?

Judging by the terminology you use, you seem to be quite unfamiliar with software development. I think you may have underestimated the difficulty level of the porting process. Getting UQM to run on a PSP is one thing; getting it to run well is another; you will probably have to do a lot of tweaking to get UQM to fit the PSP's display, controls and sound hardware and performance issues are likely to be a problem. Do you have any plans on how to resolve these issues?

I think someone's under the misconception that if you've created a project file for some PSP IDE, you've got a working port...

not at all... i'll sum up what i've done, which is not much but some is better than none... basically I work in a linux shell to do my programing (windows just doesn't cut it) called Cygwin....

I use a toolchain exclusivly for the psp called, simply enough, : "psptoolchain-20060120"... its common for psp developers to have this... not hard to find at all either... this basically adds the code lines you need for the source to operate on psp.. I have done this so far....

the other program you need if you want to get the psp to reconize the source you modified is : "pack-pbp-1.1.0.c".... this program is what you use to bundle up the source you edited into a usable .pbp file for the psp... I haven't done this part yet but assume that it shouldn't be too hard... if it is, then I could always ask another psp developer if they could lend a hand...

so far am I on the right track to explaining what i've done so far...?

Now, as far as making the game run in the right resolution and supposing the sound doesn't work right off the bat and what not... that  "IS" a bit beyond me... Really I have pretty much just started programing recently for the sole purpose of playing star control 2 on a PSP... the only problem is that given my current situation with money and what  not i've been using my friend's computer for the project ( mine just doesn't cut it... -_- ) so I don't always have access to it on a day to day basis... I usually can't work on this about 2 day a week but the rest of the time I am trying to figure everything out when I am using it.


so there you have it.... I have already converted all the files need to run the game on PSP but haven't compiled them into a usable format (kinda like an .exe) for the PSP yet...  I know the resolution won't be correct but I can only hope everything else works out alright...

OK, that was a lot more helpful. Most of the software mentioned can be found at oopo.net consoledev (http://www.oopo.net/consoledev/).

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "converting all the files needed to run the game"?

here... I read into this a bit more and some others have been a bit sceptacle about this but its not to far fetched... Sony PSP port? (http://uqm.stack.nl/forum/index.php?topic=2521.0) if you go there then you can see that a lot of people have been woring on this and i'm not quite sure but there might be an actually good working version almost complete... I left a post to get in contact with any of them because it seems like a lot of them don't even have a PSP....

well what I mean by converting the files is ( I'll try to stay un-technical) : I have used cygwin in conjuntion with psptoolchain and sdk... its a thing that basically make the convertion process from a source code to psp format... you just go into the folder the source is in and in therory it suppost to auto generate the files for you if you type "make".... I found out that it isn't that easy.. you see the source is aparently suppost to have a makefile which is what the program goes off of to make the files... kind of like directions for cygwin to follow while its doing it's thing (coverting) I quickly found that it was there but that I need a target file for it to make which was the whole game... so typing "make uqm" should work right? well it did. after about 5 or 10 minutes of going through everything I guess changing everything into a suitable format for the psp..

another thing happened that was another road block that I'm at now... after this is done, the program should spit out a usable .pbp (.exe) file for you.. of course it didn't though.. no way! that would just be to convienent and easy... so I moved on to the next part of my project... which is using a pbp packer to go through and pack all the source files it convered in to a single .pbp  (in this case it would be kind of like making a winrar archieve)

I hope that helps out a little better...

also I have noticed somthing quite odd my last few posts and that is the clock said something like 2:xxPM when it should have said something more like 5:xxAM... just an observation...

I even saw your name a few time on the link I posted Novus ... you should know what I'm taking about by now...

Actually, it might help if the discussion were more technical; it's hard to be specific in non-technical terms. Also, you can pretty much assume that anyone participating in this conversation is familiar with compilers and associated technology.

UQM doesn't use make, so you'll have to adapt the build scripts in build/unix instead. Normally, the build scripts will use the native compiler and libraries, so you'll have to modify them to use the PSP ones instead (otherwise, you'll just get a native program). Alternatively, you could try to construct a makefile for UQM. Is this what you've done?

By the way, where did you find PSP versions of the libraries UQM needs? You need SDL, zlib and SDL_image at least, and probably libogg and libvorbis, too. Generic versions of the others might work, but SDL is very system specific.

The sample makefiles seem to include /usr/local/pspdev/psp/sdk/lib/build.mak, which contains most of the stuff needed to produce a PBP archive.

This forum is based in the Netherlands and therefore uses Central European Time by default.

Netherlands eh?

