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Saturn devel

vreuzon - Nov 19, 2003

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		slinga		Feb 14, 2004
			bump Any updates? Any new projects? I'm still trying to figure out how to display (multiple) colored ASCII characters...I might do a 12 player snake game if I get some free time.

		Reinhart		Feb 17, 2004
			Your work with ASCII characters makes me wonder if it would be possible to try a port of NetHack... ? It is just a little question as this game is not designed to be a console game ... but why not ? Maybe with less command ? What do you think ?

		antime		Feb 17, 2004
			Nethack requires a lot of memory. Additionally, it needs to save the levels you've visited and their state (items, how much you've explored etc.) which also exceeds the Saturn's capabilities. Some other Roguelike that doesn't have such high system requirements might be a possibility. The UI will be another problem unless you plan on supporting the keyboard adapter. (Idea: Use a PRNG where you can go in both directions of the sequence as seeds for level generation, forget about saving their state.)

		AntiPasta		Feb 17, 2004
			lol... their goes my plan to port nethack to the ti-83 :lol:

		antime		Feb 17, 2004
			If anyone's hellbent on getting Nethack to run on the Saturn, the Nethack-Palm porting project... was aiming at getting the game ruunning on 2MB Palm devices. The project seems to be dead, but some of their space-saving work could possibly be salvaged. For saving the game, a cartridge would probably be needed.

		ExCyber		Feb 17, 2004
			It seems like the state should be heavily compressible even if only using relatively basic techniques like RLE and Huffman. I wonder if Nethack already does this; can't find any mention of it anywhere with a cursory couple of searches.

		antime		Feb 17, 2004
			It looks like you can configure it to use an external packer, search for docompress_file in files.c.

		ExCyber		Feb 17, 2004
			I guess that means that only the files saved to disk can be compressed, whereas there's a good chance that on Saturn it would have to be compressed in RAM to have any chance of working properly (no swap space and such).

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