port of Dualis to a free operating system (e.g. Linux)

[narkius]

yo!

 

well, i have a friend here who wants me to program a little game for the DS. but before i start with that, i need to have an emulator on a free operating system, so i thought about creating a port of Dualis for Linux. i have no clue about DS, only played on my PSP occasionally, owned a GameBoy 10 years ago and have next to no experience in game programming, especially on consoles. of course, i have no idea about MS-related programming, too.

 

1 ) is there anybody else interested in this?

2 ) is there anybody here to answer the questions that might arise when doing the conversion?

 

my first questions are:

a ) what is the current version of Dualis? here in the forum i saw somebody mentioning 12, but on the website, i can only download the sources for version 11.

b ) the assembler code used in Dualis is only ARM-related and can thus be used in the port as is?

c ) i had a brief look into the file structure of the package, but which are the files/file extensions related only to MS-specific development tools (like .dsp, .dsw)?

d ) did anybody ever try to run Dualis under Wine? i do not have a second machine with Windows running and i guess it makes it easier to understand how it works if i see it running.

 

that's it so far. er, thanks for your attention.

 

cheers,

narkius

[Robert]

The only question I can answer is that the current version is 20.3

 

It is not an "open-source" project, only a few versions have had sources released.

 

What compiler, libraries, etc are needed I have no idea.

[mic]

Some people have reported that Dualis works with Wine.

 

There are a few problems with porting Dualis to other OSs:

 

1) It's based around a number of DLLs. Perhaps you can build them as SOs on a *nix system, I really don't know.

 

2) The assembly code files. These are written for MASM so you'd have to find an assembler you can use for your OS that supports MASM syntax.

 

3) The inline assembly (mainly found in the GPU). There might be VC++-specific things there, I'm not sure how other compilers implement it.

 

4) The Win32 API calls. There are a lot of these.

 

The files that are specific to VC++ are things like .dsw, .dsp, .plg, .opt and maybe some others.

[narkius]

Some people have reported that Dualis works with Wine.

 

There are a few problems with porting Dualis to other OSs:

 

1) It's based around a number of DLLs. Perhaps you can build them as SOs on a *nix system, I really don't know.

 

2) The assembly code files. These are written for MASM so you'd have to find an assembler you can use for your OS that supports MASM syntax.

 

3) The inline assembly (mainly found in the GPU). There might be VC++-specific things there, I'm not sure how other compilers implement it.

 

4) The Win32 API calls. There are a lot of these.

 

The files that are specific to VC++ are things like .dsw, .dsp, .plg, .opt and maybe some others.

 

thanks for the answers, mic. sounds like an awful lot of work.

could you please comment on Dualis being not an open source project? sorry, for my ignorance, i don't know where to download the current version 20.3, what is the current license?

 

cheers,

narkius

[mic]

It *is* open source, and totally license free (at least the parts written by me). The reason why source is not available for every versions is because of convenience. Since 20.3 I've merged all modules into a single workspace to save work on source code packaging in the future.