It was a lot of fun!

As you probably know, Satoru Iwata passed away last Saturday. In case you don't know him, he is credited as the mind behind the Wii console.
In the 90 previous technical posts I have described some of my mistakes and some of the lessons I learned while porting BennuGD to the Wii. I still consider this port as one of the coolest things I've done with computers to date.

It was a lot of fun coding for and learning with such a great console!
I might've not used the console in the way Mr Iwata intended it to be used but he was a hacker, he'd understand.

Preview release of binaries based on official monolithic version

I'm releasing a preview version of BennuGD for Wii based on upstream monolithic code.

Known bugs:

• There's something weird going on with directories and as a result of that BennuGD won't automatically set the working directory to the path where your DCB resides. This means that you won't be able to launch your games from the Homebrew Channel just yet.
  I've only tested the binaries to work when launched through wiiload.
  You'll also still need to change the working directory from your BennuGD code to the correct path, with something like:
  chdir("/APPS/MyAPP/");

This build only includes the official modules, but includes all of them. I've also left some debugging info on. It'll go away when the proper release arrives, obviously.

<<Get it from here>>

If you know how to compile and run your code through wiiload I'd like to ask you to download it and tell me if it's working fine for you.
Cautions from previous releases still apply:

• Convert your music to 48kHz
• Don't use FNT files compressed with gz
• All that stuff

If it's not, please report bugs in the comments section of this post or -better- in the project's bugtrack section.

Thanks a lot.

Compiling the Wii port with the official monolithic code (Part I: BGDC)

Yesterday I spent an hour or so playing around with the official monolithic code.
I got BGDC to compile from SplinterGU's monolithic code.

What you're seeing is the standard info message you get when you call "bgdc" without any arguments.

Not really impressive but it's progress, in a sense :)

PS: The patch includes one small dirty section; we'll fix it before release

Official Monolithic architecture now available!

(Cross-posted to bennugd-wii and bennugd-mobile blogs).
SplinterGU just made an official monolithic implementation of BennuGD available in the official SVN repo.
The implementation is pretty-similar in design to mine but SplinterGU has managed to make it much easier to mantain (the header with the list of required symbols are generated automatically so he basically just maintains the modular version). That said, future updates to my ports (both for the Wii and for mobile platforms) will be based upon this design. I don't yet know if I'll publish full sources or just a set of patches against the official repo.

In any case, SplinterGU has expressed interest in the Wii port so it might become official at some point.

Not much more to announce: I advanced quite a bit with the iOS port and should published an updated template shortly. The android port still has troubles with the sound, and those don't seem to be going away shortly.

Happy coding!

Marcos Lopez: Part II

BennuGD user beredezebe has packaged mz's "Marcos Lopez: Part II" game to our loved Wii console.
You can find more details of the game here and in the meantime you can watch a video of the game in action below but you better give it a try!

Get it from here.

Updated binaries

As you might now from the BennuGD-mobile blog, my most recent work on BennuGD has been focused on using the monolithic architecture I created for the Wii port to engineer the Android & iOS ports.
While most of the work has gone into those, the Wii port has also received all the updates from upstream BennuGD and the other day I made some test binaries just to check that the Wii code still compiles as it should.

I'm releasing these untested binaries just in case they're useful to anybody, but please be aware that they might expose bugs and eat your homework. Apart from that, they feature the latest and greatest in BennuGD featureness.

Grab the updated binaries from here.

[Update] Ups! Looks like I screwed up something with the binaries! thanks a lot to beredezebe for testing them.

"Morshu the MMMMMM" new BennuGD-Wii game!

Reader Beredezebe writes to let us know that a new BennuGD-Wii game created by user blabla has been released. It's called "Morshu the MMMMMM" which features pretty cool graphics and is available in French and in English.

Read all the news and info about the game in the original NintendoMax thread [FR].


Meanwhile, you can see a video of the game below:

Get the game from here.

Hope you like it, and thanks to Beredezebe!


[Updated to cite blabla as the author of the game, beredezebe is the author of the port]

A game made with BennuGD wins the NintendoMax contest!

Beredezebe writes to let me know that the results for the Nintendomax Wii Dev Competition 2011 are now out, and know what? La Momia que Fuma's "Mr. Sitwell in Turbo WC Magical Adventure" is the winner!

