STPPC

ledow

Would anyone be interested in a port of Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection?

I've worked on it before, porting it to a touchscreen/controller interface for the GP2X / Wiz / etc, converting it to work with just plain SDL instead of XWindows / GTK, etc. and wrapped it up in some nice menus that don't need mice etc. to navigate.

http://www.ledow.org.uk/gp2x/

Someone later converted it to a Wii homebrew game, but I was just wondering if anyone would be interested in me doing a libretro port to the RPi so it can work with all the controllers?

mitu

Is this the same guy that created Putty and his puzzle games ? Looks like a neat idea !

Clyde

@mitu said in STPPC:

Looks like a neat idea !

Indeed.

cyperghost

@mitu Seems so.... putty is neat ;) kitty is better ;)
@ledow About the puzzle games. They are very interesting and tempting and are always installed on my devices. So I see you mentioned the port to GPX2X, so it is also portable to RS-97 devices, too ;)

ledow

@cyperghost said in STPPC:

RS-97

In theory, indeed - the GP2X is merely an ARM-based processor running Linux (sound familiar? That's why I was looking at the RPi!). It would be easily portable to anything similar, however without a device to hand it's almost impossible to develop on a platform, and I don't have one, sorry!

My port also works on Windows, and x86 platforms, and various combinations thereof, and the underlying games are INCREDIBLY portable to other platforms. Tatham did a really good job of abstracting out anything to do with the machine it runs on, but the default "frontend" on Linux is GTK-based.

Simon Tatham indeed wrote PuTTY and puts this collection of games together, and he's a nice guy. He helped me out with a few problems I was having, and at the time he was working for ARM themselves! He's extremely logical and mathematical and the games are always "theoretically solveable without ever having to guess", which is his focus. He doesn't really care about apps and other ports so much.

The deep logic of the games to him is always the focus and he has little interest in joining them together, making them work like a games collection (e.g. alternative inputs, menu systems, sounds, etc.) - you'll notice that other people wrote the web-frontends for them, the Android ports, etc. And at the time I did it, there were no non-GTK Linux ports, so I made a little menu, converted all the frontend to work on plain SDL (which he doesn't like because there's no inherent menu system in SDL), and turned it into something more approaching a "game".

If there's interest, I can "reconvert" my port to move away from their small-screen focus (I think the GP2X LCD was 640x480? Maybe even 320x240!) and plug into libretro to benefit from all the different types of controllers available.

cyperghost

@ledow said in STPPC:

If there's interest, I can "reconvert" my port to move away from their small-screen focus [...] and plug into libretro to benefit from all the different types of controllers available.

I would aprreciate this. The best "game" in this collection is snake. I like puzzeling but I'm totally new to play this with keypads. I've installed the android version on my eBook-Reader and on my smartphone for casual gaming.