----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Beats of Rage 1.0028 Playstation 2 port by Neill Corlett ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit the Beats of Rage web site at http://senile.mine.nu/beatsofrage/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why did I port this? -------------------- Beats of Rage is one of the more interesting homebrew games I've come across. Ripping KoF sprites is certainly nothing new, but Beats of Rage takes this time-honored practice a step further by turning it into a complete, coherent 2D melee game that's also a respectable interpretation/remake of the Streets of Rage series. I'm obviously not as big a fan of Streets of Rage as Senile Team is, but as I muddled my way through the DOS version of Beats of Rage on my Windows XP PC, I thought... this game deserves to be on a console. Any console. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why Playstation 2? ------------------ I had a choice between the Dreamcast or the PS2, and initially I had no idea how much memory or CPU time Beats of Rage would need, so I decided to play it safe and go for the more powerful one. (cough) Actually, it turns out Beats of Rage is barely using a third of the PS2's CPU time, but it peaks at about 22MB memory usage. It might be possible to keep it within 16MB with more aggressive resource freeing, so I'd say a Dreamcast port is definitely possible. Perhaps later. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- How tough was it to port? ------------------------- Not very, actually; it took me about 3 days. Mad props to Senile Team for keeping the source code very simple and portable. The only problems I had were with longs (surprise! they're 64-bit), struct packing, unaligned memory access (only in the putsprite routines), a few conflicting identifier names like "kill" and "time", and assuming unsigned chars (a gcc flag takes care of this easily). Mercifully, the PS2 EE has the same byte order as the x86; otherwise it probably would have taken me 3 more days to iron that out. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hey, part of the screen is cut off! ----------------------------------- Beats of Rage is a 320x240 game, but you can only show 224 scanlines in NTSC mode on the PS2. And since the top of the screen has all the important stuff on it, I decided to sacrifice the bottom. PAL mode could probably show all 240 lines, but PAL sucks. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why is the sound so scratchy? ----------------------------- It was like that, honest. I took the liberty of adding linear interpolation to the sound mixer, but the sound resources themselves are of rather sketchy quality. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- How come you can't save your settings? -------------------------------------- There's not very much to save, so I couldn't be bothered to add memory card routines. Sorry. You're just going to have to beat the game each time you want to play the bonus level. :P Besides, the Streets of Rage games didn't let you save your settings either. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is this thing legal? -------------------- Who cares. Creativity will always win over legality. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Where to find me ---------------- email: neill@neillcorlett.com web: http://www.neillcorlett.com/ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------