The judges say:

Cid2mizard: J'adore l'ambiance déjanté du jeu, c'est un shoot them up original. Les effets visuels sont super, la maniabilité est très bonne. Un jeu comme on voudrait en voir plus souvent. Je ne serais pas surpris de le voir à la première place!

beredezebe: Ça, c'est ce que j'appelle un jeu ! Pour commencer, on a affaire à un humour très fin (un type sur des toilettes volantes qui doit cracher des trucs sur un Sumo aérien), les graphismes sont excellents, la durée de vie est très bonne et la difficulté est au rendez-vous ! Je n'ai vraiment rien à redire, mis à part la voix de Mr. Sitwell (au bout d'une demi-heure, c'est un supplice) et une difficulté un peu trop grande dès le départ (on doit pouvoir s'adapter avec le temps). Mon coup de cœur pour cette année.

ConsoDreams: Un jeu bien réalisé, graphiquement c'est pas mal. Dans les bons titres.

Which -roughly, my French is not what it used to be- translates to:

Cid2mizard: I love the crazy ambiance of the game, it's an original shoot'em up. The GFX are great and the playability is very good. A game like we'd like to see more often. I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the first place!

beredezebe:That's what I call a game! To start, we're dealing with a very fine sense of humour (a guy on a toilet who must shoot a flying Sumo), the graphics are excellent, the life    endurance is very good and the difficulty is fine! I really don't have any complaints except for Mr Sitwell's voice (after half an hour, it's a punishment) and the difficulty might be a bit to high at the start (it should adapt better during playtime). My favourite for this year.

ConsoDreams: A very well-done game, graphics aren't bad at all. It's amongst the good titles.

So there you have it. The jury's also noted the high quality of the entries, which makes Momia's victory even more valuable :)

Download the latest update of the game from here.

The other BennuGD-created game I know of -Pong Breaker- has rated seventh in the contest.

Have a lot of fun!

Mr. Sitwell in Turbo WC Magical Adventure

The date has arrived and the game submitting phase for the Nintendomax Wii Dev Competition 2011 is now over and at least one BennuGD game has been submitted: La Momia que Fuma's

La Momia que Fuma (Momia, for short) is well known for his unique drawing style and his humorous games. He won last year's BennuGD/GPH game programming compo with EEEEK! EEEEEK! HOOOOOOK!!!. I already blogged about the game and its Wii version in this blog enntry.

You can see a video of his new game below (thanks to Cid2Mizard!).

Hope you like it.

Get it from here.

BennuGD to change license to Zlib (you can now create console games with BennuGD)

Good news everyone!

BennuGD has changed license to Zlib. What this means is that you can now use BennuGD to create commercial games for any popular consoles.
In particular, you can now create BennuGD games for the Wii and publish them through the official channels. To do so, you need to be a registered Nintendo developer (conditions and application forms at Wario World). You won't be able to use the binaries I provide here through the original channels, as you'll need to use Nintendo's own SDK.
If you've got a developer license for the Wii or any other major console and want to see BennuGD ported to that platform in order to rapidly create wonderful games, drop me a line; we might be able to help each other.

How to use mod_wpad when compiling your code in other platforms

Following the entry on how to compile directly from the Wii's Homebrew Channel, I'd like to comment on a little "trick" that'll allow you to compile code that uses mod_wpad both on your computer and in your Wii.
The idea is to use preprocessor macros to "hide" the code when compiling in platforms other than the Wii.
Following with the meta.xml from that example, the new one would be as follows:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<app version="1">
    <name>Compile Fancy Game</name>
    <coder>Your name</coder>
    <version>Version number</version>
    <release_date>Release date</release_date>
    <short_description>A short description.</short_description>
    <long_description>A longer description for the entry that'll compile your code.</long_description>
<arguments>
             <arg>boot.prg</arg>
             <arg>-o</arg>
             <arg>/apps/fancy_game/boot.dcb</arg>
             <arg>-D</arg>
             <arg>TARGET_WII</arg>
     </arguments>
</app>

