psp development

Developing for the PSP is tough, especially since I have close to no experience in video game creation. I am aware of the performance issues that I could run into on such a device, but a card game should not be as much a problem as an eye-candy 3D Game…

However the cards textures are big enough to fill the PSP’s ram (something like 20MB is available for homebrews) within a few seconds’ play, so I have to take that into account, although I’m doing most of the development on Windows… My computer has like 2GB Ram, so it is difficult to know easily if I’m not messing with the memory.

Currently Wagic cannot be released for this single reason: I handle my PSP’s memory like a pig, and it just crashes for some reason. Once this problem is solved, I’ll release an alpha, but for what I know, this could take weeks or months

Wagic uses the JGE++ library which does most of the painful job (blitting, Hardware acceleration…) for me. It allows to code for both windows and the PSP, which speeds up the development process a lot (I spend 95% of my coding time on VC++). It has bugs and limitations however, so I slightly modified the version I’m using.

When I compile the code for the PSP, I’m doing it on KUbuntu. A SDK is needed… if you’re a complete beginner in the PSP development world but are interested in creating some software for this device, ps2dev.org is the place to start. Setting up a PSP Dev environment is not an easy task, but their forums provide precious help.

Linux is highly recommended (although there are some Windows solutions to compile your PSP code). It is much more easier on Linux though, and there are lots of cools tools provided by the pspdev community on linux. I couldn’t imagine developing without PSPLink now.

(Note that if you’re a complete newbie in computer programming, you shouldn’t even think of starting coding on a PSP…you’d rather try on more standard machines first.)