Tyrian on the DS

[13ig13oom]

I know enough to know it's possible (there was a gba version after all), I know where to get the graphics, and I know that we can recreate the levels.
Now i want to know if anyone will help me develop it! ;D

[bb1]

You'd have to make the little cartridge thingy on expensive- not-readily-available hardware.

[Mindless]

bb1 said:

You'd have to make the little cartridge thingy on expensive- not-readily-available hardware.

Nah, there's homebrew hardware available.

[13ig13oom]

I have an R4 and can run homebrew code.
It only cost like $30.

[shadejackrabbit]

vespenegas.com/tyrian.html

Cry in happiness. I played this, and the only major problem is the occasional memory glitch which causes it to crash. It's really fun.

[Mindless]

Yup, that's been announced here. I'd lock this topic if I could. :/

[L.S.S.]

As for the emulation compatibility... (Using the latest version at present)

Only DeSmuME (v0.8) can launch it (It could be a bit slow)... However, other emulators such as NO$GBA (v2.6a) and IDEAS will say "Unable to initialize media device!"

So if you want to try to emulate it, you still have to wait, or download OpenTyrian instead...

[SM]

Well, what can I say, I got a M3 thingy for my DS just to play Tyrian anywhere, and I couldn't be happier, now I have it in my PC (YARLY), my Wii and my DS ...actually I would be happier if someone ported it to the Symbian 3rd ed platform, some guy ported Quake and Quake II so it shouldn't be impossible.

[L.S.S.]

I played it, and I found the only problem is that the game may lag when there is a lot of sound effects to be produced. And usually the game only processes 1-3 sound effects at the same time...

PS, there is something strange. I copied the Tyrian 2000 data to the program. It will not work. But when I replaced the data with the original Tyrian 2.1 data, the game works, but an "Episode ?: Bonus" appeared. (It is supposed to be Episode 5)

Since Tyrian 2000 uses different data format, the game will crash when accessing that episode.

[yuriks]

The Episode ? is caused by the Tyrian 2000 files you forgot to delete =P

[L.S.S.]

If we know about Tyrian 2000's data specification, we may convert it into a format that is supported by OpenTyrian, and thus, make Episode ? (Episode 5 - Hazudra Fodder), supported.

[yuriks]

The problem is that 2.1's datafiles can't fit all the data used by 2000 (which is why they expanded the format in the first place), so no, that can't work. And we would also need to modify the actual game source to support 2000 features and changes.

[atlasdark]

Works fine on my M3P, M3S, R4, and a spare Ninjacard I have lying around.

T2k on it? I wish.

[L.S.S.]

I'm hoping on some updates, or at least, optimization for this app... Unfortunately there haven't been any updates since 0.3...

The game suffers lags and looks like OpenTyrianDS cannot play all the sounds at the same time as NDS is not capable of that... (I'm not sure if such things can be optimized like what it was done to QuakeDS, but it can take a much longer time to do it...)

But a good thing is, it's possible to put your favorite music into OpenTyrianDS by converting the music into 22KHz Mono IMA ADPCM format and replace the songs in the directory. Unfortunately these music would get distorted after a few loops if it's too big.

Actually, I don't know how to produce 64kbps or less 22KHZ Mono IMA ADPCM just like those shipped with the OpenTyrianDS binaries... as the music files converted by Audacity are 88kbps while it can still be played (but may get distorted after playing for a while, and it can be very terrible when playing Episode 4 with Pentium detail settings). Was that some kind of optimizations? (It was said that the tracks shipped with the binaries are "optimized" on the OpenTyrianDS website.)

Besides, I got the source code, but I don't know how to build the code successfully so I can start looking into it... as when I tried to use "make" in Programmer's Notepad, it just gives me some errors when doing with the "main.c" inside the arm7 folder... Should I need an earlier version of DevKitPro to build it?

EDIT: I'm not certain about this, but after checking the original Tyrian 2.1 executable I found that the game was intended to have 5 episodes, while the 5th episode wasn't completed at that time... (it was later completed in Tyrian 2000, but the format has changed so we can't play it) Also, even if you put another episode as Episode 5, the starting money is 0...

EDIT 2: Actually, if you don't care about quality loss, you can use a lower frequency such as 8,287, 11,025 which will result in less lags and significantly reduce some in-game slowdowns in Pentium quality... (Actually, 64Kbps IMA ADPCM is supposed to be 16KHz mono, so the sound size was indeed optimized). Also, it seems there were some other optimizations that prevented some possible lags...