I'm quite the amatuer programmer ... I basically know nothing about it... I did learn somethings by reading some tutorials.. hardly enough to do my own hardcoding of an awesome game like star control... anyways what I can't do with knowledge I can do with luck I guess... at least thats how I've been doing my work on this so far... at least I think its the luck because this really isn't a simple task.... frankly speaking this "IS" beyond my programming knowledge but with the few things they have put out there I'm heading in a positive direction...

it acually sound like you know more about this than I do... basically I been walking in the dark without a light trying to put this thing together... I'd be more than happy to help someone who is also working on it what ever resouces I could pull together.. I can be very resourcful...

not knowing stuff well in the programming field isn't all bad though...  I do have a good understanding of technical things... growing up in the dos age with an uncle who builds computers helped me through a few rough times.... mostly working with programs and what not and basic understand of how things run... I know my way around a psp pretty well too... besides that I know about nintendo ds pretty well but that problebly isn't going to be something that poeple are going to play star control on since it take some effort and money to play homebrew on a ds.. and because homwbrew on DS isn't really the hot spot since the PSP came out trying to make the game work for it would be hell... but i can think of great ways to use the system if it were possible... *example - using the touch screen to drag modules onto the vindicator to make your ship using the touch screen.. or selecting what to say from the touch screen.. something like that... I think it would be awesome...

I have only one question for you, well maybe 2... which are... have you yourself been attempting to make the psp port becasue you seem to know alot about this... and do you by any chance know much about programming.. because you sound like you do... in which case maybe you could give me a tip...

I have a lot of patience and am very stubborn... with my weak programming skills I could eventually come up with a port that is semi working if i'm lucky... but if I had a little expertise I could whip it out a bit quicker than how things are going for me now... ;D

While I do have some experience in porting and writing games (like most of the UQM developers and contributors), I don't have a PSP, have never used one, nor do I intend to get one. Thus, I'm not very interested in doing a PSP port myself. While I can offer generic advice on what to look out for when porting and point out potential pitfalls, doing a PSP port isn't worth (to me) the time, effort and money required to familiarise myself with a new system, hunt for the required libraries, get the whole mess to compile and then spend ages trying to get it to run swiftly and stably. After all, UQM works fine on my Linux PC.

The psptoolchain you're talking about are the building tools (compiler, assembler, linker, etc) that create binary code (for the PSP) from the source code, like one would otherwise create binary code for Windows, or for Linux. It does not convert files for use on the PSP in any other way.
If you've got this working, then you've still got to adapt the source code to the specifics of the PSP platform. So you need to know about those specifics, and you know how to read and write C code.
That's what porting an application is all about. Not about running the compiler on the source code, which is just a first minor step, and which seems to be all what you're (almost) capable of doing.

If you want to learn how to port a C application, you first need to learn C.
Although in your case, I'd advice you to learn to write readable English first. Punctuation helps a lot.

More to the point, staar, it's unclear from your description whether you're actually using the psptoolchain or just compiling Cygwin binaries. I'm having a really hard time guessing what you're talking about.

At a minimum, you need to know the limitations of the PSP hardware; display resolution and colour depth, sound format size, CPU speed; that sort of thing. You also need to sort out all the libraries UQM uses. If you're really lucky and the libraries exist and work the same way on the PSP and everything compiles properly and works quickly enough, you'd still have to rewrite all the code that relies on stuff that the PSP doesn't have such as a keyboard and a proper operating system.

Even if you manage to get everything to compile, sorting things out so that you can get past the menu without crashing can be a real pain. As I understand it, that was the fate of the last attempt.

After spending most of the day reading about partial order reduction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_order_reduction), all those ellipses make it look like your sentences are supposed to loop. ::)

Staar, luck will get you absolutely nowhere in programming. Programs as big as UQM are simply too big and complex and if you just change things without knowing what you're doing, you'll just create a bigger problem with every attempt to fix up a previous problem. My unwanted and unasked advice to you about this is: forget it, don't even think about doing it. Feel free to ignore this, and try it, though ;)

this is a fact.
even though i'm still learning C right now at a slow rate i've at least learned how to compile UQM 2 different ways (VC++ & mingw) and i am trying to make a project file for dev-C++ (which is really irritating me :) ). On my first wack at it during version 0.3.0 i couldn't do anything with the source code but look at it and get a headache trying to figure it out, now i can at least understand a little less than half of it all (still can't write any stable programs in C yet though  ::) ).

So my advice would be just to try to understand most of it and learn how to compile a working copy first before trying to port any of it. Otherwise you'll end up with a mess of code and a huge headache ( if that hasn't happened already  :D )

.:: EDIT ::.
just out of curiosity, where do i find the sdl for psp?
or are people using "regular" SDL?

i'll just accept that programming would be a bit much and try to get more into c programming first before trying to just do it without learning first... then i might revisit this project if I feel up to the challenge... though I wish luck to anyone else who might be working on a psp port... ;D

Another one bites the dust.

Why is it that big ideas are like lemmings? They always jump headlong and en-masse into the people who will only kill them in the end. (Don't think I'm not talking about myself here.)