I am going to take on the impossible task of porting a Windows 95 game to the Pippin.

You guys will call me insane (I am insane), but I can't get this idea out of my head. I recently got a Pippin and I wondered why the hell this system didn't get many games. It had the potential of having a decent library before Apple cut support.

I have practically zero programming experience (just elementary stuff as a school requirement), and I have no idea how to begin the project. A user over at the AtariAge forums is egging me on to pursue this feat, but he told me that I'd have to start off with something easy and simple first and then work my way up. That could take years. I don't have time for that.

So what game is it? I'd like to port this bad boy-



Which I feel would be a perfect game that would fit the Pippin's almost non-existent library.


But wait, there's more! I recently read an article about this-

http://collective.square-enix.com/news/5/details-for-developers-how-collective-works

Square Enix to license out Eidos IPs to indies, including Gex?!? What if I managed to gather a group of talented coders from my local colleges/universities and turned our group into an indie development team that was tasked to work on this? Is it possible?

To make it reach a wider audience, we'd also make sure the same disc could work on Mac OS X 10 (and the legacy Apple operating systems I guess), Windows 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista, 7, and 8. I recall reading that there were a couple of Pippin titles that would work on a Pippin, Mac OS 7, and Windows 95 all on the same disc (I may have recalled incorrectly though, so somebody please verify this).

The disc would be glass-mastered and officially-licensed and come with a black Amaray DVD case and instruction booklet. That would be awesome.

But this is all a pipedream from a poor community college student working a minimum-wage job. I'd like to see this happen, but beggars can't be choosers.

Thoughts?

 

i dont know how close a Pipin is to a standard pc , but you'll need the source code to even attempt to do this

 

*thunks head on keyboard*

What experience do you have of porting/coding?

 

He probably don't know what he's talking about
It's not even porting, it's reverse engineering, building game engine, and adapting it to Pipping platform.
(facepalm)

 

None.

Damn straight.

 

Then I guess people spend several years of their life learning because they're (we're) all idiots.

 

On a more serious note, how good is this decompiler/disassembler?

http://www.backerstreet.com/rec/rec.htm


Would it be able to get at least a crude version of the source code of Gex?

 

I didn't mean to offend you, but I often see such threads where somebody either want to do something without even basic knowledge how to do it, or "gathering team of coders/artists/design writers for my NEXT BIG SUPER PROJECT" (and obvious question is what that person can contribute himself for project, labor management? ).
What I would recommend to you is to get sources of some small open-source platformer game (SuperTUX for instance), try to build it for PC platform first, and then try to move it to Pippin.
Most likely you'll quickly realize scale of such projects and you will never return to it.
Also stop wasting time for forums, if you have an idea - better start doing it first, and write to forums when you already got some results.

No disassembler in the world will give you "source code".
However IDA Pro is best for reverse engineering.

 

No offense taken. I really don't know what I'm doing. Come on folks, I alluded to that in my original post.

I am just super bored and want to see how impossible such a task would be.

 

I just took a look at SuperTux's sourcecode and I am now officially afraid of doing any and all kinds of coding.

This is never happening.

 

That was quick .

 

i'd like to see someone crack the encryption so that some mac games could be played on the pippin. that might open up more possibilites. i remember once some guy was selling a proto pippin on ebay that let him load games from a HDD and he had some pics up of wolfenstein playing on it.

 

Jesus. Why doesn't someone get in contact with him?

 

I'm not sure if you could "crack an encryption" to make games work on a pippin. Isn't the architecture of the pippin different than a mac computer?

 

I'm not sure. I'm not the expert.

 

Also, for any of you curious about the topic, I did find a link which has the SDK-

http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/apple-pippin-sdk#comment-4485

 

Consider how, if you'd never learnt to read or write, the English language would look unimaginably complicated to you. Programming languages are the same, only much simpler and with far fewer words (commands). Everyone starts everything as a complete beginner, and if you decide to learn programming then you might find you have a real skill at it. But it will take time and lots of effort to do it well, which is the same for almost everything worth doing.

 

Nice words of encouragement for potential software programmers, but wouldn't there be a bit of talent needed for such a feat? Programming isn't straight-forward and there are countless ways to approach a situation. I am the type who will blankly stare at something if I don't get it, even if it is super-simple.

 

Baby steps, NinSEGA2. Everyone has to start from somewhere and even though I know a little C, I still do the 'stare at the screen/go away and make a cup of coffee' moments.

 

at least in my case, i think that taking a structured approach to learning programming is important. there is definitely a place to start (and that's not analyzing source code to a video game). there are weeks/months (depending on your pace) of learning how to create simple applications before you begin to understand how to code an interactive game (i mean, something more sophisticated than dice/card games). it can be done, and it's not even all that hard really, but you have to have realistic exectations and need to be committed imo. you might be creating your own small-scale game with high-level code within a year of spare time learning, for example.

if you are interested, i'd say take a crack at it and start at the beginning (assuming you are just starting to learn). you won't even think of it as "it's taking so long and I'll never get to the point where i'm making games," because with programming each new concept you learn often allows you to create a slightly more complex program and you'll immediately see the benefits of what you are learning.