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Topic: ATTN Fred: Star Control on the GBA (Read 7330 times)
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The Last Androsynth
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Any consideration about porting the Star Control series (as The Ur-Quan Masters or under any other title) to the Nintendo Game Boy Advance? Toys For Bob already have a developer's license for the GameCube, & as the GBA is all that's keeping 2D gaming alive today, SC2 could keep it's original graphics & sound without being out of place there, unlike on the PC or consoles among all the 3D overkill games.
Super-Melee would be just awesome on a GBA multilink - players would play through the storyline to collect ships they could use in multiplayer against others. To increase marketability, the game might also come in different versions, with different extra ships for each race, like the Pokemon/Megaman EXE/Medabots series, so if a player wanted all the ships they'd have to buy all versions or trade with other players.
On a technical note, as the GBA's screen resolution has less width than the PC original's (256 compared to 320, IIRC) the sidebar could be removed - it doesn't have to be there all the time. Everything else would be ported 1:1 & still feel perfect on the handheld.
If the SC series will ever get a chance to be popular with new fans again & be officialy continued by TFB, while remaining financially viable for them, it is now on the GBA.
Please help in convincing Fred & Paul to at least seriously consider this. Thanks.
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JonoPorter
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Don't mess with the US.
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there are several threads about this.
try the search button
most of them disscuss a few topics.
but mainly
how to fund it and would it work on that small screen.
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« Last Edit: December 02, 2003, 04:54:18 am by BioSlayer »
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Androsynth-X
Zebranky food
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The Last Androsynth
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:-/ Hell, we have more obscure games from the Commodore 64, like Cinemaware's Defender of the Crown, making it to the GBA. Even Sega's Phantasy Star is on the GBA.
Star Control has way much more potential than lot of old series being ported over to the GBA. It would be a shame if it missed this chance to be a huge success. Done just right, it has all the elements needed to be a popular franchise; a vast ensemble of charismatic & interesting alien races, an intense combat system, & a deep woven plot to hold fans in waiting for more.
To attract new fans, it might be initially marketed as one of the fighter-collector breed of games currently popular, Pokemon et all - to the players who are into that, the storyline would serve only to collect new ships from, to battle their friends with. of course, as they progress into the plot the single-player mode will become more enthralling (pun intended) & soon they too will join our ranks - The Abandoned Children Awaiting The TRUE Third Coming of Star Control!
..of course on the GBA it'll be Star Control 2 they'd wait for 
Please. This needs to be done before the GBA is superceded by the next Game Boy, which might likely have a proper 3D chipset, hence indirectly requiring every game for it to be in 3D, which would make SC as we know it look a bit crude there..
:-/
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NECRO-99
*Smell* controller
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Androsynth Combat Tactics Specialist
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Hell, we have more obscure games from the Commodore 64, like Cinemaware's Defender of the Crown, making it to the GBA. Even Sega's Phantasy Star is on the GBA.
Speedball 2 - Brutal Deluxe has also been ported to the GBA. It was made in 1990, and very few people have even heard of it, let alone it's predecessor. A few years before SC2, so yea, they should bring it to GB, or some portable system of some sort. Cell phone games, anyone? 
Ahhh..that game rocked back in the Amiga days...nothing like playing rugby with metal-clad warriors and a huge steel ball.
"The Last Androsynth"? Sorry man, there's two more of us here. 
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« Last Edit: December 02, 2003, 08:28:55 pm by NECRO-99 »
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I love being a clone. Everything I do bad gets blamed on the real me!
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JonoPorter
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Don't mess with the US.
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I would much rather see one for handheld computers E.G. palm and windows CE
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« Last Edit: December 02, 2003, 08:52:07 pm by BioSlayer »
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Culture20
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Thraddash Flower Child
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Jay Mattis is working on trying to port UQM over to Windows mobile 2003. He's got a thread in the Technical board.
Psuedo related note:
I played UQM for about 20 minutes on my linux-iPAQ by forwarding an X connection from a desktop PC. It was quite slow due to the network traffic.
<technical stuff>
Running UQM natively on an iPAQ has other problems too: unless Windows CE/PPC does memory management differently than the linux for iPAQs, memory alignment issues cause problems. Also, the ARM and Xscale processors don't have any floating point units, so all floating point math is (currently) interpreted by the kernal and then converted into math that the CPU can handle. It's _really_ slow. Thankfully, there aren't as many floats & doubles in UQM as there are in TW.
</technical stuff>
So, it's able to be done, but it will take someone with a little more low-level memory expertise than me (hopefully Jay is that person).
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Rib Rdb
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I actually started porting uqm to the gba a couple of weeks ago. It's not very far along yet (some image conversions scripts, and a few tests like playing the music or drawing the solar system star background.) I have finals next week, so I probably won't be able to work on it much for a while. I also have one or two friends who want to help after we finish this quarter of school, and another who worked on several GBA games (Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter I think), who's giving us some advice. I don't know if he would legally be able to help with the coding though.
We talked a little on the irc channel about selectivly zooming in on the interesting parts of the screen so that we can keep the same graphics, and possibly using some of the pc content. As far as the sidebar I was also thinking that you could have the date, and maybe fuel, in a status bar at the top of the screen like there is in the starmap. Then when you pause the game, a box could pop up showing the stuff about your ship.
Anyway, I've already spent too much time playing with this today, it's time for me to start studying!
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Pages: [1] 2
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wondered that myself, but since I just arrived on this forum last night & saw a couple topics that were to Fred, I assumed this was the way to go, & that "Fred & Paul" might make the subject too long & get it truncated..heh