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Batterycheck Remake

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Nov 25, 2018, 09:26 PM
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Batterycheck Remake

I have been wanting to write my own game and I have good memories of Batterycheck...I might have even exchanged full batteries just to get this game on CD-ROM back then

About six months ago I rediscovered this site and after dissecting the excellent description of the JJ2 file formats and learning that Batterycheck was actually running on the same engine.....I decided to give it a go. It took me a few weeks to get a working prototype on Linux in Python but most of the Batterycheck assets could be read. There was a nasty bug in reading the sprites from anims.j2a giving me very distorted images and I can't remember what the exact issue was, but I fixed it! I choose Python as a language as I wanted to be free of memory related errors while learning the concepts of how things worked, both in the files abut also how games work in general.

I can go on for hours explaining the development processes but I will keep it short for now....from the start I wanted to make my own homebrew for the Wii or Gamecube. But since a lot of the concepts were new to me I decided to start on the more simple NDS Lite. I have the whole menu system working on the DS with pre-converted and scaled down graphics compiled into the final executable. I was running into limitations on the DS and almost gave up, until I switched to the 3DS that made it all so much easier. The 3DS has been the main platform for months and I have a working playable demo for it.

Since debugging was still a pain in the rear....I decided to "start from scratch" and make it work on multiple platforms from the start! This new single code base compiles to: Linux, 3DS, Wii and Gamecube (untested)...with the possibility to add more platforms later. This new and improved version does not need to convert the graphics anymore and loads them at runtime and converts them to the native format of the platform. This is now working on Linux and the Wii, for the 3DS it will take a bit more research to figure it out.

My biggest motivation for creating this new "game engine" is to learn how things work and maybe even create something others can enjoy. Since I have a few legal questions about how to have others obtain the graphics needed to run my version of the game I hope the experts here can help me out on that.
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