That code would be pretty much like compiling your code in the PC like this:


bgdc boot.prg -o /apps/fancy_game/boot.dcb -D TARGET_WII

And in the code, where you do the mod_wpad import, you'd change it to:

#ifdef TARGET_WII
import "mod_wpad"
#endif

And, a little bit below that:

#ifndef TARGET_WII
#define wpad_is_ready(a) 0
#define wpad_info(a, b) 0
#define wpad_info_nunchuk(a,b) 0
#define wpad_info_classic(a,b) 0
#define wpad_info_guitar(a,b) 0
#define wpad_info_bb(a,b) 0
#define wpad_rumble(a,b) 0
#endif

The first block will only import mod_wpad in case the compiler defines the TARGET_WII macro, and that'll only happen in the Wii, if you adapted the code above.
The second block will void the wpad_* functions. For your program's logic, it'd be as if no Wiimote was connected.

Hope this helps you with the Nintendomax Wii Dev Competition 2011, where you can win a Nintendo 3DS console, and much more".

Happy coding!

Streets of Rage Remake v5 final released, it's impressive!

Bomber Games have released the final version of their BennuGD game called Streets of Rage Remake v5 (remember the video I posted about it featuring accelerometer controls?). This release is the culmitaion of 8 years of hard work and features 103 stages, 19 playable characters, 64 enemies. The source code for the game is over 80000 lines of code and tries to faithfully recreate the experience of the original game.

It's really cool, although it seems to have some problem on the Wii. I'll work with BoMbErLiNk to try to make sure the game comes to our Wiis at some point.

Be sure to read their own presentation of the game in their blog.
I leave you with some media from the game:

BTW, in the meantime you can play it in your computer, download it from here.

Congrats, Bomber Games!

Compiling your code directly from the Homebrew Channel

The recommended method for compiling BennuGD games in your Wii is by using wiiload to both upload your code and to execute commands there.
If your Wii is not connected to your Wifi network (or you don't have one) things get a bit more complicated and previously I created a method for compiling that was a bit complicated. Today I'm going to show you a simpler one.

First of all, make sure that your Homebrew Channel is updated as this method requires one of the latest versions available.

Then, we'll create two entries in your Homebrew Channel: one for the game itself and another one for compiling.
The first one is created just normally, and the boot.elf file that you must put there is the normalbgdi.elf file, as found in the latest available BennuGD release and you'd just copy all the game's resources there, as usual. The meta.xml file for that entry would be something like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<app version="1">
    <name>Fancy Game Runtime</name>
    <coder>Your name</coder>
    <version>Version number</version>
    <release_date>Release date</release_date>
    <short_description>A short description.</short_description>
    <long_description>A longer, more detailed description of your game.</long_description>
</app>

Now, in the other entry (just another directory in the "APPS" folder of your SD card) you'd place your game's source code. The boot.elf file corresponding to that entry would be bgdc.elf from the release and the meta.xml file would go as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<app version="1">
    <name>Compile Fancy Game</name>
    <coder>Your name</coder>
    <version>Version number</version>
    <release_date>Release date</release_date>
    <short_description>A short description.</short_description>
    <long_description>A longer description for the entry that'll compile your code.</long_description>
<arguments>
             <arg>boot.prg</arg>
             <arg>-o</arg>
             <arg>/apps/fancy_game/boot.dcb</arg>
     </arguments>
</app>


Where, obviously, "/apps/fancy_game" corresponds to the location in your SD card for your game's runtime (the first entry in this example). Also, "boot.prg" is the name of your main source code file.

If everything went fine, you can now insert your SD card in your Wii and you should now see two entries: one called "Fancy Game Runtime" and another one called "Compile Fancy Game". When you click on the compilation entry, your code will be compiled and the DCB file will be generated -assuming BennuGD liked your code- in the runtime entry, which you can click right away to test your code.

This process won't save your from having to grab the SD card from your console, copying the new files and putting it back in your Wii, but I'm sure it'll somehow make testing easier for you.

Hope you liked it!

PS: Remember you can win a Nintendo 3DS console just for coding by entering the Nintendomax Wii Dev Competition 2011! Good luck to everyone!

Nintendomax Wii Dev Competition 2011

The guys at Nintendomax (most of the gameplay videos I post come from their site) have organised a new Wii Homebrew development contest and it's certainly looking interesting!

