Schism Tracker on Windows Mobile devices? (6)
471 Name: Mathew Valente : 2008-03-31 01:41
I'm expecting my Motorola Q9h to come in the mail pretty soon and was wondering, how hard is it to get a build of Schism Tracker for the Windows Mobile device? I'd totally be down for tracking on the train with my phone.
Thanks for any help anyone can give.
472 Name: Victor Solis : 2008-03-31 03:22 (File: 60 kb, 320x200, schism-320x240.png)
Well, it'd take some work, that's for sure. For starters, is SDL available for it?
Motorola's website has practically no technical information about the device, and about the only meaningful data I could find was the screen resolution, 320x240. At present there's no small-screen mode, so it'd scale down pretty badly (see attached). In addition, if it's not a supported processor, it might take extra effort to get it to build.
I know people have talked before about getting Schism onto mobile devices, but IIRC nobody's actually done it. Apart from the obvious platform issues, the biggest stumbling block is probably the screen size, and that's got a lot to do with the way it was initially designed. Schism Tracker was never meant to be run in anything besides 80x50 8x8-character-cells, and coercing it to do anything else will involve rewriting gigantic chunks of code. However, perhaps with some tricks like subpixel rendering it might be possible to downsize it cleanly enough to see without practically having to rewrite the entire UI.
Hmm...
475 Name: Mathew Valente : 2008-03-31 19:16
Huh yeah the scaling might not work.
However!
Thinking back to my Nintendo DS demo days, there was an emulator called "Pocket NES" which used an interlaced "Flicker" method of resizing the original Nintendo's screen resolution into something the GBA could display. The idea was to utilize the screen's slow refresh rate to blur between the interlaces so that it would be a lot more managable. I imagine something similar could be done here. :)
476 Name: Mathew Valente : 2008-03-31 21:52
Anyway, I'll just assume that it can't be done. Well, not "can't"..but won't. If I had the skills I would, but alas. This is how life goes.
I'll accept the loss and move on. Thanks for responding.
477 Name: Victor Solis : 2008-04-01 02:08
If we had the hardware, we'd certainly try to get it to run ;)
478 Name: Mathew Valente : 2008-04-01 08:55
You serious? I'm totally down for being a guinee pig to get it to run.
Look at the WinAmp credits, and yo'll see my name under "Tester" for the mikmod plugin lol. Jake loved using my mod files as tests because they always seemed to crash his players.