To anyone reading this site who might be working — or who has, in the past, worked — on Pentagram, the Ultima 8 environment — I have a question on behalf of a reader.
Do you think it will be possible to port Pentagram to the Nintendo DS? There is a 4Mb ram limit. It would be nice to use this engine with the touch screen of the DS.
There is a library for Nintendo DS programming call libnds heres a link…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libnds
Theres another one which uses libnds called PaLib it makes somethings easier. We would need to scale or crop the resolution down to 256 x 192 if we are using just one screen. Theres a top and bottom one but I think it would be cool to use the bottom screen since thats the touchpad.
Libnds comes with DevKitPro which includes an ARM assembler and a C/C++ compiler basically everything you need to program for the NDS.
So…can anyone on the Pentagram team throw an answer my way? Would it be possible to port Pentagram to the Nintendo DS?
March 10th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Good question, would like to know too. And if not the DS, how about the PSP? more ram and more power
To site owner: Thanks for a great ultima site. just discovered it recently.
March 11th, 2008 at 2:52 am
Well, Exult has been ported to PSP (and pretty much anything else it can be ported). How much better hardware does U8/Pentagram require?
March 14th, 2008 at 11:54 am
As I recall, it needed a 486/66 and 4 MB of RAM. I say that from memory, of course, but the point is that its required specs should be a lot lower than a lot of the games that both the DS and PSP are capable of playing.