You can use any programming language you want to for the game, so why not use the best one around?. You might want to use the newly released rc1 version that include mod_chipmunk physics to create stunning games very easily. It feels great and has helped bring very cool games to the Wii ;)

Prizes:
They're giving out two Nintendo 3DS consoles, accessories, 150€ in cash and more. See the link below for details.

Rules:
Here are some of the rules for the competition, but be sure to read the whole thread linked below for more info.

- Everyone can participate, regardless of the country.

- All games or applications must be totally new for the Wii. This implies that no projects have been submitted shall be posted on another site before the competition closed, the projects involved in the Homebrew Bounty taking place at the same time are accepted.

- The project progress can be posted during the contest period (WIP, Previews, videos, etc.).

- A Splashscreen will be posted april 11, 2011 after a competition for designers organized by us.

- The splashscreen will be the first image to appear in the project and will be posted at least 5 seconds. Transitions and all types of effects are allowed.

- Participants may submit 1 or more projects.

- Ranking of the contest will be defined by a jury. No public vote is held.

- The classification criteria are multiple (originality, graphics, life, gameplay, personal notes, stability / bug, etc ...), a report will be posted after the vote.

- Competition results will be posted June 30, 2011.

- The Loader or applications that enable piracy of games is prohibited.

Read all about the contest here [en] or here [fr].

Hope to see your entries soon!

BennuGD for Wii RC1+ (mod_chipmunk integrated!)

Today I'm refreshing the BennuGD for Wii binaries with a very nice addition: Chipmunk physics library integration. Just in case you missed earlier posts, mod_chipmunk is a wrapper for BennuGD created by Prg that allows you to unleash the full potential of the Chipmunk physics library with a BennuGD friendly syntax.
You can see some examples of what Chipmunk can do in this video:

The cool thing about this library is that creating a reallistic physics simulation is quite complicated even for those with a clear understanding of what's going on and this library manages all the physic interactions easily and effectively.
I've adapted one of the examples Prg includes in his package so that you can run it directly from the Homebrew Channel in your Wii.

Download Chipmunk physics demo

I'm asking if any of you can create a little video of this demo, so that I can embed it in this post. I cannot do it with a good quality myself so I'd thank it if anybody can help me with that.

You can get the refreshed BennuGD binaries with mod_chipmunk integrated here:

Download BennnuGD for Wii RC1 Refresh

Please, understand that physics simulation can be a very processor-intesive process. If your game slows down too much, try reducing the number of active processes.

BennuGD for Wii RC1!

It's time to release RC1 of BennuGD for Wii.
You can seed a list of changes below:

• The code is now much easir to mantain thanks to a slightly redesigned design (more on this to come) and is fully up to date with the upstream sources and overall, the port should feel much more stable.
• Finally found the reason to why some FNT files weren't loading: seems like there's a bug in zlib for Wii that prevents it from working as documented (try to open file as gzipped, if that fails, try to open it as a raw data file). Somewhy it ends up reading from the file in incorrect places. To avoid that, always make sure your FNT files are gzipped. You can know that they're gzipped if you open them with your favourite uncompressor and they open correctly.
• Small bugs fixed here and there.

I'm calling it RC1 as I consider it to be ready for public consumption, even there's a problem triggered with multiple Wiimotes that I must fix.

To sum up, here's a full list of things that you must know when porting your existing game to the Wii.

• Make sure you've read the Getting Started page on the Google Code project site.
• Make sure your FNT files are gzipped. They'll also take less space. To be on the safe side, also gzip you FPG and your MAP files.
• OGG might work, but it's safer to use MP3. Also, recode the MP3 and WAV files @48KHz. You can use a program like Audacity to recode your music. Module tracker formats such as S3M, IT, XM... work just fine.
• The builds don't include mod_debug. If you need it and cannot compile the code yourself, send me an email and I'll send you a copy of the runtime with mod_debug enabled.
• If you need a more integrated experience, you can always use the bundled mod_wpad. That way you'll be able to query info about the controllers such as battery levels, accelerometer input, available controllers...
• You can open websites on the user's Wii.
• If something goes wrong and BennuGD crashes badly, you can send me a photo of the crash and that'll be helpful!

