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.

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.

Beta 3 released

I've uploaded some binaries I like to call beta 3. Chnages from previous beta include:

• Proper support for the Wii Balance Board (see here for a usage example). Thanks to the guys from devkitpro for fixing this in the latest libogc 1.8.6
• Default sound frequency has been changed from 32KHz to 48KHz. Had to do it because newer versions of VLC refused to resample the audio to 32KHz. Also many popular audio programs seem to handle 48KHz sound much better than 32KHz ones. Please note that as OGG Vorbis sound playback was failing, you are now encouraged to use MP3 and module music formats instead.
• Updates from upstream Bennu. I've re-sync'ed many things from upstream BennuGD. Please note that this build corresponds to revision 146 from SVN, and not the current one (190). The changes between this versions derive from the SDL 1.3 support I added to trunk to gain iOS compatibility and I most probably broke something so latest code is not working as expected. I'll fix this soon.
• Bennu can now open websites if the user has installed the (free) Internet channel.
• Some other misc bugfixing.

Hope you enjoy the changes and the proper balance board support and sorry for changing the default sound freq. it was just needed.

You can find the binaries here.

On yesterday's post

Yesterday, I posted an entry with a photo of Pixbros working in a Wii with the latest SVN build.
There are a few bugs to fix yet, but there are some things that it's worth noting:

• The game is working pretty well in 32bpp mode.
• scale_resolution seems to not work at all in the Wii, don't try to use it yet :)
• In the photo, you can see there are two characters playing. This is, in fact, a bug as there was only one controller present. Libjoy was reporting incorrect values for joysticks that weren't present. I've uploaded some changes to the SVN repo and this issue seems to be fixed.
• You might notice that the score counter is blank. There seems to be some problem with FNT loading or displaying. I'll have a look at it as soon as possible.
• The game is using music in MP3, as recommended, and those are encoded @48KHz, which is the new default frequency for BennuGD games in the Wii, starting with the next beta release.

If you really, really, want to give it a try, you can compile the latest BennuGD for the Wii from the SVN repo yourself and then compile pixbros from their SVN repo, otherwise you can just wait a little bit; it shouldn't take us long to have everything ready for release!

This game is pretty big and uses many features from BennuGD, so I'm pretty excited to see it's working that well with very little effort on the game author's side. So thanks him a lot for taking the time to make the game Wii compatible.

PS: The game is so cool that it's even been featured in Spain's public TV (Pixbros appears @ 1:21)

PS2: As the cow points ot, there are now more than 20000 users of BennuGD for the Wii. Future game release will only make that number bigger and bigger, so big thanks to everybody!

I broke something....

I seem to have broken something (possibly related to the new libglob I'm using) and newer builds don't work as they should on the Wii. I'll try to fix this asap but it might take a bit of time... sorry!

The future

After yesterday's post with some screenshots of different existing games running fine in the static version of Bennu, I wanted to share some thoughts/questions about the future of the port and the work that needs to be done.

• First of all; soon after posting the message, I fixed the scrolls. This was particularly easy. Most of the times a module acts weird it's because I screwed something in core/includes/offsets.h. I just opened that file and changed [83+16=] 98 for [83+16=] 99. Problem solved :)
• My brother sent some code that adds some support for bigendian systems. Will have to test it on a real Wii.
• If you think about the Wii controls, I can think of at least 5 different ways of controlling your game in a Wii, depending on how many accessories you plug in your Wiimote and how you grab your Wiimote.
  I will have to write some helper code to make control handling easier for bennu newbies.
• There are a few modules I'd like to create specifically for the Wii that add support for some very interesting Wii features. These include:
• Reading Mii info. It'd be based on Matthew Bauer's libmii.
• Reading Wiimote's and Nunchuk's accelerometer output.
• Reading output from things like the Wii balance board. According to wikipedia, it creates a virtual device by emulating two joysticks.
• I'd like to find out how easy/difficult it is to play sounds in Wiimote's integrated speaker.
• Others? Stub implementation should also exist for your pc, to make game creation/debugging easier.

• I'd like to integrate some video functionality into the port. Currently Bennu natively supports some prehistoric video format, but that's really not enough. I have created a video module based on VLC that works great on both Linux and win32, but I don't think porting that would be easy.
  I might go for mpeg support. We've got a couple of mpeg implementations that might fit in here perfectly.
• I'd like to make the port's code cleaner and bring it closer to the upstream BennuGD code. Ideally this would mean that given the right compilation script, my code could generate both the upstream modular BennuGD release and the Wii-specific monolithic Bennu version. This would make it easier to keep sync with future upstream changes.

I think that's pretty much it :)

Collision, signal fixed!

Ok, I finally fixed the signal and collision bugs. At some point during the integration of mod_proc & mod_grproc, I had broken a few things. What I'm not really sure of is why signal was working before...

Both 09_mod_proc.prg and 20_mod_grproc.prg work now as expected.

Wow! I did a few things in under an hour of coding today! :)

PS: BTW, this thing is starting to look usable (if you don't take colours being broken into the account) so if you want to start porting your games to the Wii and help test the port, please get in touch with me.