Porting Aquaria To the PSP 25
Apple Prophet writes "Just a few short weeks after BitBlot released the source to Aquaria as part of the Humble Indie Bundle, Andrew Church hacked up an ambitious homebrew port of the game to the PSP. He wrote a detailed synopsis of the technical challenges in an article on the Wolfire Blog, and of course, contributed all of the patches back to the project so anyone with a homebrew-equipped PSP can try it out. Check out the mercurial repository for the source."
Re:Potential Wii/console ports (Score:3, Insightful)
<media-exec style="intelligence: low; paranoia: high; pockets: deep">Cause the dirty pirates can use them!!!</media-exec>
Generation clash. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is an excellent article, showing how many things are often taken for granted by modern software developers. Mr Church did a great job not only porting the game, but also taking time to write about all these things.
For anyone who started programming in "ye good ol' times", techniques used by Mr Church are fairly obvious and were in everyday use. Memory manager, optimizing file speed access - all of that has been used in many games written in 80s/90s. Games had "resource files" with their own index tables, games used own memory managers because C/C++ did not provide ones suited to the task, games' memory usage had to be optimized because PCs typically only had 640KB usable for programs (later a bit more thanks to extended/expanded memory access), and graphic cards did not provide any shaders or other hardware acceleration for games at all, just a tiny bit of memory.
Operating system (DOS, Windows 3.1) did not help a lot with things like memory management, either.
Judging just by how modern games and applications work, programmers no longer spend time taking care of such optimizations. They just throw the problem at OS or memory (4GB required), making software run as slow on fast CPU, as older optimized software ran on 100x slower CPUs.