Get BennuGD for Wii RC1 from here.

So what now? For the next releases I'm planning on:

• Trying to fix the joystick bug in SDL. Right now SDL seems to give wrong info about the number of present joysticks and when they were pressed.
• Improving mod_wpad to support button state reading and include Wii MotionPlus support.
• Integrating mod_chipmunk into the build for reallistic physics simulations.

Hope you liked the news! Have fun.

Puzsion for Wii RC1 [Updated with video]

After finding the cause to the FNT load bug, today I'm pleased to finally release Puzsion RC1 for Wii.
I'm calling this RC1 because the game still needs some testing and might undergo some minor tweaking to further adapt it to the Wii but to my knowledge there are no bugs and it's perfectly playable.

Please let me know in the comments section if you find any issue with the game so that I can fix it.

Download Puzsion for Wii RC1

[Update] Cid2Mizard has created this video of the game in action:

Thanks for taking the time :) Also, I forgot to mention Hokuty and Amzg for their job in the game, all credit goes to them.

Hope you like it!

As to give you a small progress update, I'll upload a new binary version of BennuGD for Wii later today, which I'll be calling RC1.
Work on Firewhip for Wii/BennuGD in general is going great; together with the author I've squashed quite a few bugs related to the Fenix->BennuGD conversion and the game feels great in the Wii. Hopefully we'll be able to relesae it soon.

FNT loading seems to be fixed!

With quite a bit of help help from my brother, I've just found what appears to be the cause of the failure in font loading in the Wii!

I will do more testing tomorrow, but if this is really working we've killed the last standing big bug in the BennuGD port for the Wii.
Expect a RC very soon :)

PS: @beredezebe And Puzsion is working great now!!! I'll just make sure the musics are encoded at the right freq and release it in the next few days.

Firewhip

I just took this photo of Firewhip running in my Wii.

To my knowledge, it's the first time this very cool game is being run in a Wii. There's still a lot of integration work to do (controls, mostly) and bugs to fix.

I just thought it'd be cool to show that the game seems to be running well with the cleanup I just finished doing to the new architecture (more on that to come, but to sum up I changed a bit the way the whole monolithic system works to make it even easier to mantain and updated the code to match the latest upstream version of BennuGD).

[Updated] This game's just so cool! I've adapted the controls for the Wii in a matter of minutes and spent a few minutes playing it... Things look nice!

Vigoroth le livreur

Beredezebe lets me know that user blabla (cool nick!) has posted a note in the French BennuGD forum about a game he's ported from microlua to BennuGD. It's called "Vigoroth le livreur" (Vigoroth the delivery man, if I'm not mistaken) and you can read all about the game here [fr].

My french is not as good as it used to be, but from what I can understand, this is a collection of 4 mini-games where you must help Vigoroth with his deliveries.

As I'm still busy with my university exams, I haven't been able to test it just yet but I promise I'll write a post about the game after I've played it.

Meanwhile, you can get it from here, and you can see some screenshots for the game below:

I'd like to congratulate blablabla for his game and thank beredezebe for letting me know AND for packaging the game for the Wii.

Also, as I said in the last post, the project is far from dead and right after I finish my exams I'm planning on doing a few nice improvements to the port. Right now I'm using the little free time I have to clean up the monolithic design I created so that it's much easier to mantain. I'll try to write more on that later.

Also, forum user Prg has created a physics module (wrapping around the Chipmunk physics library) which seems pretty cool. I'll try to bring that to the Wii, too.

You can have a look at what Chipmunk can do in the video below:

Happy coding!

PS: Sorry for the off-topic, but IMHO it's important.

Just using the screenshots I've posted above might be considered a copyright infringement and might be used as a reason to close this blog without any judiciary intervention once the new Sinde law [en] is passed in the Spanish Congress (even if the Congress rejected it last december, the two major parties have brought it back to life). They say it's a way to fight "piracy" but it could just as well be used for censorship. This is not good. If you live in Spain, you might consider not voting for PSOE, PP, CiU or any other party that supports censorship in the upcoming election.

[Update] And the law just got passed today. As I said, if you can vote in Spain, don't vote for them [es].